Latest Batch of Kimchee - What's your favorite recipe and a cry for help!

We had great luck with the ginger recipe from Nourishing Traditions.

Writeup here - http://bit.ly/175SZ1A

We are looking for others to try. Any suggestions? Also, has anyone on this forum kept it out of the refrigerator for months at a time?? At the rate our food production is going, we are going to run out of fridge space.

I've kept it in a jar on the north side of the house. As long as you have liquid on top, and you skim it regularly, it stays edible. But if air gets down in it and you get nasty white schmooze in it, you better pitch it.

You know, you're supposed to keep it buried in a big clay pot in the ground all winter and go dish out enough for a few days at a time.

As far as recipes, I like Maangchi the best:

We have been making the kimchi below for the past three years in large amounts, and storing it for several months without a refrigerator. But we store it underground in root-cellar conditions, which are just like refrigeration -- people here store potatoes and carrots three feet underground in a pit in the garden all winter, so we do the same with our tubs of kimchi and local pickles.

This recipe fills about 10 liters (2.5 gallons) of containers. Our 40 people gobble up a 10 liter tub in 3 days. You can use an assortment of smaller containers and reuse assorted commercial jars. Special jars are unnecessary.

• About 10 kg (20 lbs) cabbage, cut into bite sized pieces. Normal round cabbage works great.
• Optional: replace 1 kg (2 lb) with carrots and/or radishes, julienned (cut into narrow rectangular strips). Or add strips of a dark green cabbage leaf such as kale or collards. Or fresh chillies in halves, red or green.
• 50 g (2 oz) salt, then add more to taste. It should be lightly salty, like food. We only have iodized table salt and it works fine.
Chop the cabbage and vegetables and mix the salt throughout. Leave it covered for an hour or two, so it wilts a bit.

• a bunch of scallions, or an onion sliced in thin rings
• 200 g (7 oz) garlic (a bit less than half a pound)
• 250 g (9 oz) ginger (a bit more than half a pound)
• 200 g (7 oz) powdered red chilli, but not a very hot variety. We have big dried Kashmiri chillies that give gorgeous color and flavor but only moderate heat. If using other chillies, start with less and later add more to taste. We buy whole dry red chillies and powder them in the blender.

Chop the garlic and ginger fine. Make a paste of them with the chilli powder and smear thoroughly throughout the vegetables, mixing the onions in. Include some of the brine that came out of the vegetables. Taste and adjust the spices and salt. It should be a tasty salad at this point, only as spicy and as salty as you like it.

Pack tight into clean containers (not metal since it could rust). Cover as airtight as possible, and stand in a warm place for about 5 - 7 days. We keep them in a sunny windowsill or solar heated greenhouse, which probably reaches 27˚C 80˚F in the day and drops to 13˚C 55˚F at night. Stand the containers on a tray in case they ooze garlicky juice.

Keep tasting it, and when it’s nice and sour either eat it soon, or refrigerate it. After it has fermented fully in the warmth, we wrap the containers in plastic and bury them 1 m (3 ft) deep in the garden, the same way we root-cellar potatoes over the bitter cold winter here. It is if anything, even more delicious four months later at the tail end of winter. It stays good at least a week or two at cool room temperature (but we've never been able to test if it lasts longer than that!).

That sounds terrific. I think what I need to find are the right chilies for my family, to provide good color without too much heat.

I'm still unable to make kimchee that my family enjoys like they enjoyed the stuff at K-Pepper in Middleton, WI.

Kimchi sounds like spicy sauerkraut to me. Fermented cabbage and veggies with a ZING!

Julia Winter wrote:I think what I need to find are the right chilies for my family, to provide good color without too much heat.

Living in India, I get a good variety of dried chillies in the market; sorry if you don't have much choice of chilli varieties. One trick I've used to reduce the fire and keep the color, is that in some varieties of chilli, the heat is mostly in the seeds, and not so much in the skin. So I buy a small sack of dried red chillies, dump them in a basin, crack and crush them a bit with my hands, remove all the stems and moldy ones, and then sort of shake the basin so that the bottom is mostly seeds and the top is mostly skins. Then I take the top part and grind it to powder in the blender. We definitely like kimchee made with this the best.

