Korean Kimchee
Korean Kimchee Recipe
Ingredients
· 1 cup (250 ml) sea salt flakes
· 1 head Chinese cabbage, roughly chopped up. Keep two or three leaves for packing.
· 1½ tbsp salt for sweating the Daikon Radish, if you bother… I don’t!
· ½ Daikon radish (moo), sliced into 1/4 cm slices (about 2 cups)
· 2 tbsp rice flour
· ½ cup chilli powder/Paprika, or to taste (I use about half this.)
· 5–6 garlic cloves
· 2 cm piece ginger, finely grated.
· Smallish Brown Onion, diced
· Some julienned carrot, some chopped chillis, some sliced capsicum, turnip or whatever.
· 2 – 4 Anchovies (or skip the chilli and Anchovies & use 50 – 100 ml of Hogan’s Chilli Blachan mixed into the rice flour paste.)
· 2–3 tbsp fish sauce (Often forget to put this in. Still tastes great, though!)
· 2 tbsp sugar (I never use this.)
· 3–4 spring onions, sliced diagonally.
Instructions:
Standing time 3 days +. Makes about 1 ½ to 2 litres volume.
You will need to start this at least three days ahead. You can put whatever you like into this. The ONLY constants are the cabbage and the three days or more. It will still work well with nothing more than the cabbage. Go the whole hog, though, and it’s REALLY crunchy and yummy.
Combine the salt with 3 cups of water and stir until the salt dissolves. Pour the salt water over the chopped cabbage in a large bowl and let it stand for at least 3 hours, or until the cabbage wilts. Wash the cabbage in three changes of water and drain well. Set aside.
Mix the 1½ tbsp salt with the radish in a bowl, leave for 15 minutes, then drain and set aside. (I never bother with this step. Just chuck it all in together.)
Place 1 cup water and 2 tbsp rice flour in a small pot and bring the paste to a boil, stirring continuously. This should take about a minute or so. Turn off the heat, place the rice paste into a bowl, mix in the chilli/paparika (or Chilli Blachan, if used.) and let cool.
Blend the garlic, ginger and onion (& Anchovies, if used) in a blender.
Mix all the ingredients with the cabbage in a large bowl, adding the spring onions towards the end. I usually toss in chopped chillis, sliced capsicum, finely julienned carrot, thin slices of turnip, green beans and whatever else is to hand until it looks pretty!
Pack into a clean, glass jars with a sealable lid and crush the kimchi with a narrow bottle used as a ‘rammer’ to let out the vegetable juices, then put a folded up, saved cabbage leaf and a weight of some sort (clean rock? Clean paper weight?) on top and let it ferment for 2–3 days at room temperature. Don’t overfill! Each day, loosen the lid to let out excess gases. I leave it for two weeks. It doesn’t ‘go off’ if you keep the kimchee under the acidic liquid from the squashed up veggies. It doesn’t need refrigeration, but you can slow the process down by putting the jars in the fridge. This is a lactic acid ferment, just like German sauerkraut. Taste it each day until it tastes right to you.
It is very easy to make a version of this that doesn’t use fish products if you choose to avoid them. You can add some seaweed to the mix and they make very good vegan fish sauce alternatives so if anyone is looking for a way to make this delicious healthy condiment without the fish, it isn’t hard to do. I have successfully made it many times. It tastes especially good with the seaweed added.
Great idea!! I had not thought of that, being a dedicated carnivore.