About Picklestone

2020-11
Picklestone is ontworpen door Tomonori Tanaka uit Kyoto. Ik vroeg hem zijn verhaal te doen:

I’m an advertising designer working for a Japanese advertising agency. I was busy every day and my work was taking over my life. So I wanted to improve my diet and adopt a healthier diet. That’s when I turned my attention to pickles, a Japanese preserved food. With a history of over 1,000 years, Japanese pickles were simply made. The vegetables are processed by adding salt and draining the water out of them to prevent them from going bad. Red chili pepper and kombu are added to add aroma and flavor. This would increase the vitamins and transform the food into a healthier food. I became interested in pickles by researching their history. Every day, I pickle a variety of vegetables. Pickles can be combined with salt, vinegar, and soy sauce to create endless variations. Eating pickles on a daily basis has given us a healthy body. But I wanted to invent an easier way to make pickles. I created the Picklestone.

Picklestone is an old Japanese tool for making pickles, but I designed it in a modern way.
To make Tsukemono, you need to first drain the water from the vegetables and make a bacteria-free environment for the vegetables by using salt. Preservation power improves by salt entering the vegetable fiber, and the number of lactic acid bacteria increases, and the sourness of the pickle is produced. Easy as that, now you have Japanese style pickles.

Why can pickles be made in just one day?
The secret lies in the weight. By applying pressure vertically to a cylindrical glass pot, the speed at which water is drained from the vegetables increases, and this is how the pickles get their unique texture! Pickled vegetables are completed in about 4 hours for finely cut vegetables. In addition, when we seal the container with the stone, the pickles do not come in contact with air and the preservation power improves.

If you can’t eat a large volume of raw vegetables, pickle them and you can get plenty of fiber and vitamins. In addition, the effect of lactic acid bacteria improves the intestinal environment. Japanese-style pickles are the perfect vegan superfood. Why not make them a part of your daily diet?

Awards
I won two awards for picklestone. One is the Good Design award 2018, which is the most prestigious award in Japan. The other is the Design for Asia awards 2020, which are given to the best product design in Asia. With this award, we can say that it is the most beautiful design for a pickle dipping tool.

Nowadays, people all over the world are using Picklestone to enjoy Japanese pickles.

Tomonori Tanaka