Basic Kimchi recipe

Basic Cabbage Kimchi

Timeframe: One week (or longer)

Ingredients (for 1 litre)

• Sea salt
• 500gms Chinese cabbage
• A few red radishes
• 1 large carrot
• 1-2 onions, leeks, chives or spring onions
• 2-4 cloves of garlic (or more!)
• 3-4 red hot chillies, fresh or dried (to taste)
• 3 tbs fresh grated ginger

Method

1. Mix a brine of about 1 litre of water and 3-4 tbs of salt. Stir well to thoroughly dissolve the salt. The brine should taste good and salty.
2. Coarsely chop the cabbage, slice the radish and carrots, and let the vegetables soak in the brine, covered by a plate or other weight to keep the vegetables submerged, until soft, a few hours or overnight. Add other vegetables to the brine, such as snow peas, seaweeds, bean sprouts, Jerusalem artichokes, anything you like.
3. Prepare spices: grate the ginger; chop the garlic and onion’ remove seeds from the chillies and chop or crush, or throw them in whole. Kimchi can absorb a ot of spice. Mix spices into a paste.
4. Drain brine off vegetables, reserving brine. Taste vegetables for saltiness. You want them to taste decidedly salty but not unpleasantly so. Rinse or add salt accordingly.
5. Mix the vegetables with the spice mixture paste. Mix everything together thoroughly and stuff it into a clean litre jar. Pack it tightly into the jar, pressing down until brines rises. If necessary, add a little of the reserved vegetable soaking brine to submerge the vegetables. Weight the vegetables down with a smaller jar or a zip-lock bag filled with some brine.
6. Ferment in your kitchen or other warm place. Taste the kimchi every day. After about a week of fermentation, when it tastes ripe, move it to the refrigerator.