Rebecca Norman

We once used a bunch of useless old audio cassette tape to make a bird-proofing for our pea field. We put up sticks around the edges of the field, and stretched audio tape back and forth. I don't remember how well it worked to keep the birds off the seed, haha. After a week or two, it did start to break up and flop around so we collected it all for the trash.

Here are my current notes about how to make kimchi, based on making it for about 14 autumns.

I like it with:
Day 1 ingredients
Cabbage cut in strips
Radish in fat matchsticks (Optional)
Carrots in fat matchsticks (Optional but adds good color)
Dark green leaves such as kale or mustard greens add nice color too.
Salt
A container to store all the vegetables for a few hours or over night.
What is important is the majority of the vegetables should be cabbage family, such as cabbage, kale, radish, kohlrabi, broccoli or cauli florets, mustard greens, etc. The cabbage family always ferments nicely if given salt, an anaerobic environment, and warmth for several days. You can substitute up to about a quarter of the weight with something else -- I like carrots. It might work fine with a lot more of a non-cabbage, but I stick with the cabbage family things because they works so well, ferment without problems, and make a delicious winter condiment. Personally I avoid sweet things like apple in kimchi because I suspect they might ferment to alcohol and then vinegar or mold rather than the lactic acid that we want in kimchi. If you include a sweet fruit then please use a trusted recipe and measure everything.

Day 2 ingredients
Onion leaves (scallions). Or thin sliced onions.
Powdered red chilis, garlic, ginger, maybe salt.
Glass, ceramic or plastic jars (non-metal). Special fermentation airlocks are not necessary.

Day 1 method
Cut all the vegetables except onions. Salt them lightly, but mix thoroughly. They should be as salty as food that is salted -- I mean, you could eat it as a side salad, but make sure it is salted. Salt is essential to the fermentation, so kimchi is not a good fit for you if you are on a restricted sodium diet. Using a little too much salt at this stage is fine, because a lot of the salt will be removed in the brine that naturally comes out.

Cover and store the salted vegetables for a few hours or overnight in a bowl, bucket or container that won't rust. Stainless steel is okay since it's only brief exposure. Refrigeration is not necessary. This process wilts them so they can be packed tight and anaerobic and the jars for fermentation.

Day 2 method
Powder up delicious dried red chilies, not super hot ones but tasty sweet medium-hot ones. Remove stems, rotten ones, and some seeds before grinding. I grind them in the blender. Gloves and mask!

Chop garlic and ginger fine. I use 50-50 or heavier ginger, but a friend says that Korean customers told him it should have been more garlic than ginger. Optionally, grate them, or puree them in the blender.

Remove the brine from the bottom of the vegetable container by any method you like. (E.g. dump in a colander, or lift out the vegetables, or try to pour off the brine while holding back the veggies). Reserve the brine in case needed later.

Mix all the ginger-garlic with some of the powdered chilli. Mix all of this into the vegetables, then taste and add more chili or salt as needed. It should taste as salty and spicy as, or just a little bit saltier and spicier than, a side salad or condiment. For large batches, gloves are helpful -- otherwise no matter how you wash your hands, you will touch your eyes or tender bits with a spicy fingernail later today, you just know it!

Salt is not optional; it ensures proper fermentation. The garlic, ginger and chili are not necessary for fermentation or preservation, and any of them can be omitted if desired.

Then pack into jars, layering in the onions or scallions as you go. Push it down hard with your fist. Brine should rise up over the vegetables, and if it doesn’t, add back some of the brine that was removed, or if that was way too salty, add a little water. Leave a little empty headroom in the top of the jars because juice will bubble up. Put the tops on the jars. Strictly airtight is not necessary.

Place the jars on trays in case it bubbles over, and keep in a warm place or a sunny windowsill for about 5 to 8 days. Korean friends tell me absolutely no sun, but Indian pickle methods explicitly recommend sun. Both work just fine! The Korean friends agreed the results were excellent despite the sun.

Use a clean fork to dig out a piece every couple of days and taste it. When it tastes nice and sour, move the jars to chilly storage for winter. A fridge or root cellar is good. It will last for months if kept cold but not frozen.

The very top layer where vegetables stick up from the brine might be a little greyish and less nicely colored. You can dig around and bury that layer and pack everything down again before cool storage. Or you can ignore it, and when you take the jars out for consumption either discard the grey layer if you don't like it, or eat it.

