Replaces Jarred supermarket kimchi
Kimchi
It takes a little while, but then you have a lot of cheap, healthy and delicious veggies to add to whatever you want.
- Hands on
- 30 minutes
- Total time
- 1½ hours, plus about 2 days fermenting
- Makes
- About 2 litres
All over the world, there are dishes that everybody knows grandma makes best. In Korea, I believe that dish is kimchi: everyone has their own special recipe that they think is the GOAT. The fun thing with recipes like that is that you just need to figure out which steps are the important ones. In kimchi, you need a brine to soften the cabbage and kick-start the fermentation, some kind of sweetness to balance the gochugaru, and something that adds complexity, like fish sauce. I have taken that approach and made a Scandinavian fusion kimchi that I, at least, think is great.
Ingredients
Cabbage
- Napa cabbage (about 1.5 kg)1 head
- Salt (about 3% of the cabbage weight)45 g
Paste
- Ginger, peeled50 g
- Garlic, peeled25 g
- Apple, peeled and cored200 g
- Fish sauce1 dl
- Gochugaru (Korean chilli flakes)½ dl
Vegetables
- Carrot140 g
- Celeriac140 g
Method
- Dry-brine the cabbage. Cut it into bite-sized pieces, about 4 cm, put it in a large bowl and toss with the salt until every piece is coated. Leave it about 1 hour, tossing once or twice. It will shrink, go floppy and sit in a puddle of its own water.
- Rinse the cabbage two or three times in cold water to wash off the excess salt, then let it drain well in a colander. Taste a piece: it should be pleasantly salty, like a crisp, not unpleasantly so. The fish sauce adds more salt later.
- While the cabbage brines, make the paste. Blend the ginger, garlic, apple and fish sauce until smooth, then stir in the gochugaru. It should be a thick, brick-red paste.
- Grate the carrot and celeriac on the coarse side of a box grater, or cut them into thin matchsticks.
- Mix everything in the big bowl: cabbage, grated vegetables and paste. Use gloves, or your hands will smell of garlic and sting for a day. Work it in until every piece is red.
- Pack it tightly into a clean jar, pressing down so the liquid rises over the vegetables. Leave 3-4 cm of headroom, because it bubbles. Close the lid loosely.
- Leave it at room temperature for about 2 days. Press it down once a day with a clean spoon and taste it. When it is as sour as you like, close the lid and move it to the fridge.
One thing that helps. This is a fermentation, and it creates gas, so do not use a jar where pressure can build up, or you risk having kimchi everywhere when you go in for a taste. It may also leak a little, so stand the jar on a plate. Warmer kitchens ferment faster, so start tasting after one day. If it is too salty, the brine was too long or the rinse too short. It mellows with time, and next batch, rinse more. If you want it hotter, add more gochugaru rather than fresh chilli.