Sukumo

Wednesday, June 28, Sally and Stephany and I met at my house to start our Sukumo. We have been drying indigo and saving it since 2020 at least. 

The recipe called for 15.4 pounds of dried indigo leaf as the very minimum. I weighed myself holding a large container, and then put indigo in the container. 

The process calls for starting with a small amount and adding water and kneading it. So batch by batch, I weighed it and then dumped it in the wading pool and we kneaded it. The final amount was 15.6 pounds, but we found a string in it and a plastic bag, so we were probably exactly right on with 15.4. This was amazing, because we had only been randomly weighing it and estimating how much we had.

We obtained a large whiskey barrel off Facebook marketplace. The process is to put rice hulls in the bottom. There is a cool brewery supply in Hillsboro where we got the rice hulls. The next layer is straw. Then, burlap. Stephany got advice from Britt Boles to sew the burlap into a bag so it would be easier to lift in and out. Stephany had an old piece of burlap, which I washed and sewed into a bag. 

After kneading for awhile and adding water, the next step was to add Sake. We got Sake from SakeOne. Britt had been there previously, unbeknownst to us, so the woman there knew which kind of Sake we needed - the unpasturized kind - Momokawa. We went tasting there a couple weeks ago, but didn't buy the Sake then because the fresher the better. Stephany bought a bottle the day before and brought it. 

Then we stuffed the leaf mixture into the bag, put the bag into the barrel, stuck Stephany's fancy thermometer into the middle of the mix, closed up the bag, put more straw on top, then put Stephany's nice indigo-dyed cloth on the top.