Watch out, though -- in some very hot chillies, even the skin/flesh is very hot.

You can get colour without heat by whizzing red peppers with mild red chillies.
I always use a lot of fish sauce in the pickle.
I really like kimchee made with mustard greens.

I like fermented kale. It's also a brassica, so it ferments nice and easy.

Leila Rich wrote:You can get colour without heat by whizzing red peppers with mild red chillies.
I always use a lot of fish sauce in the pickle.
I really like kimchee made with mustard greens.

Without the heat?!? That belongs in the same class as a 'Pub with no Beer'

Leila Rich wrote:You can get colour without heat by whizzing red peppers with mild red chillies.
I always use a lot of fish sauce in the pickle.
I really like kimchee made with mustard greens.

John Elliott wrote:Without the heat?!? That belongs in the same class as a 'Pub with no Beer'

That is a bit of a tragedy!
I would like to take this opportunity to state that I have no affiliation with mild food, or it's Australian country music equivalent, Slim Dusty

Nice thread! I've been wanting to make kimchee for some time now, but haven't gotten around to it.

I did just learn how to make some delicious kimchee jige tho'! (store bought kimchee is not the same)

Edit: In my recipe above, start with a LOT less chilli and then add it in. Sorry. We just made our first batch of the autumn with that recipe and it was too hot, so I think that year we had some extremely mild chillies, or I had taken just the skins, not the seeds.

I am using a aggregated method mostly based on Katz's Art of Fermentation:

Soak vegetables in brine (too salty to eat, ~5% salt by weight) for 1-3 days
make a spice paste using chilis, garlic, ginger, and rice (plenty of rice) with a little fish sauce and some Sriracha sauce (or whatever looks spicy and needs to be used in the fridge...)
drain the veggies, rub/mix with the paste and pack in a crock, add brine/water if needed and weight (then wait.)
in 1-3 weeks, remove from crock and pack in glass jars for storage and distribution.
in 1-3 more weeks, wonder where all your kimchi went and start more.

I've had it out of the fridge for weeks, but not months yet (doesn't last that long) but I don't see why not. To maximize shelf life, pack in jars with as little air space as possible, store as cold and dark as possible, and vent periodically, taking care to minimize the amount of stuff that gets back in. Higher salt content also extends shelf life.

You could also look into Harsch crock, which has a water seal at the lid. In theory, a well packed crock of this style left undisturbed should last through the winter in a cool dry place.

I usually buy the kimchi in stores. We have lots of Korean and Asian stores in my neighborhood. I prefer it a little more tangy than most are, so I add citrus or, my newest-I add quince to it. It was really good.
John S
PDX OR

Right now, I'm buying Cosmos Kimchi at Costco, and it's pretty good. I'm eating a two egg omelet with pesto and a big serving of kimchi for breakfast almost every day.

I do want to learn to make kimchi, but right now I have no functional kitchen (I've had just one sink in the whole house, a bathroom sink, for over 10 days now) so it will have to be later.

Julia Winter wrote: I'm eating a two egg omelet with pesto and a big serving of kimchi

Basically the same thing, but I swear combining the idea in a kimchi omelette is one of those 'better than the sum of its parts' things.
I think it's Even Better if it's folded over crunchy mung bean sprouts and coriander.
I know what's for dinner-I've got an enormous jar of kimchi that's just getting really good...

Hmmmm, you may be right! I will have to try that. I need to sprout some beans. . .

Good news - as of today, I have a sink. Huzzah!

Bad news - guest are coming in 8 days, and we're not going to have the walls sheet rocked. It will be exposed studs, mineral wool and wiring above the cement board, which is above the new kitchen counter. Base cabinets are just about in, wall cabinets will not be.