Ankle-deep in mud in Kameoka, some 40 minutes by car west of Kyoto, I was trying not to slip face-first into the row of Kamo-nasu heirloom eggplant saplings we’d just planted. A few feet away, Satoshi Mori, the third-generation owner of Kyoto’s Kyo-tsukemono Mori picklery, demonstrated the correct way to plant the young greens. Around us, fields lined with neat rows of garlic, turnips, and onions stretched toward the low hills ringing the valley; a black kite circled overhead, on the hunt for a mousey breakfast.
It was early May, though for Mori, it was Kawazu hajimete naku (“frogs start singing”), the beginning of summer, and one of the 72 microseasons Japanese farmers use to track the changing weather. “Here, people still place great value on seasonality,” he said. “It’s a way to appreciate the natural world we’re part of.” That attention to seasonality is also central to tsukemono, Japan’s remarkably varied world of pickles and preserved vegetables, which is one way of enjoying ingredients at their seasonal peak (a concept known as shun). It was also the reason I’d found myself in borrowed rubber boots, slithering through a muddy farm field miles away from Kyoto’s tourist crush.
The pickling experience begins on a farm outside Kyoto, where participants learn how seasonality shapes the vegetables used in tsukemono.
Photo by Drew Escriva
Mori’s vegetable patch was the first stop on a new fermentation-focused “Epicurean Expedition” by the Luxury Collection, Marriott’s portfolio of more than 140 hotels and resorts in 40 countries and territories. The experience is one of 10 launching as part of the brand’s new Expeditions program, which ranges from multiday trips connecting several hotels to single-day experiences like this one, built around local experts and traditions.
In Kyoto, our base was Suiran, a Luxury Collection Hotel, a 39-room retreat along the Hozu River in Arashiyama, with tatami-floored rooms, manicured gardens, clay-tiled Meiji-era roofs, and hot spring baths. For the fermentation itinerary, even the welcome treats followed the theme, with fermented Awa Bancha tea and fragrant sake lees.
How pickling became part of Kyoto’s culinary identity
During the hands-on workshop, participants learn the process behind nukazuke, vegetables fermented in a bed of seasoned rice bran.
Photos by Drew Escriva
Japan’s relationship with pickles runs deep and goes well beyond the floppy dill spears found in Western deli tubs. Tsukemono accompanies almost every meal, from breakfast rice to late-night izakaya bites, and each region has its own varieties. Kyoto’s versions are particularly prized for their delicate flavor and historical ties to the refined cooking of the Imperial Court and Zen Buddhism.
Before modern refrigeration, pickling helped preserve the season’s fleeting produce during winter. “It’s the wisdom of the ancient people, a technique of survival,” Mori explained while guiding us through our next stop, a local farmers’ market where we picked out vegetables—skinny cucumbers, carrots, and daikon radishes as large as toddlers’ legs—for the afternoon’s workshop.
At Mori’s store and head office in Kyoto’s Ukyo Ward, the air was thick with the yeasty-sweet smell of fermenting rice bran. We kicked off our tsukemono crash course by tasting Mori’s signature pickles: paper-thin slices of senmaizuke turnip; tangy shibazuke from finely chopped cucumber and eggplant seasoned with red shisho; and cucumbers lacto-fermented just briefly to retain their snap. Mori explained that Japanese pickles were historically much more sour, but modern refrigeration allows for shorter fermentation times, yielding subtler flavors. It also made room for experimentation: Mori works with nontraditional ingredients, such as Kyoto olives and matcha. “We have to keep innovating,” he added. “It keeps the tradition alive.”
Learning to make tsukemono from a master
Based at Suiran in Kyoto, the experience traces the city’s pickling traditions from the farm and fermentation room back to the hotel.
Photos by Drew Escriva
We gloved up to try it ourselves. Mori had prepared buckets of rice bran (nuka), which we mixed with water and salt into a doughy paste. It’d take another week or two of adding vegetable scraps and daily stirring for the mixture to lacto-ferment naturally into nukamiso, the base for nukazuke pickles—so we worked with a previously made batch, burying our market haul, salt-rubbed and scrubbed clean, into the sweet-smelling mush. I asked Mori why he decided to share his secrets and open up his workshop for visitors like me. “Kyo-tsukemono is rarely exported, and few people [outside Japan] know about it,” he answered. “It’s not just about eating it at a restaurant. The story is important, and when you learn about the process [behind it], it tastes better.”
Back at Suiran that evening, chef Tsubasa Yamaguchi put fermentation at the heart of an eight-course dinner created for the itinerary and served at the hotel’s stamp-sized Kanzan teppanyaki counter. I’d spotted him picking up ingredients at the farmers’ market earlier that day, and they reappeared throughout the meal. A soup of ginger, sake, and fermented onion koji (rice malt) came topped with soy-marinated beans and baby turnips; abalone was paired with sweet manganji pepper native to Kyoto and a creamy sauce from white miso and fermented black garlic. Even the wagyu tenderloin was seasoned with miso, soy sauce koji, and slices of the same Kamo-nasu eggplant we’d planted that morning. None of it laid on the fermentation focus too heavily, but that was precisely the point: Fermentation is so embedded in Japanese cooking, it’d be wrong to treat it as a novelty.
The next day, I opened the plastic tub of nukazuke I’d packed up after the workshop. Overnight, the rice bran had grown pungent enough to fill the room. There was a whiff of optimism as I dug my cucumbers from the sand-colored muck, but a first bite of the now-limp pickle made one thing clear: Artisans like Mori have spent generations refining fermentation into an art. My soggy cucumber was proof some traditions are better left to a professional—and that I’d probably never look at a plate of tsukemono quite the same way again.
The Kyoto Day Discovery Expedition costs $715 per person and does not require a stay at Suiran. Rooms at the hotel start at $550 per night. Marriott Bonvoy points cannot currently be redeemed for Expeditions.
