The Kimchi Masters of South Korea
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's the definition of emergency food, because you have to be VERY hungry to want to eat it.
It's gross. Really, really, really gross.
In Romania, pickled cabbage is a staple in the winter, cannot be that dissimilar to kimchi although I haven't tasted it. Particularly I like pickled cabbage juice straight from the barrel, some two months after they are prepared for fermentation. That's right around Christmas and it's the best thing to have after a hangover. There's also "drunkard's soup": cabbage juice soup, fatty and sour: https://www.bucataras.ro/uploads/modules/news/41634/656x440_...
Coming back to calories from cabbage, there's cabbage soup where cabbage is really, just for the flavor, like tea leaves in a tea you don't have to put a ton of them. That's one of the things I learned making my own soup, in the first one I put like a whole cabbage and turned out some yucky stew.
And there's sauteed cabbage, which I usually make in the fat left from frying sausages. And it's eaten with the very sausages, plus milk sour cream and bread. So a ton of calories, the cabbage is just ... I dunno, "the delivery agent" :)
But indeed it's not related to food shortages coze you don't have bread and cream and sausages when that happens. It's more like one of the several staples, coze although tasty, you can't eat potatoes all day, gotta vary.
P.s. another very Korean detail in that story is that Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut, later left the program to pursue an MBA.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/22/489805398/ho...
For example, fresh kimchi is best with boiled pork belly, while a more sour kimchi is better for stew. And then there’s this “peak” kimchi for eating by itself — it’s tremendous when it’s homemade.
Can’t wait to go back to SK and, if you haven’t had it, I highly recommend finding some kimchi & pork belly. It’s an unbeatable combo.
It's largely ultra gentrified into just being another over priced neighborhood, but back in 2010 it was something special...
The small koreatown in STL is still very original. I have to take my Korean cousin, otherwise I don't get service.
Similarly, the 23rd St. Cafe serves great Indian / Mexican fusion.
Apartments used to be like 600$ or so.
It wasn't perfect, but LA used to have a bunch of working class neighborhoods.
I have tried 4 times now, and I'm pretty sure it's because the only recipes I find are from Korean-american migrants, meaning that they'll use kosher salt, which we in Europe don't have. The salt/water ratio will be off, which will prevent fermentation (and lead to oversalted kimchi).
If anyone here is a Korean and knows of a somewhat traditional kimchi recipe using metric units and table salt, I'd be stoked if you would post it in a comment.
We do (whatever Europe means in this context) but no offense if you can’t even find salt then how do you manage gochugaru or fish sauce for example?
I did the the Munchies kimchi several times and it was always perfect
But yeah, 3% (non-iodized) salt by weight. You can top off the brine with filtered water if your vegetables don't weep enough, but this hasn't been a problem for me.
Also it’s quite hard to oversalt kimchi in my experience. You’ll need to ferment it longer but eventually the sourness will balance out the salty
OTOH thinking about the large trucks, tractors, and other machinery operating down there, there is probably contamination too, just by abrasion from the rubber tires, or beltways.
Pick your poison :)
Not Korea, but my wife is native born. Her family recipe is a little different than the ones I've seen online, but the result is still kimchi. There's also literally hundreds of different kinds of kimchi, so there's definitely flexibility built into the concept.
It's not really Kosher salt that Koreans use, but very coarse sea salt. It's usually sold in stores in Korea (or Asian food stores elsewhere) either in big bags by the kg [2][3], or often in a big bin near the produce in a grocery and you just scoop up as much as you need into a container and pay by the kg.
The problem you are having is not the ingredients in the salt, it's the coarseness of it. With sea salt, or kosher salt, the grains are very large and so you get less salt per unit volume. I'm 100% certain you can track down some kind of large grained coarse salt as it's used in all kinds of cooking settings, often as a late-in-recipe seasoning on breads and meats. It's likely to either be coarse grained sea salt, unground salt, or even a coarse grained mined salt like Himalayan pink salt. I believe there's a well known French coarse grained grey sea salt called Moulin & Cuisson or Le Guerandais or something that would be a good substitute.
Most major European cities have a large enough Asian population these days that there is probably an Asian grocery where you can also check also. (I'm only aware of this because when we travel in Europe my wife almost always seeks out a few things so we can cook at home instead of going out to save some money).
You might also be curious to know that the world's largest commercial Kimchi maker has a factory in Europe (Poland). [4]
1 - https://kimchimari.com/best-salt-kimchi-12-salts/
2 - https://www.hmart.com/natural-premium-sea-salt-for-kimchi-2-...
3 - https://www.amazon.com/Beksul-Natural-Premium-Coarse-Brining...
4 - https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/11/08/poland-to-become-euro...
5 - https://www.souschef.co.uk/blogs/the-bureau-of-taste/recipe-...
So, the good news is that precision doesn't really matter for a lot of these recipes. But if you want to be precise, use proper weight units and get some proper tools to weigh things out. 2.5% is a good target (by weight) for a brine. I use precise weights when making bread. When making kimchi I don't weigh out anything.
