02/02/2024
Traditional kimchi 김치 is usually a family affair, involving the harvest of a 100 or so kg of Korean cabbage from the backyard garden (almost everyone grows their own veggies), cleaning, making the kimchi sauce from scratch, and then preparing those 100 kg and storing them in stone pots (traditionally), or now, big plastic kimchi containers.
Sometimes the cabbage is chopped up, sometimes it is left whole, and each leaf is "painted" with kimchi sauce and rolled into a cylinder, packed close and stacked for fermentation.
This batch was fun! And a lot of work!
I soaked and then dehydrated rice, pulverized it into rice flour via the food processor, and last, cooked up a porridge using homemade vegetable broth. This broth with tamari replaces the traditional fish 멸치 or squid sauce used in kimchi. Along with tamari, I pureed garlic, onion, and ginger. A liberal amount of Korean gochu pepper and the kimchi paste is ready!
We'll see how it tastes after a couple of weeks of fermentation!
