Simple kimchi recipe

We preserve lots of food for our residential school for the long season when stores don't have any fresh vegetables from December to May, because the roads to our region from warmer places are closed all winter. A Korean-American friend taught us how and we've made more and more every autumn, and it's never enough. It has turned out to be a super hit with the teenagers here (who already liked Indian pickles). We make it with whatever ingredients are readily available here.

• About 20 kg cabbage, cut into bite sized pieces. Normal round cabbage works fine; Asian cabbages would be more authentic
• 2 kg carrots and/or radishes, julienned (cut into narrow rectangular strips).
• Optional dark green cabbage leaves in strips for color, eg collards, kale, broccoli leaves.
• 200 g salt, then add more to taste. It should be lightly salty, like food.
Chop the vegetables in the morning, sprinkle the salt in and mix thoroughly. Leave aside in a container for a few hours, covered with cloth or a lid, so it wilts a bit.

• 800 g garlic
• 1 kg ginger
• 800 g chilli, a not very hot variety. It was big long Kashmiri chillies, with few seeds and gorgeous colour.
Chop the garlic and ginger fine and powder the chillies. Make a paste of them all together and smear thoroughly throughout the vegetables.

• a bunch of onion leaves (scallions), or thin slices of onion

Pack tight into clean containers (not metal since it could rust), layering the onions/scallions in from time to time. Cover as airtight as possible (not too strict), and stand in a warm place for about 4 - 7 days. We put it in our warm solar greenhouse int he day and back to the kitchen at night.

Taste, and when it’s nice and sour either eat soon, or put into cold storage for months. We wrap it in plastic and store it in the equivalent of a root cellar, and it comes out even more delicious after a few months.

(Oops, I'm sorry, this is a double post. I thought I'd posted it but searched the orum tonight and couldn't find much about kimchi so I posted it again. And then realised I must have searched "cooking" instead of "preservation")

Sounds delicious. I must try that recipe, in a small amount. My last attempt was a spectacular failure as it called for leaving it out for too long. It went bad in the warmth.

I'm a big fan of fermentation. Besides the health benefits of SCFA’s (short chain fatty acids) I really like that, in the right conditions, the Lactobacillus bacteria is all-powerful. If I have the formation of a little bit of fungus around the edges, I just stir it in and it will surely die. Nothing in the kimchi will survive except the Lactobacillus guaranteeing food security.

We the cooks, are a farmer tending to our herds of lactobacillus. To thrive they need food of course, and water for their environment. They prefer their water salty and acidic. They are also anaerobic oxygen haters and must be submerged.

I’m no expert, just what I've read somewhere, that Lactobacillus thrive at a salinity of 2 – 2.5 % by weight of salt, and a minimum acidity of 4.6 PH (which we know by taste). I use this much salt and don’t find the finished Kimchee to be noticeably salty, probably because of the wonderful sourness/acidity of it. By this standard (if it is correct) your batch size would call for a ½ kilo of salt.

Whoah - That's a lot of cabbage! Is the recipe fairly scaleable do you think?

I'm so glad you resurrected an 11 year old post; now I have this amazing recipe, and I have a bunch of cabbages and carrots growing.

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.

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 have a sort of “paleo” mindset or have more trust in the more ancient things and more distrust in more modern things, especially distrust in the explosion of inventions in the last century. In the first city states archaeologists find what they believe to be fermentation pits, or pools dug out into rocks which they believe were used to turn grain into beer. The proliferation of grain was a new invention of agriculture. I speculate that they combined their new abundance of grain with a more ancient knowledge of fermentation.

The proper conditions for fermentation can be found in nature- On a rocky coastline at the full moon high tide one can find pools of salt water furthest from the ocean in which to place their gathered plants. They could then leave them there until the next full moon tide. In warmer weather they would need to cover with seaweed or transport some sea water to make up for evaporation.  This would leave no archaeological record and could be millions of years old.