Umeboshi Making

Umeboshi is salty and sour pickled plum.
It's popular ingredients for Onigiri (rice ball), or placed in the middle of white rice in the obento box so it looks like Japanese flag.
You can buy Umeboshi at Japanese stores, but it's not so difficult to make it by yourself.

Around May or June, you would find plums for Umesh (plum wine) at Japanese supermarkets.

Choose ones which are ripe. If they are green, leave them for several days to ripen.

Wash them thoroughly, dry them, and throw them into sanitized container with salt which is 18% of the weight of the plums.

Place a weight on top of the plums so that the moisture from plums (called Plum Vinegar) comes out quickly.
This is crucial because without being covered by the Plum Vinegar, the plums would be likely to get moldy.

Optional: Find a bunch of red color Shiso (Japanese herb), trim off hard parts, scrub them with salt then add to the container for red color.

Choose sunny, hot day (I usually do this in September), and take the plums out from the Plum Vinegar and let them dry under the sun for three days.
If you used red Shiso leaves, dry them too until they become crispy. This tastes good with rice.

Now Umeboshi is ready to eat, but they taste better if you let them rest for a year.

To tell you the truth, Umeboshi is too salty and too sour to eat for me, but JC loves this so I mostly make this for him.
I like the flavor itself, so I chop the Umeboshi and make it into paste and use as a condiment.
Plum Vinegar can be used to pickle other vegetables such as cucumber.
Or you spread Plum Vinegar on plastic wrap, make rice ball with this wrap and the rice ball would have salty plum flavor.
There is nothing to be wasted!