I love umeshu, that sweet Japanese wine made with green plums, best served refreshingly cold over crushed ice. I've wanted to try my hand at making my own ever since a friend, a fellow English teacher in Japan, let me taste homemade umeshu from a giant jar his school's Home Ec teacher had given him. When she heard he liked the stuff, he said, she had started digging in a cupboard in her classroom until she unearthed a container filled with scary-looking plums floating in a hazy liquor. It had been there for years, she said. Besides the awesomeness of a teacher brewing booze in the classroom, I was stunned by the wine itself: sweet and ultra-smooth, a silk ribbon of ume slipping down my throat.
This is what I thought of at the Hollywood Farmers' Market a couple weekends ago, when I stumbled onto a pile of unripe plums, tiny and green, exactly the specimens I used to see for sale in late spring in Japan. The stand selling them offered samples coated in Tapatio and coarse salt which were tasty, like sour-spicy little pickles, but no match for decades-old umeshu. I bought a pound and told no one about my booze-brewing master plan.
Using a recipe in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art for guidance, I gathered the necessary components: a bag of chunky sugar, shochu/soju from the Korean grocery store and a container large enough to hold everything for a couple months. The original recipe calls for rock sugar, which I couldn't find, so I substituted an equal weight of coarse raw sugar. I was also supposed to rinse the plums and lay them out in the sun for an hour, turning them carefully to make sure they were perfectly dry. Clearly, Tsuji-san does not have a cat and thus has never heard the THUNK thunk thunk thunk of a green plum being batted off the counter and chased under the refrigerator every time he turns his back.
The culprit.
I instead dried my plums by hand with a clean kitchen towel.
After that it was simply a matter of layering the plums with the sugar in the container (I used a repurposed plastic juice bottle) and covering it all with shochu. I chose this particular Clean & Mild Taste shochu for its resemblance to a large bottle of water. It feels so wrong somehow -- which makes it very right.
Freshly submerged, the plums were green and pretty; a week later they've already dulled to beige. In three months, my umeshu will be ready to drink, just in time for the August heat, but it will only get smoother and more intense with time. Will it be as good as a Japanese Home Ec teacher's forgotten classroom brew? Probably not -- but I'll check in after I taste it to let you know.
Umeshu (Plum Wine)
Makes 1 quart
1 pound green plums
3/4 pound raw washed sugar or rock sugar
1 quart shochu/soju
Remove stems from plums and rinse in a colander. Dry one by one with a clean cloth. In a large jar or other lidded container, add the plums and sugar in alternating layers. Pour in the liquor. Seal tightly and store undisturbed in a cool, dark place for 3 months. You can drink it at this point, but it will be even better after a year. Keeps indefinitely. And you can eat the fruit!
Ooooh, can't wait to hear to hear how it tastes later (although I'll have to because it's sort of a long process)!!
My Gizmo is not nearly as mischievous as your kitty - how is that leash training coming along, btw? Has he gotten used to a harness yet?