Ep. 457 - Kimchi: What Is It & How Is It Made?

Kimchi is a a traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented vegetables, such as napa cabbage and daikon radish. A wide selection of seasonings are used, including gochugaru (Korean chili powder), green onions, garlic, and ginger. As a staple food in Korean cuisine, it is eaten as a side dish with almost every Korean meal.

Join Rob before he heads into the commercial kitchen to live stream the process of making kimchi...and shares the proper ratios of ingredients so that YOU can make your own kimchi!  Be sure to tune in to the LIVE STREAM following the episode on Thursday, 11/03/2022 at 10:00am: https://youtu.be/a6d2ivai5QA

Ingredients:
1 Head Napa Cabbage - A head usually weighs between 1 1/2 and 3 Lbs. 

Our example will include 2 pounds of napa cabbage (chopped and drained).

Ingredients (by percentage of cabbage weight):
5-7%       Daikon Radish
5-7%       Green Onion
1-1.5%   Cilantro

Paste:
2-3%       Garlic
1-1.5%   Ginger
2-2.5%   Fish Sauce

3-3.5%   Gochugaru


Ask questions during the the LIVE STREAM Thursday, 11/03/2022 at 10:00am: https://youtu.be/a6d2ivai5QA

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#kimchi #koreanfood #food

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Discussion Links:

Food Forest Farms - Enterprises - Food Forest Farms Coffee ...

Redmond Real Salt - Ancient Fine Sea Salt, Unrefined Mineral Salt, 16 Ounce Pouch

Taekyung Chili Powder For Kimchi (Flake, 1LB) - Korean Gochugaru

Red Boat Fish Sauce, 8.45 Fluid Ounce

Ball Fermentation Lids and Springs, 32oz, Metal

Ball 4 Fermentation Kits, 32oz, Clear

Cambro 8-Quart Round Food-Storage Container with Lid, Set of 2

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

Fermented Vegetables: Creative Recipes for Fermenting 64 Vegetables & Herbs in Krauts, Kimchis, Brined Pickles, Chutneys, Relishes & Pastes

