Miso Pickled Garlic (Ninniku Miso-zuke)?All you need is 3 ingredients and a glass jar!

I have a very serious disease called jar-itis.  This disease causes me to fill my refrigerator with jars.  I inherited this disease from my father.  Our poor families are always complaining that there isn’t enough room in the refrigerator because our jars are taking up all the space. So you may be wondering what compels us to hoard these jars?  It’s our love for the things that come in them—like marinated artichoke hearts, olives, and pickles.  Living in Japan introduced me to a new kind of pickle—miso pickles.  Not only are miso pickles delicious, but they are wonderfully easy to make.  I recently made a batch of miso pickled garlic (called ninniku miso-zuke in Japanese) and thought I would share the process with you.  Miso helps temper the strong garlic flavor and seasons the cloves at the same time.

The only difficult step in making this dish is peeling off the thin filmy skin (underneath the regular skin).  Although this is monotonous work, it is worth it because it allows the miso to better permeate the cloves of garlic, making the pickling process go quicker and the garlic taste even better!

Once you have trimmed off the root ends and peeled each clove, you boil them for 2 minutes, and then drain them.

Then you make a mixture of miso paste and mirin,

spread a thin layer of the mixture on the bottom of a glass jar,

add a single layer of garlic cloves,

and repeat the layering process until you have used up all of your miso mixture and garlic cloves.  All that is left to do is seal the jar, put it in the refrigerator, and wait!

After about 10 days the cloves will be ready to eat.  If you want a more mild garlic flavor, let the cloves pickle for longer (at least a month or more).  I like the garlic flavor to be a bit stronger so 10 to 14 days is long enough for me.  The garlic can be eaten as a side dish or as a condiment or garnish for another dish.  I usually use aka-miso (red/brown miso paste), but you can use whatever miso paste you prefer.  If you use a sweeter miso paste, you can omit the mirin.  Once you have eaten all the yummy cloves of garlic, you can use the leftover miso mixture to make delicious miso soup.  Now I just need to go stuff a clove of pickled garlic in Mr. Fuji’s mouth before he can complain that I’ve added yet another jar to our already full refrigerator.