Quick and Easy Kimchi

It was in my professional restaurant kitchen that I first started making Napa cabbage kimchi, 12-16 heads of whole cabbage at a time. Determined to do everything by hand, I bought fresh garlic and peeled and minced every clove with a knife (2-3 hours just for this). Carrots, onions, radish, ginger: all cut by hand. My goal was to produce the most “hand-made” perfect kimchi I possibly could. Efficiency was not so important. Between shopping for all the ingredients, hauling them to the restaurant and finishing the kimchi, it took me the better part of 2 whole days. Of course, I had prep cooks to help with all the peeling and a dishwasher to clean up after me.

Did all this hand-work make any difference? I am not sure. At the time, as a non-Korean chef, I thought I had better try my hardest to make it as traditional as possible. But after reading lots of recipes and speaking with Korean cooks and friends that I knew, it seemed that most of their moms or grandmas were using food processors to make the process more efficient. Efficiency: this is a Korean tradition as well! The kimchi I make at home these days is just as delicious, takes less time and makes less of a mess. Making cut kimchi instead of whole cabbage kimchi also makes the whole process a little faster and saves me the trouble of cutting fermented kimchi every time I want to use it.

I don’t usually follow a set recipe but today I made a note of all the steps and amounts:

1 whole Napa cabbage (around 2kg)

1/2 cup sea salt or kosher salt

1 1/2 cups water

1/4 cup rice flour

1 tablespoon sugar or maesil plum syrup

1/2 cup peeled garlic cloves

1 tablespoon fresh ginger sliced

1 medium onion

1/2 korean pear peeled

1/4 cup fish sauce

1 tablespoon salted shrimp

1 cup mild korean chilli flakes (gochugaru)

6 green onions

1 carrot cut into matchsticks

1 cup korean radish matchsticks

1 cup chopped buchu (asian chives)

VEGETARIANS: you can make this exact recipe and leave out the shrimp and fish sauce. The cabbage will still ferment and be delicious. If you want a more intense savoury flavour, you can add a few squirts of soy sauce or some dried mushroom powder to the puree. If you can’t find dry mushroom powder, pick up some dried shiitakes at any asian grocer and grind them in a coffee grinder. Add them to the kimchi sauce a teaspoon at a time until you like what you taste.

IF YOU DON”T LIKE SPICY FOOD: leave out the chilli flakes. Your kimchi will still ferment and be delicious.

That’s it! A very simple kimchi recipe. It is still pretty messy and time consuming but, it will always taste better than anything you will buy in a jar at the grocery store and you will have the satisfaction of handpicking all of the ingredients yourself and making it as spicy as you like. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.