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:11

Well hi there and welcome back to another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. My name is Rob Kaiser and I am your host. Today is Thursday, November 3rd, 2022, and this is episode number 457 of a show where you join me with my family on our small farm and homestead as we grow all around, as we grow all of the various businesses here on York Meadow Farm. And today's episode is an episode titled Kim Chi What Is It and How Is It Made. This episode is going to dovetail a live stream, which is going to take place at 10 a.m. this morning. And what I'm going to do with this episode is break down our recipe into a way that's easily translatable so that you can make it on your countertop in a mason jar or in a larger container, whatever vessel you have, with however much cabbage and other ingredients you have.com. Yorkmeadowfarm.com is, or Yorkmeadow Farm rather, is where I learned to make kimchi, where I learned the process from my father who walked through recipe after recipe after recipe, doing countless hours of research to dial in this particular kimchi recipe. So if you are in a position where you want to make kimchi, great. This is an episode for you. If you are in a position where you just want to learn more about kimchi, but also want to buy some product that we can't seem to make enough of because of the demand of it, then yorkmeadowfarm.com is the place for you. Educate, nourish, healthy is what we talk about when we talk about everything at York Meadow Farm. So if you're interested in small batch fermented foods and clean and natural bath and body products, then York Meadow Farm is for you. All sales from York Meadow Farm go to support our small family business. And anything that you buy from York Meadow Farm, listeners of the show get 25% off utilizing the discount code at checkout, all around growth. So be sure to check that out and do your shopping at yorkmeadowfarm.com if you like what you hear and you want to support the show. So without further ado, let's talk about what kimchi is, and then I will talk you through the process of how we make it here and how you can make it at home. Alright? So in order to find out what kimchi is, I mean, look, I'm no expert. Yeah, we make fermented foods, but I don't claim to be an expert on anything. I've just done various fermenting over a couple of different decades now, and it's only been lately over the past six months that I've really done a deep dive into it and learned how to ferment in mass while learning other things about it, the history of it, so on and so forth. So, to learn about what kimchi is, we're just gonna go to my favorite pre-end uh search engine of choice, which is pre-search. We're gonna look at the first three articles and just do a quick read on those. And you can do the same thing on whatever search engine you want. But kimchi, according to the Spruce Eats, is a traditional Korean dish whose components can vary but usually include some combination of vegetables, garlic, ginger, and chili peppers. All right. And according to the Revolution Fermentation.com, kimchi is a kind of traditional, slightly spicy Korean sauerkraut made from fermented vegetables. Its basic vegetables are usually nappa cabbage, daikon radish, and there's a few others listed. And from Wikipedia we read that kimchi is a traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented vegetables, such as napa cabbage and Korean radish. A wide selection of seasonings are used, including gochu garu, spring onions, garlic, ginger, and geotal, etc. Kimchi is also used in a variety of soups and stews, and that comes from Wikipedia. Alright, so this is kind of what I tell people kimchi is. Kimchi is a regional fermented dish that's generally associated with Korea, and it contains some kind of variation of ingredients generally including nappa cabbage, daikon radish, and green onions, and then it's mixed with a paste that consists of garlic, ginger, fish sauce, and a spicy pepper blend called gochu garu. And all of this sits in ferments, and the end product is kimchi. Alright? So there you have it. Um any kind of vegetables can be used in conjunction with your napa cabbage and your daikon radish. Okay, so what we use is nappa cabbage, daikon radish, green onion, and cilantro. We use a little bit of cilantro, and the paste that we use is garlic, ginger, fish sauce, and gochu garu. Okay? So what you do, and we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna for the purposes of this episode, we're gonna talk about making small batch kimchi and basically presuming that you, you know, you went to the grocery store and and you're gonna buy one head of cabbage, one head of Napa cabbage, okay? So I'm gonna outline the recipe and the or the basic recipe and the basic quantities of ingredients thereabouts that you need to make kimchi. And I'm gonna say basic because, like Sandor Katz says, you don't want to be a slave to your recipe. Okay, so I'm gonna I'm going to explain what that means and and and and why, because basically fermentation is a process, and what you want to do is basically understand what you're doing, and know that you have a lot of flexibility and variability with the vegetables that