Mak Kimchi

Kimchi is so cheap to make, but I always felt like it was too high effort to bother with, and I've always just bought from the store. I decided it was time for me to buckle down and give it a try.

Followed Maangchi's recipe loosely.

Ingredients

• 2 heads napa cabbage
• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 cup water
• 1/6 cup sweet rice flour
• 1/12 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup fish sauce
• 1 cup hot pepper flakes (gochugaru)
• 1/3 cup crushed garlic
• .5 tbsp minced ginger
• 1/2 cup diced onion
• 2 green onion
• 1 cup daikon radish
• 1/4 cup carrot

Methodology

Chop the napa cabbage in half.

Remove the core.

Chop each half into half again to form quarters and cut up into bite-sized pieces that are about an inch long.

Question why this photo won't rotate.

Now it's time to clean and salt the cabbage.

I didn't have containers that were big enough to hold all the cabbage, so I ended up splitting it into two batches during this step.

After adding the cabbage to the bowls, fill with cold water and add salt. Stir it all around.

I added plates on top to keep all the cabbage submerged under the water. At this point, we will let the cabbage sit for about 3 hours, flipping it once every 30 minutes aka almost once after episode of your anime binge watching.

But before hopping into the binge watch, let's prep the sauce that we'll mix with the cabbage to create kimchi.

Chop up the green onion--toss it into a container to keep in the fridge.

Julienne the daikon radish into pretty matchsticks. Same--toss it into the same container to keep in the fridge.

Dice the onion. Toss into fridge.

Dice the garlic and grate the ginger. Toss into fridge.

Dice the carrot. Toss into fridge.

Phew, veg prep is done.

For the paste itself, boil together the water and sweet rice flour on the stove.

Add in the sugar when things start getting nice and thick.

Remove the paste from the heat and allow to cool.

This is pretty tasty--it's basically liquidy mochi.

Now that the sauce prep is done, you can resume the anime binge and remember to flip the cabbage once every 30 minutes for 3 hours.

When the 3 hours are done, drain the water and rinse out the leaves 3 times by adding new water, swishing everything around, and draining.

Get the work station ready to start combining everything.

Add the veggies into the sweet rice flour paste.

Also add the red pepper flakes and fish sauce. As a bonus, I added some apple sauce for sweetness.

Mix everything together.

Slowly move the sauce over into the cabbage and mix around.

Pack it down tight into a container and leave the lid loose.

Though the kimchi is pretty tasty when it's fresh at this stage, I wanted to ferment--I ended up leaving it outside for just one day. There were a lot of bubbles forming by then.

When done, keep in the fridge.

Results

I enjoyed this a lot and will definitely make again since I caved in and bought the red pepper flakes, hah.

For next time, I'll increase the amount of paste and salt, but this was very tasty. I might actually skip the ferment step too because I like the sweetness that is present in the fresh kimchi.