the colder seasons culinarily is known here as the high season for cabbage. well, the time has come again and for all of you who don´t like cabbage soup and cabbage roll i want to offer a korean alternative – kimchi.
even though i learned from gaertnerblog event of october that white cabbage is the only vegetable whose vitamine c will not get destroyed while cooking, but releases it instead, i will contribute uncooked white cabbage.
kimchi is uncooked vegetable, it is spicy and koreans eat it in various types as a kind of side dish to almost every meal. i think you can make kimchi out of almost every vegetable. very classic kimchi is with chinese cabbage. but there is as well green beans kimchi, cauliflower kimchi, asparagus kimchi, eggplant kimchi and so on.
making kimchi is not difficult at all. the only thing you have to keep in mind, is to plan some days in advance. the kimchi will need about 4 days to ferment. but you can store it in the fridge for quite a long time after that.
as mentioned above, koreans usually eat different kinds of kimchis as side dishes. i prefer the white cabbage kimchi accompanied with some silk tofu as a light lunch or fried with some pork and silk tofu for dinner. the soft and mild tofu goes perfectly together with the crunchy and spicy kimchi.
the recipe is from sook-ja yoon of her book good morning, kimchi. it was a souvenir from south korea. so i hope it is authentic and nothing got lost in translation. i add how to pickle the cabbage before you can start to make the kimchi. i don´t know why, but the cookbook author seems to think everybody knows how to do that.
500 g white cabbage
2 cups salt
2 cups water
20 g carrot
30 g spring onion
1 tsp chili/ red pepper powder
1 clove of garlic, thinly sliced
1 cm ginger, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
the first step is to pickle the cabbage and the carrots. therefore you have to cut the cabbage into 3 cm by 3 cm pieces. peel and chop the carrots into 3 cm by 3 cm by 0,5 cm pieces. wash them and put them, together with the 2 cups salt and 2 cups water, in a kimchi container or simply a tupperware. let it soak for 6 to 8 hours.
drain the pickled cabbage and carrots, but save the brine. you will need it later. cut the spring onions into 3 cm pieces. pour the cabbage and carrots in a large mixing bowl and add chili powder, garlic, ginger, salt and sugar. mix until all ingredients are well combined.
put everything in a tupperware, fill up with the saved brine, close and press out every remaining air from the tupperware container.
refrigerate and wait for 3-4 days until the fermenting process is completed.
i hope you will have fun with the kimchi experiment and enjoy!