you're using. All right, for example, and also one thing that that that we do here, and one thing, and I think it makes sense, and I'm going to encourage you to do the same on your fermentation journey, is instead of utilizing things in your recipes and your notes in terms of teaspoons, like one teaspoon of salt, well, one cup of this, one cup of that, start measuring things and weighing them out in grams. Okay, so for example, we're gonna talk about one head of napa cabbage, but a head of napa cabbage can vary in size and weight and volume and mass. So we're gonna talk about the like so a head of napa cabbage is gonna weigh anywhere from like a pound and a half upwards of three pounds. Sometimes those things can be huge, you know, and even even from the same from the same crop, from the same field, in the same case, whatever, you can have a lot of variance with cabbage, and you get a lot of variants at the grocery store, which is probably where you guys are gonna buy your cabbage when you make your kimchi. So, for the purposes of this you know, dialogue right here, we're gonna talk about one head of cabbage, probably weighing about two pounds. Okay, now two pounds of Napa cabbage is gonna be about nine hundred and seven grams. Okay, so we're gonna utilize this 907 grams of Napa cabbage, but keep in mind that everything that I'm talking about with this 900 grams or so involves your chopped cabbage after like after soaking, right? So, what you want to do is chop like core your nap of cabbage and chop it into whatever size chunks that you want, and basically we chop it in half and then lay the half flat side down, chop it in half again, and then chop it in quarters. And then by at that point, the core is removed, and then we just chop it in chunks and slide it into our vessel. Okay, so at this point we've got our chopped cabbage, and we make a salt brine solution that is 7.4% salt to a gallon of water. And with one head of cabbage, you're not gonna need you know that much water, maybe a gallon, maybe two. With the volume that we made yesterday, we used a lot more, but seven point four percent is um and let's see, one one gallon of water weighs how many grams? Okay. So one US gallon weighs approximately thirty-seven hundred and eighty-five grams. So what we want to do, this is one number I didn't calculate ahead of time, thirty-seven eighty-five times point oh seven four. Whoops, point oh oh seven four, right? Thirty-seven eighty five times point zero zero seven four. We want to make a seven point four percent brine solution. So just move that decimal point two places, point zero zero seven four, and basically in one gallon of water, you're gonna add about 28 grams of salt or so, okay. See how this is starting to come together? Depending on the salt that you're gonna use, it's gonna weigh out different, okay? You could use a real fine salt, like Morton salt that comes in the box at the grocery store, and in volume, that's going to be less than, say, a thick coarse grind sea salt. Now it's also going to be easier to use because what we're doing with this salt is mixing it in a brine, mixing it in water to make a brine, so we can soak our chopped cabbage. The type of salt that you use doesn't really matter. We prefer to use Redmond sea salt, redmond salt from Oregon, Oregon, from Utah. Technically, I guess it is a sea salt, but it's mined in Utah, it's not refined, it's just pure salt. We like it, we use it, but for when you're soaking your cabbage, it doesn't really matter. Okay, so chop your cabbage, soak it for a few hours. We soak ours overnight, and then what you want to do is drain it and weigh it. So we're gonna presume you've got your drained your your your chopped cabbage that's been soaked and drained, and we're gonna presume it's about 900 grams. So we'll say like 907 grams, which is two pounds. So you got two pounds of soaked and chopped cabbage, right? So you're gonna now, now that you've got your chopped cabbage, you need your daikon radishes, your green onions, and your cilantro. Now, this is where you can vary it up. You want to throw some carrots in there? Sure, throw some carrots. You know, if you've got some other seasonal things, you know, maybe some leeks or uh different kinds of onions, you know, throw those in there too. Don't have any cilantro, don't worry about it. You know, you have some kind of uh cilantro paste or something, okay, sure, try that. You know, why not? But here's what you're gonna use. So we got about 907 grams of cabbage, right? And of that 900 or so grams, we want to use about six percent of that weight is gonna be daikon radishes. We're gonna include six percent of that weight in daikon radishes, about the same in green onions, a little less, and just a smidge of cilantro, like one to one and a half percent of your weight of cilantro. So, what we're looking at with 900 or so grams of cabbage, we're looking at about 50 to 60 grams of daikon radishes, we're looking at about 45 to 55 grams of green onions, and we're looking at about 10, 11, 12 grams of cilantro. All right, now if you end up buying a couple of daikon radishes and chopping up what you have, and you know, you have some extra, and you know, maybe you bought a fat radish and turns out that you've got