Kim Chi

Kim Chi

My friend Scott and I have been toying with the idea of making Kimchi for a while now; and in a drunken Thanksgiving moment, we decided to give it a try.

On the surface, Kimchi should be an easy slow food to make; it's nothing but spicy cabbage based fermented vegetable dish. The hard part is the culturing. Whilst it is possible to make Kimchee without a culture; if I rot my food on purpose, I want to stack the deck that it will rot in the proper manner. It turns out that Lactobacillus Kimchi KoreEnsis is not available commercially in North America (at least that I could find - Please if anyone knows where to find it let me know!), so that left us with a couple of choices:

1. Sympathetic Magic:
   Feed the new batch of Kimchi with a sample of a previous successful batch. The thought here being that there will be enough live flora in the other batch to successfully inoculate this one.
2. Substitution:
   Lactobacillus Kimchi KoreEnsis is a homofermentative lactic acid bacteria. I could simply add some Lactobacillus Acidophilus instead and hope that it could survive the high-saline environment.

We decided on the "Sympathetic Magic" route, and Scott picked up some Kimchee at a Korean grocer in Oakland; but alas; he forgot to bring it home! So we ended up using some of my dietary supplement Acidophilus pills instead. We also hoped that despite the preservative added to it; that the Kimchi sauce we bought would have some live bioflora in it.

We started by loosely following the directions from The Pyongyang Metro.

Ingredients:
• Chinese Cabbage
  The "Chinese Cabbage" at my local Nob Hill was really adult Bok Choy. There was an "Oriental Cabbage" that looked more similar to the ones that the girls on the metro were using; but more yellow and with less central stalk; likely not the same variety at all, but I picked up 2 heads and Scott picked up 2 additional heads. I also picked up 2 heads of Bok Choy and Scott picked up some young Bok Choy, and I threw in a head of Radiccio for colour.
• Spring Onions
  Not sure what these really are, so I chose green onions instead.
• Sea Salt
  Scott picked up some "Korean Sea Salt" at the afore mentioned green grocer; but we decided to use my already opened Kosher salt as the real objective here is a non-iodized salt.
• Korean Chili Powder
  I substituted Mexican Chili Powder and we cut up a handful of red jalapeños as well
• Crushed Garlic
  Ours was finely chopped
• KimChi Sauce
  Ours was a different brand; and included amongst it's ingredients: "Squid Juice" and other fish-based weirdness.
• Crushed Ginger
  Ours was grated
• Onion
  I picked out a red one.
• Additional Ingredients
  we also threw in a quartered and thinly slices daikon radish, and since the whole idea sprang from Scott's recollection of a turnip kimchi, we sliced and quartered some of these as well.

We did not bother to measure the ingredients carefully, and likely added too much chili powder. If it's too spicy post-ferment, we'll make some more with only cabbage to mix in and dilute the spice.
We didn't let the cabbage brine for the full 6 hours that the Metro girls recommend, as we began making it at 17:30. Scott did most of the mixing as I sliced the end of my finger off on the Mandoline Slicer early on in the evening, and we didn't want to get much human blood in the mix.
I left it in the kitchen overnight to allow a warm environment for the culture to incubate in, then brought it down into the wine cellar where it will remain, fermenting away for a few more days.

It already tastes great!

Updates
• 03-Dec-08:Moved Kimchi to garage
• 05-Dec-08:Moved Kimchi to refrigerator