Go, Kimchi, go!

This post is going to be short and sweet, just like the woman that introduced me to kimchi.

Thank you, Mimi!

Anyway, I've adored kimchi since the first time I ever tried it. For some reason I've never tried to make it until now... now that I think of it, i'm a bit astonished that I haven't done this yet.

Enough of that, here we go!

Notice:  this takes between 3 days and up to a few weeks to be ready.

ingredients
two small or one large head of napa cabbage
one medium daikon radish
a big handful of dried chilis
3 fresno peppers
1 bulb of garlic
1 bunch green onion

ginger... like a one-and-a-half-inch chunk
1/4 cup fish sauce.
1 Tbsp. sugar.
tons of salt (sea salt preferred)

instructions
Chop up the cabbage into about inch-and-a-half sized chunks.
Dissolve 1/4 to 1/3 cup of sea salt in a gallon of water... basically make some brine. Soak the cabbage in the brine for at least 3 or 4 hours, or overnight.

I didn't have the right kind of chili powder that I would have liked to use, so i decided to take a bit of a different approach. I always have tons of fresh and dried chilis around, so i just took a big handful of dried chile de arbol chilis and a few fresh fresno peppers, threw them in the blender with the garlic and ginger, and pulverized it all

This made me really wish i had a nice mortar and pestle, or at least a decent food processor. Blending didn't work so hot, so i ended up hand-mincing it all anyway.

Chop up the rest of the ingredients. (Use a grater for the daikon)
You could easily throw them all in a food processor, but I prefer the texture variation that comes from chopping by hand.

Mix everything together in a huge bowl.


Rinse and drain the cabbage.

Now mix it all together very thoroughly.

Now pack it into jars. The basic idea is to have the juice in each jar be above the line of solid stuff, so if you're packing one batch into multiple jars, be sure to properly distribute the juice. Pack it in there good nonetheless.

Let the jars sit in a room-temperature spot for three days or so. Once it starts bubbling a little bit, it's ready to try, and you can then move the jars to the refrigerator.  I plan on opening one of these jars in a few days and going from there. I'm pretty excited about this.


Rufus can't wait either.

Kimchi