Here's what I tend to do too make kimch:
1) get cabbage and use lots of salt to draw out the moisture. More is better. The goal is to draw out water. You cannot use too much salt at this stage. Use cups, buckets, whatever makes you happy. It does not matter.
2) after 40 minutes or so, wash the cabbage; most of the salt will go down the drain at this point. This is why the amount of salt doesn't matter. The remaining cabbage will taste slightly salty but not overly. That's because some of the salt will have made it into the cabbage through osmosis. Nature will get the ratio right for you.
3) prepare a paste with sugar, some salt or fish sauce (season to taste basically), some starch to thicken, mix in the chili flakes and your other ingredients. Use Korean chili flakes if you can get them but you can fall back to other chili flakes. You want mild heat, don't go too crazy here.
4) mix everything together and put it in a jar. There should be enough juice coming out of the cabbage to cover the ingredients. But if not, add some water. Obviously use water without chlorine. Or put differently; use water that tastes nice when you drink it. Don't put stuff that doesn't taste nice in your kimchi.
5) Let it ferment. You should see fermentation happen within a day. Activity will taper off after a few days. There is no right or wrong here. Some like it fresh, some like it funky. Ferment longer for more funkiness. I usually go for about a week.
I loosely follow Maanchi's recipes. But I've watched a few other ones on Kimchi. Brad Leone is highly entertaining and he ferments all sorts of stuff. The main thing you can learn from him is that fermentation is easy and that there really is no right or wrong here.
It's a natural process and all you are doing is letting nature do it's thing. It's pretty hard to mess it up actually. The main thing to understand is the optimal salt to water ratio in a brine (and a lot of other food) is about 2-3% by weight. But you can be off by 50% and it won't really matter much. Anything too high and you kill the yeast and the bacteria and they'll be less active. Anything too low and they'll be less active. You can just go by taste here. If it tastes too salty, it probably is.
Kosher salt is a US thing. But of course kosher food is a Jewish thing and Jews of course emigrated pretty much everywhere. Though probably not a lot of them ended up in Korea. All it means for salt to be kosher is to have no additives. So, get some salt without additives and weigh it out and you'll be fine. I've used with and without and honestly it doesn't make a huge difference. Use what you have.
For authenticity, use Korean ingredients and get all the good stuff. But bear in mind that this is food that was made for centuries by people without any modern tools. It's not that hard.
- 2 napa cabbage
- half of a yellow onion
- 4-6 green onion/scallions
- a couple table spoons of ground garlic or garlic paste
- teaspoon of ginger paste
- 2-4 table spoons for fish sauce
- pepper flakes to desired level of spice
Recipe from a native Korean.
I think the main thing here is technique. The rest is picking nice ingredients and flavouring.
Came out really good despite not having some of the ingredients because I’m disorganized (left out carrots, ginger, scallions). My Taiwanese neighbor suggested adding apple to sweeten it up a bit, cut the sour, and less Korean pepper flakes.. but I like mine spicy.
Working on a second batch now.
The book has a couple other kimchi recipes in addition to dozens of other fiery ferments.
One of my first questions: how will climate-change affect the composition of "complex kimchi"? Will the changes be profound (at least to Korean tongues), as with coffee?
Why would you expect it to?
I mention this because daikon kimchi while sacrificing the tenderness, delicacy, and complexity of flavor of a good cabbage kimchi is really, really, REALLY forgiving. So if you want to learn the fundamentals that's a good place to start.
Also - it may seem like an extravagance, but get a fermentation crock with a water seal and weights. They pay for themselves in ease, time, and better product with far less chance of spoilage in just a few batches... and literally a couple batches if you account for the retail price of kimchi vs. the cost of the ingredients for homemade.
It seems to serve a similar role in Korean cuisine as the pickle in American cuisine or the pickled ginger or wasabi in Japanese cuisine.
Kimchi can be a palette cleanser kind of thing, but it’s also frequently the main flavor of a dish more akin to sauerkraut.
Later, I tried some really good ones that I could eat on their own but in any case, the value proposition of Kimchi became clear to me after I tried it with a rice/meat dish like Beef Bulgogi. The slight sweetness of Bulgogi works amazingly well with the bitterness of Kimchi. There's a flavor to trigger every tastebud.
Also, I've come to appreciate dishes where every bite is slightly different and the flavor evolves as you progress through the dish from start to finish. Kimchi is the perfect condiment in that respect because it is often used as a topping, hence it hits you at the beginning. It awakens your tastebuds and prepares you for a full gastronomic journey... In a single dish.
Also, I like that Kimchi doesn't just awaken your tastebuds... It goes one step further than the humble pickle. The complex flavor profile of Kimchi challenges you to seek out complexity in other parts of your dish.
If you're not veg you can use prepared seafoods - cured versions, sauces, etc to get most of the way there. As a vegetarian I use soybean paste to sub in for the umami flavor and some of the salt / fermentable sugars I'm otherwise missing.
Sounds a lot like BBQ!