When we make Ladakhi pickles, we wilt the vegetables (same type of veg mix, mostly cabbage family) by blanching (optionally) and then laying out to dry on cloth overnight. Then we mix them with salt, whole spice seeds (ladakhis consider small mustard seeds essential but I like to put different spices in each batch), and mustard oil that has been raised to the smoke point and cooled to remove the bitterness. The mustard oil lends a distinctly sweet umami flavor. Then pack and ferment as for kimchi: jars packed tight, with some headroom, and on trays in case it bubbles over, a warm place for several days until yummy, then into cold storage for a up to 4 or 5 months.

I can't resist posting the one I made a panoramic shot of from the roof of my house in Ladakh (Indian Himalayas) in 2022

Hi! Original poster (OP) here. Glad you liked my instructions from 2013! We have continued making it for our school every year as a workshop with the students. It always works out great!

We constructed a root cellar so we make about 6 big 15 liter containers every autumn, of various versions of kimchi and Indian pickle and Ladakhi pickle. After fermenting in the warmth for about 5 to 10 days, until it tastes sour and right, then we store them in the chilly root cellar and they last just fine until about April or May, which is when the roads to the region open and we start getting vegetables in the market. These pickled vegetables are a really nice complement to the (rather dull) winter storage vegetables, the limited quantities of leafy greens from the greenhouse, and vegetables we dry in the summer.

Yes, it totally scales down to a reasonable household volume!!! I'll dig up my notes from somewhere about different volumes, but anyway it works by taste. Aside from the huge batches at the school, I make a couple of quart jars (one liter jars) at my home, as well.

I'm not sure about trying to get a real 2% salt by weight. I just make these with the amounts ready, but then mix them to taste. I would correct my advice above to say "salt the vegetables to be like food on the salty side. You could still eat it as a side salad, but not super salty, like you wouldn't actually eat." Yes, 200 g salt for 20kg veg looks too light.

Sandor Katz in The Art of Fermentation p. 100 says that for the dry salt (rather than brine method):

“Commercial manufacturers typically work with 1.5 to 2% salt by weight, or roughly 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of salt per pound or 500 g of veg. In Wild Fermentation, I recommended 3 tablespoons of salt per 5 pounds / 2.3 kg of vegetables. Many people have told me they find that to be too salty. Try less... In summer heat I typically use more salt to slow down fermentation; in winter I use less. If I’m fermenting vegetables intending to preserve them for months, I use more salt; if I’m making a batch for an event next week I use less.”

So 1.5 % salt per weight would be 15 grams per kg of veg. Or 375 g if preparing 25 kg of veg, or 500g salt for 33 kg veg.

A much older and more conservative book, Putting Food By, says 2.5% salt to the weight of food. I would find that to be way too much.

Hi Badri, I suspect that Hyderabad is much too hot for capers, and during monsoon, much too wet for them. But you can grow so many other great foods there!

We've had good results from half trombe walls in our passive solar heated houses in the high desert in the Himalayas. The south facing wall is basically all window, and then we put a three to four foot high wall right inside of it, 6 inches thick, made of concrete bricks and plastered.

I like to make the gap between window and wall wide enough to allow stretching in to clean.

Your bench idea, even further inside, is also a good idea, since in winter the sun does penetrate further into the room. But it would do less to protect from overheating during sunny or hot days, and over chilling on winter nights. Consider building in a convenient and easy curtain system that you can open and close daily to control heat gain or loss.

Hey I know this is an old thread, but speaking of old, back before herbicides and machines, you'd cut the tree waist height (I think) and cover with a barrel and let the tree sucker in the darkness under the barrel until it exhausted itself. They usually sticker off the stump if you leave enough stump, you know, instead of suckering all over the surrounding land. I tried it with black locust - worked fantastic. When I just simply dug up a different black locust, it suckered everywhere, including the basement! However, The bucket treatment left no sockets at all. Not one!

I love this idea! I need to get rid of a line of rose of sharon, and they're along a beloved wall so I can't be using a machine to haul them out or anything, and they are a terribly suckery type of thing. I like that idea, to leave enough stump so the suckers come off the stump and not running along the ground.

Oh, and by the way, if you are making your hummus runny, or making a dressing, then any old blender you have will do the job. It's when you want to make firm hummus that some blenders fail to grind it smooth. So for hummus I usually make it a little runny in the blender and grind until smooth (and by the way I don't peel the chickpeas). After it's smooth and creamy, I add powdered dried tomatoes and/or paprika to firm it up.

I make hummus often, and when I was out of tahini one time, I used nuts and a dash of toasted sesame oil instead of tahini. It came out great and now I often do that. I've used cashews or walnuts or sunflower seeds, and all come out great.

My experience of trying to compost in a plastic barrel was very bad. Liquid pooled, went anaerobic, and produced lots of methane. What a stink!