Dehydrating daikon

I’m very partial to daikon, the enormous white radish that’s much loved in Japan. It grows very fast, up to the size of my forearm, and it’s pretty pest resistant.
That success is also the challenge: how to get through an arm-sized daikon with the two of us?
My recent purchase of Preserving the Japanese Way provided a timely solution: dehydration.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds! Plenty of other things are dehydrated (think apple, banana, etc), including Japanese ingredients like seaweed.

The process is a simple one: use a mandolin to cut the daikon into thin strips. I tried two different sizes of strips, and the daikon was processed in under five minutes.

Then into the dehydrator it goes! Run it for a day at the medium setting, and the result is a tangle of dry strips. These can then be stored for many months. According to the cookbook, they need to be soaked for an hour or two before use.

This entry was posted in Cooking, Growing our own food and tagged daikon, dehydrating, Japanese.
February 19, 2020 at 2:12 am
so how did the reconstituted dish turn out? and how did you cook with it?
November 22, 2020 at 7:23 am
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