salad days - ssäm 쌈 night recap

wherein Denys recaps in detail the events of his dinner party on 5/14/2021, after a little tangent walking you through his longest-running culinary project

one year ago

My current longest-running culinary project¹ began at this same time last year, when on a mid-pandemic Internet bender I discovered that I was at the time in the midst of the hyper-short season for ume plums. Pictured below are the ones I acquired then:

Prior to the discovery of these fresh ume at one of our local Japanese grocery stores², my only experience with these plums had been the distinct pleasure of trying salted, pickled umeboshi in bento boxes in Japan, which I had seen placed in a bed of white rice to resemble the Japanese flag:

The ume fruits as picked fresh from the tree are nigh-inedible, hard, green stonefruit, so the cultures in the areas where they grow came up with novel ways to get something edible from them. Umeboshi in particular are pickled and dried to produce these little red saline orbs.

I think making my own umeboshi is still a little beyond the scope of my culinary abilities, so last year after some research I settled on making umeshu, or plum wine, with my fresh ume. This recipe couldn’t be simpler - combine neutral grain spirit³ with rock sugar⁴ and the ume plums, and let sit for one year. I gathered my supplies:

stacked cleaned plums (with stems removed) in the bottle with the rock sugar:

and added the Tito’s. One day later, the density differential between the various contents pulled the sugar down to the bottom, the plums to the middle, and the vodka to the top:

Nothing super exciting (from a visual perspective at least) really happened after that. The rock sugar at the bottom dissolved, the plums sank to the bottom, the sugar dispersed throughout the liquid, and the vodka/sugar mixture leached all of the flavor out of the plums.

today

One year later, we’ve got this beautiful umeshu:

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So in honor of the first birthday of my first batch of umeshu, to celebrate the point in time where this amber liquid can finally be safely consumed⁵, I invited over some of the high school friends in town for a dinner and umeshu-making party. And like any good plans these days, I commenced things with a group text:

ssäm night recap

1:30pm - arrived home from work and began preparation of the bo ssäm (보쌈 ). I bought a 7.5lb pork shoulder from 99 Ranch Market, rubbed it with salt, and threw it in a 300 degree oven⁶. Estimating ~6 hours roast time to get the internal temp of the shoulder up to 200 degrees.

2:30pm - 5:30pm - let the roast do its thing in the oven while I prepare the casa for guests.

5:30pm - AP⁷ arrived to the house with his contribution to the dinner - a pandan cake from Kamalan Bakery and a case of Rolling Rock. He brought these beers as an explicit reference to Mare of Easttown, so we cracked a couple of those open, attempted our best Pennsylvania accents, and talked about our then-novel theories about who did what.

6:00pm - prepared some of the dipping sauces to go with dinner. I combined ginger, green onions, salt, and smoking hot peanut oil to make this amazing ginger scallion sauce, and we used saujeot (새우젓) to make the salted shrimp sauce as shown in this recipe page. AP and I then grabbed some of the Yuenglings I had in my fridge (acquired on a quick sojourn to Louisiana after getting my COVID shot in deep East Texas) to continue our Mare of Easttown-themed beer consumption⁸.

7:00pm - AM and KM arrived with their dog and their contributions to dinner: some dank vino and a truly elite selection of cheeses from Houston Dairymaids⁹.

to avoid embarrassment for all parties involved, I will not be naming the attendee who spelled cheddar as “chedar” on the paper surrounding the cheeseboard

Just look at that intense annatto color on the chedd. Crowd favorites were the blue and the soft goat cheese that went perfectly with the strawberry preserves.

7:30pm - MD and KG arrived with their pup and made their dinner contribution - dakgalbi (닭갈비). Stir fried chicken with rice cakes is going to make for another dank filling for our ssäm lettuce wraps and baos.

8:00pm - EL and LG arrived with their dog and their dinner contribution - japchae (잡채 ). Stir fried noodles with lots of dank veggies. Soooo good. In other news, the pork shoulder finally got to 200 degrees, so I pulled that out of the oven and tented it under some foil.

8:30pm - now that all of the attendees (both human and canine) had arrived and finished their contributions to dinner, we shredded the pork, laid out the spread on the outdoor dining table, and proceeded to eat until we were all stuffed:

9:30pm - we sang Happy Birthday to (and poured glasses of) the now 1 year old umeshu, cut the pandan cake, and we had a plum wine/plum syrup making clinic. Each attendee got to make a batch of wine or syrup for themselves to take home and age over the next year.

How was the umeshu now that you finally got to try it, you may ask? The first thing you notice when you open the jar is the absolutely intoxicating aroma. Big Luxardo/amaretto/noyaux vibes on the nose (as to be expected from a fruit in the same family as the almond). That comes through on the taste as well, with a lightly lingering sourness as extracted from the fresh green fruit balanced by sweetness from the dissolved rock sugar.

10:00pm - ??:?? - everyone chipped in in the kitchen to clean up, more plum wine was poured, and everyone made it home with leftovers and a jug of umeshu or ume syrup to age in their pantry.

Such a fun night. Can’t wait to do it again next year for the second birthday of last year’s umeshu and first birthday of this year’s umeshu, and I hope that everyone who came will spread the ume love with their respective batches of plum wine.

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This is exactly the kind of story I want to tell with salad days. It would've been impossible to convey all of this nuance (with all of the research I did linked and footnoted) and most importantly how much fun we had on this Friday evening in just a few IG stories. Thanks for reading friends.

I appreciate any comments, feedback, or suggestions anyone has about salad days. I will receive any replies sent to this email address, and you can use the discussion board style comments feature if you have anything else to say by viewing this newsletter on herf.substack.com.

1. I put my sourdough starter on pause, so more accurately I should say current longest-running non-dormant culinary project.

2. I bought the ume last year at Daido, and for reference, the other Japanese grocery store I’ve found in Houston is Seiwa Market (also worth noting, Seiwa happens to be right next to Houston’s best ramen restaurant).

This year, I discovered that one of the Japanese markets buys their ume directly from H Mart and repackages it into smaller containers for resale. You better believe that I went straight to the source and bought half of a bushel of ume direct from H Mart this time around.

3. I used Tito’s vodka (40% ABV). For this recipe you want anything above 35%, and I settled on Tito’s since I was having a hard time sourcing an affordable shochu as called for in the recipes I found.

4. Rock sugar is used here due to its lower surface area compared to granulated sugar, which keeps it from dissolving into the vodka/plum mixture too quickly.

5. The pits of the ume (and all stonefruit afaik) contain cyanide, which in this preparation is neutralized by the vodka soak. I’ve read that you can safely drink the umeshu after 6 months, but it’s traditional to wait a year so there’s more time for flavor extraction.

6. Note to Korean food purists, I know that roasted pork may not be the truly authentic bo ssäm filling, but we’re going for maximum dankness here as opposed to strict orthodoxy

7. Initials used for names to provide a bit of privacy for my dinner guests and to add a cool air of mystery to the story. Who were these dank people? How can I become one of them? (The answer is, of course, to just ask your boy!)

8. In a power ranking of Pennsylvania beers, I preferred Yuengling, and AP preferred Rolling Rock. And after watching the latest episode of Mare of Easttown (#6 as of this writing), maybe we were overthinking with some of our theories?

9. You guys, I cannot stan this store enough. Please go there sometime if you are in H town.