like 70 grams of daikon radish, and it's more like 8% of your cabbage weight, no worries. Same thing with your green onions. If you grab a couple bunches and it turns out that you've got more like 70 or so grams instead of that 50, well, no worries, don't worry about it, don't worry about it, you know. And what but but most of all, what you want to do when you're prepping your ingredients is you want to document it, you want to write it down and start keeping some sort of journal, some sort of logbook. All right, it's important that you do that because by the time you come to taste it, well, you're gonna know what you did so that you can adjust your recipe for next time. Okay, so got your ingredients, chop them up. Your your Daikon radish. Basically, the easiest thing to do is just chop them into discs and then stack a few discs on top of each other, and then chop those into thin strips like match sticks. Green onions, just keep those pretty chunky, you know, half inch chunks or longer, half inch to an inch chunks, and then your cilantro just chop that up pretty good, and uh you know you're gonna mix all of that together. Well, you don't you don't even have to mix it yet, just dump it in the bowl that your cabbage is in. Okay, dump your daikons in, dump your green onions, dump your cilantro in. Now it's time to make the paste, okay? And the paste that we're talking about is the paste that consists of the garlic, the ginger, the fish sauce, and the gochu garu. Okay, the garlic and the ginger is pretty self-explanatory. We'll talk more about the fish sauce and the gochu garu in a minute. But the easiest way to make this paste is with a food processor, or in this case, with this small of an amount, you can probably get by with an immersion blender. It'll be a little bit easier, cleanup will be a little bit easier, and uh you know, so try it with an immersion blender first. So you're gonna use, like we said, percentages, you want about two to three percent of your cabbage weight and garlic. You want about one to one and a half percent ginger, two to two and a half percent fish sauce, and you know, three, three and a half percent gochu garo. So we're gonna we're talking about nine hundred grams of Napa cabbage, so we're talking about twenty, twenty five, thirty grams of garlic, we're talking about 10-15 grams of ginger, we're talking about anywhere from 20 to 25 grams of fish sauce and 25 to 35 grams of gochugaro peppers. Now, the go-chugaru pepper is it's really dependent on you know how much spice and flavor you want to add because that's a pretty pungent spice, lots of flavor, a lot of heat, and some people don't like it. So figure out what works for you. But those are the numbers you want to start with. So you want to start with about 20-25 grams of garlic, you know, 10-15 grams of ginger, 20 25 grams of fish sauce, and you know, 25-35 grams of uh gochugaru. Now, what kind of fish sauce do you want to use? All right, I don't know. Use whatever you want, but do your research and make sure it's a good quality fish sauce. You'll find a lot of fish sauces out there uh that are made with sugar in them. There's also a lot of fish sauces out there made with MSG. And when we first started, basically all I wanted to look at was when we went to the Asian market up in Cleveland, I wanted to look at like what appeared to be a top shelf brand and definitely not a brand in plastic, and something that did not have sugar MSG, right? So over time we did some experimentation with fish sauces, and we ultimately settled on Red Boat 40. Okay, and I've linked to that in the show notes. Um it's just it's it's a good quality fish sauce that seems to be respected by a lot of foodies, and you know, but again, it doesn't matter, you just want to use a fish sauce, preferably something that's just simply anchovies and salt. The gochugaro, you can use any kind of gochu garu blend. There's a multitude of kinds online. I've linked to the actual kind that we use. It's the brand name is Taikyung Chili Powder for kimchi. Uh, it's sold in one pound, three pound, and even smaller containers. I link to the one pound bag because that's about the best value. And if this turns out to be something that you're into, you know, that might be the best bang for your buck. However, the link you know, when you're checking this out online, you will see the smaller container, and that might be be best for your first initial experimentation. I don't know. Um, you know, I also linked to Redmond sea salt, but I linked to a two pack bag, two one pound bags, because if you're buying Redmond salt online, you know, you're gonna pay like $16 for the two one pound bags, or you're gonna pay $14.99 for one one pound bag. So when I link to these things in the show notes, I try to link to what's most sensible and you know what is the most appropriate value, in my humble opinion. Okay, so now that you've got your garlic and your ginger and your fish sauce and your gochugaru kind of measured out, what do you do with it? Well, you take that garlic and you take that ginger and you just chop it up, right? Peel the garlic or peel the ginger if you can to the best of your ability, clean it up. But we find that it works best if it's just peeled to the best of your