How I Made Kimchi

I am not a chef. I can’t take a random set of interesting ingredients and turn them in to something delicious. In the kitchen I am something of a menace. BUT! I am a geek and thus there are a few things I have learned to make because I think they are interesting (and tasty).

With the help of my Korean friend Soyoung I now know how to make that staple of Korean food: kimchi.

Ingredients

I used the following ingredients:

• A whole head of Napa cabbage
• Shrimp sauce (don’t look at this too closely or you will get grossed out)
• Crushed red pepper (from a Korean grocery)
• Sea salt (large crystals)
• Carrot
• Garlic
• Sugar (confectioners, it was all I had)

You can use all kinds of other stuff in kimchi but this is like the basic variety. Most people also include scallions but I forget to get them.

Also notice the Hello Kitty toaster in the background. It makes toast with Hello Kitty on it.

Halving

First I thoroughly rinsed the cabbage making sure to pull the leaves apart some to rinse all of the inside parts. After that I cut the cabbage in half. (I didn’t dry the cabbage because the water helps with the next step.)

I don’t know why but I think Napa cabbage is really beautiful.

Salting

I put the cabbage halves in a large bowl and then poured on top of it one metric fuck-ton of sea salt. I worked the salt way down into the cabbage pulling it lightly apart as necessary to get the salt all up in there.

Wait

After salting the cabbage I just waited. I think overall I let the cabbage sit for about 2 hours. I just kept an eye on it and every now and then picked up some of the leaves to see how wilted it was. Once it was substantially wilted I rinsed the cabbage thoroughly again to get all of the excess salt off.

The Sauce

To make the sauce I mixed pepper, shrimp sauce, sugar, garlic and some soy sauce. Then, using my hands, i got that sauce all over that cabbage. That cabbage didn’t know what hit it. It was like a mack truck of sauce.

Finished

After the saucing it was pretty much ready to jar. Unfortunately I only had one mason jar so some of it went in to all kinds of random containers. I gave some to my folks and hoarded the rest.

We ate it for probably about three weeks. After that it started getting kind of sour. I’ve recently learned that when the kimchi goes sour you make soup and pancakes out of it. Topic for another page?

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