Vegetarian ham: anatomy of a (really gross) failure

Xue Baochen, I trusted you.

You built up my hopes, allowed me to dream that a pumpkin marinated in soy sauce would age like a fine wine into a complex rainbow of flavors. Something worthy of the name you gave it, “vegetarian ham.”

I followed your instructions, left with the question of how a cut pumpkin could not rot.

Well, rot it did. After a couple of weeks, the top started to look a little … Cronenbergian. And the bottom, when I did finally build up the courage to look, the next step was to toss the whole project and autoclave the pot it came in.

But I’m not ready to give up on this pumpkin just yet.

What I was hoping for was something that would deliver a burst of taste. Something that could take the place of cured ham in cooked dishes. Dried mushrooms can do it; fermented kimchi can do it. I think pumpkin can as well.

So time to try pickling the pumpkin in a more sensible manner, i.e., in a jar.

To get a few different variations, I cut a smaller pumpkin into different sized pieces, put half into a jar with soy sauce, cooking wine, sugar, and ginger, and the other half in brine using a different recipe from Treatise on Vegetarianism: the one for Salted Squash 腌瓜. This basically says to cut squash into one inch square pieces and soak it in salt (2 jin salt for ten jin squash), mixing it once per day until the salt was completely absorbed, and later adding spices. I’ll worry about that second step later.

I’ll let both batches sit for a couple of weeks, and then decide what to do next. If the pumpkin comes out relatively firm, I will try sun drying it to concentrate its flavor. If it comes out soft, I might try making it into a sauce that can be used directly as a topping for noodles. In any case, I certainly know what not to do.