Pickled Cucumber キュウリの漬物

We really like the pickled daikon which I posted before. I am making it regularly. As I mentioned in the previous post, the marinade contains a good amount of sugar and when I placed the daikon in the marinade, the marinade was basically a slurry i.e. not liquid. It weighed a total of 170 grams (120g sugar 25 gram vinegar, 12 gram sake, 15 gram salt, and 10 gram sake). But after 1-2 days, the moisture extracted from the daikon made the slurry into a liquid. Previously I discarded the marinade after the pickled daikon was finished. But this time I decided to experiment and added several whole American mini-cucumbers into the leftover marinade to see what would happen. After two days, the cucumber looked wrinkled. Nonetheless the result was surprisingly good. The cucumber tasted fresh and had some crunch left but was not raw. Initially I thought it was too sweet but the next day, the sweetness dissipated and just complemented the fresh taste of the cucumber. 

I wanted to see how the marinade changed after I used it for both the diakon and the cucumber. I did this by weighing it. I weighed the marinade both before and after the daikon and cucumbers were done. Before I put in the diakon, the marinade weighed 170 grams. After the diakon had been in the marinade for 2-3 weeks I removed it and weighed the marinade. It was 343 grams; meaning that 173 grams of liquid were extracted from the daikon and replaced in the diakon by the salt and flavoring of the marinade. In essence the moisture extracted from the diakon doubled the total volume of the liquid.  I then added 4 American mini-cucumbers to the 343 grams of marinade and after 1week I removed the cucumber and weighed the marinade. It had increased to 398 grams. (An additional 55 grams of liquid from the cucumbers were added to the marinade). I am not sure how many times I can reuse the marinade like this but it is good to know that I can use it for at least one batch of cucumbers after marinating the diakon and the cucumbers come out nicely.