Every once in a while I make kimchi – this time not a big portion. I use napa cabbage, radish, spring onion and make the sauce with a kelp broth, glutinous rice flour, gochugaru, fish sauce, garlic and ginger – and obviously super salty water to ferment.
Do you have any other ingredients and best practice methods you can recommend when I keep napa cabbage as the main vegetable?
by Zitaneco
11 Comments
My general advice is to make it how you like it rather than trying to stick with a specific recipe. I like bigger, crunchier pieces of carrot and daikon so I leave them bigger. I’ve added apple and pear before and that was excellent, just waiting for them to come into season to make it again. I also really prefer leeks to spring onions. Imo they hold up better and stay more flavorful once fermented.
Another ingredient you could add would be sesame! My MIL adds roasted sesame seeds to her kimchi and it’s so yummy – she crushes some in hand to release the oils better
Why is it so watery???
Is this nabak kimchi? Otherwise it should not have this much liquid.
Seems to be a lot of liquid here. Usually you’d strain and rinse off the super salty water or your end result may be too salty. But as you said you’ve made this before it could be you prefer your kimchi salty.
Too wet! Salt, drain and rinse!
For the tip I learned from my grandmother and mother, I picked them for serveral hour like 4~6 and sqeeze so hard like it will be almost no water then put the spread in every single of them and press/fill the container completely full, usually add more fish sauce or salt maybe chili powder if I feel like it needs more salt/flavour/spice one day after because it needs some time to get them get evenly seasoned
Smaller container, too much air space is bad
Korean, here. Do what you want, but you don’t need super salty water to ferment. Or the plate. If you like it, good job!
I’m really glad I posted this. I’ve been making my kimchi for years now and learned a couple of things. First, I will not add extra water in my next batch and try using only the water that the cabbage releases. And I will replace the sugar with pear. Thank you guys!
Intead of rice flour paste and pear. Try mashing bananas.