Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi

Living in D'Kar, many of the food items I like to eat in Canada are not available. This is unfortunate, because food is one of the great pleasures of my life... But it's also an opportunity to try and make some of those food items from scratch. One of my proudest triumphs, for example, has been tahini - closely followed by hummous and babaganoush.

Most recently, I decided to tackle something I definitely won't be finding in Botswana anytime soon: the Korean staple, kimchi. Kimchi is basically spicy pickled cabbage (with various additions, if you please), and is eaten constantly by Koreans. Admittedly, I don't eat a huge amount of it at home, but I do enjoy it. I've been growing Chinese cabbages in the garden, since I vastly prefer them to normal cabbages, and the first ones are reaching maturity - what better use for them than kimchi?

So, without further ado, Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi, a Photo Story.

The cabbage. It doesn't look quite as compact as the Chinese cabbage you'd buy in a grocery store - I'm not sure why that is, perhaps they tie up the leaves when they're grown commercially? Or it could just be that this is a variant - or the soil/sun/water wasn't the same - who knows, really. The point is, it tastes like a Chinese cabbage.

Cabbage with my foot, to show you how big it is!

Harvested, and sitting on my kitchen counter.

Cabbage root and stem, after I took all of the leaves off. The stem was amazingly woody, especially near the root... Possibly I should have harvested earlier.

First step of kimchi: Salt the cabbage thoroughly, and leave it for several hours (or days, depending on whose recipe you're following...) so that some of the water leaves the cabbage leaves and they pickle.

Next: wring out the cabbage, cut it (if you wish), and prepare the kimchi sauce/marinade (mostly ginger, garlic, and chili)

Ready to mix!

All mixed up. Doesn't it look delicious?

In jars, ready to ferment. This is where I ran into some trouble - you're supposed to seal it up in the jars and then leave it at room temperature for a few days, until you see it bubbling - that means that the fermentation has started, and you can then put it in the fridge. The problem was that we've had a resurgence of winter, and the days following the kimchi-making were basically like being in a refrigerator, so I don't think that the fermentation could get started. Bother!

However, today I decided to open up one jar and just see what was going on, and make sure it wasn't going bad from being left out so long. Here are the results - it hasn't fermented, but it's still quite good. Not as good as the kimchi I get at home, but it's still decent. Definitely better than no kimchi at all! The weather has warmed up a bit, so I'm going to keep the other jar out and see if it will ferment.