ability, chopped, and then mixed with the garlic, chopped, and then throw that fish sauce in there, immersion blender, mmm, mix all that stuff up, and then you've got your paste. Now put that paste in a bowl, a smaller bowl, and then add your gochu garu powder and basically fold that in with the spatula because what you're gonna end up with is a very thick paste. And if it becomes you know, if it's too thick to work with, then you know, splash a little bit of that fish sauce in there. Oh, one thing that I forgot to mention is after you soak your cabbage, instead of dumping out your brine, you know, dump out most of it, but reserve some of it. Reserve, I don't know. You know, in the beginning, when you're not sure, make sure you set aside like a couple three cups of brine. Because what's gonna happen is you may need some extra. This is one of those ferments, unlike sauerkraut, where you actually add a little bit of additional brine afterwards, because unlike sauerkraut, what we're doing with the cabbage instead of salting it directly and then massaging it so as to release the water from the plant matter itself, we're taking the cabbage, we're soaking it, and then we're draining it. Alright. So the process is the same, but we're not actually doing the mechanical work of massaging the cabbage. Therefore, once we pack it, oftentimes what we see is the natural brine levels just aren't there yet in the immediate stage upon putting into the vessel. All right, so if you ended up throwing away your brine, no big deal. You can simply, you know, mix up another little bit of brine with a half a gallon of water and whatever 14 grams of salt or whatever, you know, you do the math. There's a cool uh there's a cool site out there called coolconversion.com, which helps you figure out what weighs what, and you know, very, very easy. So, you know, the internet is our friend when it comes to figuring out what is what and what measures what. So, anyways, where are we at now? We've got our chopped vegetables over here in one bowl, we've got the paste that we made, the gochugaro peppers that we just folded in in another bowl, and at this point, what we're going to do is simply mix them together. So take your paste and mix it into your vegetables and massage it in there. It's gonna take a little bit of work, you know. With kimchi, you may consider using gloves because the fish sauce has quite a pungent aroma. But if you want to get wild, don't worry about it. Wash your hands and let your spouse or significant other um, you know, uh hate you for days, but then once they finally eat the final product, they will love you. Alright, so mix it all together and then do what with it? Well, not sure what kind of vessel to put it in? You got a mason jar? Alright, cool. That's a good start. Now you've seen all kinds of things online about weights, about you know, different things that you can do to little fermenting kits and stuff. Right, I have two, I've used them all. I've used the little silicone lips, I've used airlocks, I've used nothing, I've used, you know, but what we finally decided on that seems to work the best are these ball fermentation lids and springs. I've linked to them in the show notes. They actually sell them in kits two, four packs with the jars, with the lids, with the springs. But if you already have wide mouth mason jars at home, and chances are you do, then all you need are these lids and the springs. And if you've got lids and airlocks too, then the springs are just worth it as well. But you know, the lids are fine because there's no airlock, it's just kind of this flap valve passive thing that allows air to escape without allowing air to get in. And the springs are very easy because it allows you to have that variability in this where the springs provide pressure against the vegetables, ensuring that they stay underneath the brine, and that seems to be the problem that most people have when they're doing their ferments. Veggies don't stay under the brine, or there isn't enough brine produced in the first place, and things just funk out, you know. They are unable to stay in that anaerobic air uh environment, and ferments just trash. So at this point, you know, with a pounder, if you don't have a pounder, you can use just a meat stick or a meat stick, a uh meat tenderizer, you can use um a bottle like an old salad dressing bottle. Uh, anything, anything will work, but just put that put the mixed vegetables in this paste in that mason jar. And if you need two mason jars, cool. You want to leave you know at least an inch, maybe a little more of head space in that jar with kimchi, I think about an inch and a half, couple inches, all right? And then based if you know it once it's packed in there, if it looks a little dry, if it doesn't, if you're not seeing visible moisture, visible brine when you're packing those vegetables in there, then add a little bit of that leftover brine or some additional brine that you created because you accidentally dumped it all down the drain. Why do I say it like that? Uh you know exactly what I'm talking about. I've dumped brine down the drain when making kimchi numerous times and have had to accidentally make up some brine to you know deal with this. So once you've got everything