My daughter loves kimchi and and at the rate that she was asking for it I was needing to buy a lot of it. I looked up some Kimchi recipes, and there are quite a few. Some added a flour mixture, other didn’t; one said no carrots, one had just cucumbers.
I took the information from them and tried my own. I was curious to see if it was going to be worth it, time wise and if it would taste better or different. The prep time really wasn’t too bad. I would say as long as you are interrupted, it should take maybe 20-30 minutes.
I cut one head of Napa cabbage into about 2″ chunks and then added salt and water and put a weight on it. I used my other stainless steel nesting bowl, the next smaller one, and filled it with water as the weight -it worked great.
When I went to the grocery store, the daikon radishes did not look good so I just substitute with regular red radishes. I also added juliened carrots, green onions, and one white onion.
The sauce ingredients I was excited about being able to control the heat level. Again all the different recipes I looked at, some used 1/4 cup Korean chilli flakes, another said chili powder was a decent substitute, red pepper flakes by the tablespoons. The one that said 1/4 cup of chili flakes seemed like a lot of heat, delicious but too much for my family right now.
I did get distracted when I was making my sauce and absentmindedly picked up the brown sugar instead of white. It still turned out fine, but next time I will use white sugar and see the difference.
Ingredients
- 1 Napa cabbage, chopped
- 2 carrots, juliened
- 2 green onions
- 1 bunch of radishes, sliced
- 1 onion, sliced
- 3 Tbspn salt
- 2 cups water
Sauce ingredients
- 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 2″ ginger, minced
- 1 Tbspn red chilli flakes
- 1/2 tspn chilli powder
- 1 Tbspn soy sauce
- 1 Tbspn sugar
Directions
- Remove a few of the outer layer of the leaves and set aside. Cut the rest of the cabbage into about 2″ sections and put into a bowl.
- Sprinkle the salt over the cabbage, pour the water over the cabbage and mix with your hand. Put another bowl filled with water, like a weight and put it top of the cabbage. Let it rest for 30 minutes or so.
- While the cabbage is resting, cut and peel the rest of your vegetables and set aside.
- In a seperate bowl, mix the sauce together; garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sugar, chili flakes and chilli powder.
- Drain the water from the cabbage and rinse well. Add the prepped veggies and sauce and mix with a gloved hand.
- Put the Kimchi container and cover with some of those cabbage leaves that were set aside earlier. Press down with a weight to keep everything submerged, and cover loosely with a lid.
- If not everything is covered with liquid, add a little water until totally covered.
- Leave out to ferment 5-7 days, and then put in the refrigerator to slow the fermentation process down.
Tips
- I divided mine into two containers that I only filled up about 2/3 full. That way if anything were to bubble up, it would stay mostly contained in the container.
- I also used containers that I was not planning on using for anything else. Kimchi has a strong flavor that I didn’t want to leach into containers that woild be used for somehing else.
- While it was fermenting, I put the containers in a cookie tin. If the Kimchi, did bubble up and over I wanted it to go into the tin instead of everywhere else.