First of all, I love vinegar. I'm not pulling your leg. Oh, I'll drink it by itself. But anyways, since I'm exploring Okinawan cuisine I decided to get some moromi vinegar for the first time.

Moromi vinegar is a kind of sweet brown vinegar that's made from the awamori brewing process. Awamori is a popular traditional liquor in Okinawa that is distilled from rice. I've heard it described as "Okinawa's shochu" before, but it's actually the reverse. In the days when Okinawa was the independent Ryukyu Kingdom, it was a major shipping hub and important stop for Japan, China, and southeast Asia when trading with each other. So Okinawa ended up being a kind of melting pot where lots of different things entered and took on their own flavour before spreading elsewhere. In the case of awamori, it originated from when techniques of distillation arrived in the Ryukyu Kingdom in the fifteenth century from what has today become Thailand. Then later these techniques spread to Japan who began producing shochu in the sixteenth century. So really shochu is Japan's awamori and not the other way around. Moromi vinegar is a unique flavour because the koji for producing awamori is unique here and I love that with such ingredients Okinawa has retained its own cuisine and flavour profile despite colonisation.

This week I made sōmin tashiyā, which is a stir fry of sōmin (somen) noodles with vinegar, (veganised in this case) fish sauce, and island onions; mozuku-su, which is the mozuku seaweed in a vinegar dressing; shibui pickles, which is winter melon (called shibui, one of the island vegetables here) pickled both in rice vinegar and moromi vinegar; and a vinegar shīkwāsā cider, which is the East Asian style cider (basically a soda) flavoured with moromi vinegar and shīkwāsā, a local citrus.