Current mood:	curious
Entry tags:	diy, kimchi, korean food

The Kimchi Experiment

Madhur Jaffrey's Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, which for me is gastronomic holy scripture, introduces her recipes for kimchi (aka kimchee) thusly:

Just as a meal without wine is inconceivable for a Frenchman, a meal without kimchee is inconceivable for a Korean. Kimchee is not a liquor but a pickle—a hot, tart, often garlicky pickle that has an honoured place at all Korean meals, from breakfast to dinner. Kimchees may be made out of several vegetables, like cucumbers and radishes, but the most popular kimchee—perhaps because it is the cheapest—is made with Chinese cabbage.

In the late autumn trucks piled high with the pale-green vegetable drive into towns and villages and the entire female population of the country succumbs to feverish bouts of pickle-making.

Well paint me a Korean housewife 'cause I just made my first batch. I'm not sure if I've even had kimchi before, but one of my favourite packaged ramens is kimchi flavoured—kimchi is used not only as a pickle on the side but also to give taste to soups and other dishes. Nong Shim recently changed the ingredients of their kimchi ramen rendering it nonvegetarian, plus of course all ramen has MSG and other lovely products of the industrial-food age. Thus began another adventure in DIY food creation.

It's an... interesting process. You leave a bunch of shredded cabbage in salt water overnight, then transfer it to a bottle along with garlic, ginger, spring onions, ground chilli pepper, and sugar (although I used honey). You then top it up with the salt water, cover it loosely with a cloth, and leave it unattended for a few days. Yes, that's right, leave it out in the open, no fridge, no top aside from the cloth to prevent anything from falling in, sitting out free as a bird as nature may or may not have intended. I must say it was, and still is, a bit of a shock to my neovictorian cleanliness-next-to-godliness cultural background. In an age in which we have antibacterial this and sterilized that, I think it's enlightening and mind-opening to make something that sours in open air and then eat it. I've still only tried a couple of teaspoons, and it's tasty (albeit strange). I'm waiting for our next stir fry to chow down on it properly.

Pictured above is the final product. Bubbles that were not there when the process began escaped as I shook it up to distribute the (near-tablespoon) of cayenne pepper.

EDIT: Seems one of flickr blogging templates doesn't work, so I just deleted the entry and reposted. My apologies to anyone who commented in the interim; feel free to re-comment.