After keeping your salted plums for three days, they should look very watery.
Your next mission is to give them color…
Last time, I mentioned that artificial food coloring is typically used for mass production of umeboshi. That’s the last thing you want to enter your gut. Making sure that you read the contents before purchasing any food product is paramount.
Making your own umeboshi is really labor intensive (sometimes romanticized as “labor of love”)… If you can find the real deal from a farmer’s market, call yourself lucky. That’s labor of love most likely done by a grandmother/ a grandfather.
Ingredients:
red shiso leaves- a bunch (like a bouquet of flowers)
sea salt- 4 heaping spoonfuls
Procedure:
1. Separate the red leaves them from the stem.
2. Wash them thoroughly.
3. Add four heaping spoons of salt. (They are not strict with the measurements here since you will squeeze the salt off later anyway.)
4. With your clean hands, squeeze (Not only squeezing.. almost like kneading) the salt and the red shiso leaves until moisture gets released.
My husband helped me here, he said he saw brown juice at first squeeze and drained it off. And then continued squeezing until he could extract purple juice. That too got discarded. What you will have left are dehydrated red shiso leaves. That’s what you need.
5. Top your ume with the dehydrated red shiso leaves. (And… Voila! You’re not yet done.)
6. Store in a cold and dark spot in your kitchen for one month.
7. Sun dry them for three days.
Asian Santa
June 30, 2025
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