Misozuke

Misozuke is a classic tsukemono (Japanese pickle) in which the subject foodstuff is buried in miso (with maybe extra salt and mirin and sake) and left to transform. Most instructions I see expect you to eat the vegetables in 1-14 days. Traditional things to bury include: carrot, burdock, radish, broccoli stems, cauliflower, chiles, garlic, tofu, and some Japanese vegetables to which I do not have access.

You can try anything and you can age it much, much longer than the above suggests. (I leave them for months and years in general.)

John Kohler makes radish misozuke:


This isn't how I've done it and the video could stand be 1/4 the length, but if you like watching refined technique:


You can even make misozuke egg yolks:

I decided to make this thread because I was having ancient garlic misozuke on brown rice for breakfast and I thought it would be fun to share. This is the last jar I have for a large large batch that I made a long time ago.

When you combine garlic and miso, after a year, the skin of the garlic has softened some and the miso tastes of garlic a bit but it's not really all that different. After three years, the margins between the two foods have started to noticeably erode and a dull spoon can pass through a clove of garlic. I think five years old is kind of the sweet spot -- it isn't homogenous but it's getting there.

In this example, somewhere along the way, it dried out and blackened and there's a little crispiness to the edges. The garlics are still visible in the pictures below, but when I mixed it into my rice, they broke up into little chunks of mixed miso and garlic. It's totally still edible and the flavor is great, but the texture isn't delectible.

It's worth noting that I haven't ever used a young white miso the way all the sources do. My miso started out dark reddish brown, so the transformation to black isn't as stark as it might otherwise seem.