packed, once you've added your additional little brine, throw your spring in there, and then screw your lid on top and set it somewhere and wait. You know, okay, are you authentic if you're not putting it in a big croc and burying it in the ground for six months like the Koreans do? Probably not. But so what? You know, anybody who's saying that's probably never made kimchi themselves. So, you know, you can take you can tell them and their opinions to well, you know what. So set it aside. Okay. And if it's warmer, the fermentation process is going to go faster. If you do set it someplace cooler, like in your garage or in your basement, it's going to take longer. But for a ferment this size, mason jar countertop size, what you're gonna want to do is Yeah, is I'd say give it a week, alright? And then test it. Okay, but every time you test it, be careful. Because every time you open it up and expose it to air, you expose it to the nasties and and provide some potential for the ferment to go south. So you don't want to get in there and be testing it every day. You just but in the beginning you may want to test it more than once you become a more experienced fermenter. But give it about a week or so, open it up, clean hands, sanitization is key. You know, pull out a little forkful, give it a taste. If it's still very crunchy and tasting a bit not as uh fermented as you like, let it go. If you think it's good, then dump it out. Or just remove the springs and the and the and put a new lid on there, and you're good to go. That's really as easy as it gets. You know, mix your veggies, make the paste. Alright, it's not as simple as mix your veggies. Chop your cabbage, soak your cabbage, the next morning, drain your cabbage, weigh it, set aside some of that brine. Once you've got the final weight of your drained and chopped cabbage, then take the other ingredients, add those, make your paste, mix it all together, pack your vessel, use these ball fermentation springs to create a nice barrier, if you will, to keep everything under brine. And what's nice is should you decide to ever scale up and make kimchi with four heads of Napa Cabbage, there's a link to what we use for our next scale above countertop mason jars, which are Cambro eight-quart round food storage containers. I've linked to a set of two in the show notes. And what's nice about these is the seal that they make, and the fact that with a small, you know, kind of like a small plate, like a boy, I'm having trouble thinking of this word, guys. Uh, a small, like a coffee saucer, you know, one of those sanitized again, and a spring sanitized inside one of these jars. That's a great way to use instead of a weight, a follower and a spring to keep your ferments under, and that the seal that these Canbro containers make provides an awesome seal, and oftentimes you can get away without using an airlock on these two because they provide a tight enough seal that allows air to escape without a bunch of junk getting in there. And really, what you're concerned about is the nasties and the bugs and things like that, right? As long as your stuff, as long as your vegetable matter stays submerged underneath the brine, all the air can get on, get in and out of there. No big deal, you know, because everything is underneath that brine, but the bugs and stuff say out. So if you want to scale up from just a simple mason jar, then check out the Canbro eight-quart round food containers in the show notes as well. And if you want to learn about some books, the book that got me started 20 years ago was Nourishing Traditions, the cookbook that challenges politically correct nutrition and diet dictocrats by Sally Fallon, the book that got my dad into everything and really got his gears grinding was Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live Culture Foods, and one of the best fermentation cookbooks that we've found with great recipes is a book called Fermented Vegetables: Creative Recipes for Fermenting 64 Vegetables and Herbs and Krauts, kimchi, brined pickles, chutneys, relishes, and pastes. So, with that, guys, that about wraps up today's show. It went a little longer than I thought, but it turns out that the process of making kimchi is a little bit more complicated than I was initially thinking, and something that required a little bit more explanation and something that I couldn't just breeze through in 20 minutes. So the reason why I wanted to do this is even though we're live streaming today's show and how we make kimchi here in just a couple of hours, we are making kimchi on a very large scale. You're gonna see um nine five-gallon buckets full of chopped naba cabbage. We've got pounds of daikon radish and pounds of green onions that we need to prep and make and prepare. So I'm just gonna show the whole process to you through the live stream. But for those of you who are interested in what kimchi is and how it's made, I wanted to do this podcast to accompany the live stream so that when people are watching the live stream, I can reference them back to this and you can see exactly what it takes and what's necessary to make kimchi on a small scale in your home. So, with that, guys, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. This is Rob Kaiser, and thank you.