Daikon is hung above the hearth and smoked over burning hardwood, oak or cherry, for somewhere between two and five days. Then it is packed down in rice bran with salt and sugar and left to ferment for two months, and often a good deal longer than that. Cut across, it is the colour of amber all the way through, and it squeaks slightly under the blade of the knife.

Why smoke it at all? Because an Akita winter has short days, temperatures below freezing and a great deal of snow, and radish cannot be dried outdoors in any of that. Households hung them from the beams indoors instead, and the smoke from the sunken hearth got to them. That, according to the accounts, is the whole of the invention: an accident of where there was room to hang things. Some say the practice goes back to the Muromachi period.

Iburi means smoked. Gakko is the local dialect word for a pickle, used all over the prefecture. As with a number of things in this part of the country, the name is simply the method said out loud.

A way of drying something in a place where nothing can be dried. The smoke arrives a moment after the crunch does, and stays in the back of the nose for a while afterwards.