Oura Burdock

● Ōura Burdock (Ōura Gobō)

The burdock we use comes to about 10 boxes, roughly 80 stalks. It's a large burdock with a hollow core, similar to Umeda burdock, and it's grown in places like Saitama and Ibaraki. Scrub the burdock with a brush to remove the soil. To avoid any metallic reaction, we use a bamboo skewer to carefully scrape out the mud and similar debris caught inside, working it out finely bit by bit. Bamboo skewers are actually rather cleverly made tools. Asia is a bamboo culture, after all — chopsticks are bamboo too, aren't they, and baskets are also woven from bamboo. What's good about bamboo is that if you don't cut it, it grows enormously within a single year, so it always has to be thinned out — meaning you can use large amounts of it without throwing the natural cycle out of balance, so it doesn't really damage the environment. A single stalk of bamboo can serve all kinds of purposes.

Once the burdock has been cleaned, you cut it, but you can't just cut it carelessly. What you have to watch for is that the knife we normally use is single-edged, which will cause the burdock to split. So here we use a thin, double-edged knife instead. And you cut it straight, so it doesn't come in at an angle. You can actually tell by the sound as you cut — if the knife goes in at an angle, the corner splits ever so slightly, and that causes the piece to break apart while simmering and look unattractive. You take care not to break the corners, and if a corner does break, you just clean it up a little with a light bevel cut. Also, since it's simmered standing upright, you can't cut it too long either — you cut it to match the height of the pot, to the minimum length that avoids waste. If you laid it flat and simmered it that way, it would fall apart, which is why it's simmered standing up, but a regular pot won't hold much of it that way, so we use a flat-bottomed Western-style pot, the kind used in French cooking, for this.

Reconstitute the cut burdock in rice bran to draw out the bitterness. Arrange the burdock standing upright, insert the thinner pieces into any gaps, and settle it flat into the pot. Every year it works out the same way — cutting it to that length determines how many jūbako boxes' (households') worth of quantity you get. First arrange the bottom layer, then coat everything evenly with rice bran once, and arrange the second layer. It tends to float when boiled, but since about 80 stalks are divided between two pots, to keep both pots equal, we keep the volume of burdock the same and use the same amount of bran and water in both, packing the burdock in tightly. We also settle it carefully in a single pass so as not to damage the cut surfaces of the burdock when it simmers. First, you put in only the larger pieces in a rough arrangement, then fill in the gaps by fitting thinner pieces in upside down and so on, packing it all in tightly like a puzzle, and then it's boiled.

It varies depending on the thickness of the burdock, where it's from, and of course the season and how well the burdock turned out that year, but it takes a minimum of four days, and typically around a week, of reconstituting until it's soft enough that a skewer slides straight through. This time's burdock is a bit thicker than usual. If you don't reconstitute it all the way through completely at this stage, it will only firm up and harden further once the sugar goes in later, so even if you pull it out early here, it just ends up taking longer at the next stage regardless. During this process, the water turns completely black within a day, so you have to change the bran. Ideally you'd want to change it every day, but changing the bran alone takes more than two hours. To put in fresh water and bran, you tilt the pot, pour in water with a hose, and rotate it while letting the dirty water and bran flush out. You soak it in water for about an hour and a half, until the dirty water inside has drained out to a certain degree and it runs reasonably clear. It depends on how well the bitterness has been drawn out, but roughly once every two days is about right — changing it too often actually strips away the burdock's aroma, so we change the bran about three times in all. As for the target firmness — what my father used to tell me about the finished texture was to reconstitute it until it's about as soft as tofu. Once it's been softened to about the firmness of tofu, you gently remove the bran, settle it into the pot, and this time firm the burdock back up to the right texture using sugar. And the finished result should end up at the same firmness as an ordinarily simmered burdock... he'd say. Because a substantial amount of sugar goes in, if you haven't reconstituted it soft enough — about as soft as tofu — beforehand, the seasoning won't fully penetrate, and the burdock will end up hard, leaving an uncooked core in the middle.

Once it's reconstituted soft, you rinse the bran off thoroughly in water. If you use a bamboo skewer directly for this, the burdock falls apart, so we use an old bamboo shiki-zaru mat that's been further softened with a wooden mallet instead. To clear the bran packed inside the hollow of the burdock, you blow a puff of air right into the opening to push it out. Leftover bran can cause spoilage, but the inside of the burdock's hollow is quite soft by this point, so hitting it directly with running water would just crumble it apart. So the only option is to pool water inside and let it swirl the bran loose that way. It's work that demands real care.

Next, you settle it into a pot lined with a shiki-zaru mat and simmer it. In the photo it may look packed in solidly, but you don't pack it in too tightly — as with the kelp rolls, you leave a bit of a gap. Also, the way heat penetrates differs between the edge of the pot and the center, so the degree of doneness ends up quite different depending on position, so you decide where every single piece goes based on its softness and size — placing the softer pieces near the edge of the pot, and the firmer ones toward the center.

You start by adding liquid just enough to cover it, and reduce it down from there — when the broth runs low, you top it up a little, taste it, lift the whole shiki-zaru mat out, and rotate the pot depending on how the heat is reaching it, so the shiki-zaru mat is absolutely essential for exactly this reason. It's always done with about two people, repeating these small checks so frequently it's practically an around-the-clock watch.

Put it over heat just enough to bring it to a boil, take it off the heat as soon as it boils, and once it's cooled, put it back over the heat again — you just repeat that cycle. Essentially, how you apply the heat differs depending on how many days you need it to keep. Also, sugar goes in too, but since it mustn't ruin the flavor of the burdock, you can't add the sugar all at once either — you add it little by little, gradually, taking your time. It's the same as medication for treating an illness: no matter how effective it is, you can't just administer it all in one shot — seasoning has to be handled with the same kind of care as medicine. And once something's in the pot, you have to think of it as a baby. If you're not gentle with it, it breaks. Whatever's in the pot, think of it as being in a cradle and handle it carefully — that way, it doesn't break.

The most important part of the whole burdock process is the reconstituting stage, certainly, but settling it into the pot for the actual simmering matters even more. Once it's settled in, it absolutely cannot be moved again — and along with that, the amount of sugar you measure out (add) at the very first stage also matters a great deal. You have to measure out enough at the start to firm it up to the right degree, but if you measure out too much, it firms up too fast and the seasoning never makes it all the way through. In the end, it varies every year depending on how the burdock turned out and how it reconstituted, so I really can't give you a specific number of grams. Experience gained from doing it many times over really is necessary here. We do keep data on it every single year, but even though the total amount of sugar used ends up the same in the end, the amount measured out at the very first stage differs from year to year.