Kimchi!

My kimchi had it all - it was spicy and salty, with just a hint of scandal!

...Daikon radishes!

Now, I know next to nothing about kimchi. All I know is that Big Kahuna's BBQ in St Johns offers it as a condiment for their saimin (Haiwaiian-style noodle soup - I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the quick description), and when we lived in St Johns, I learned to like both - a lot. It's spicy, crunchy, tangy, salty, and a teensy bit sweet.

I'll now cut straight to the Wikipedia definition, so I don't screw it up: Kimchi is "a traditional Korean pickled dish made of vegetables with varied seasonings. Its most common manifestation is the spicy baechu (cabbage) variety. Kimchi is the most common banchan, or side dish. Kimchi is also a common ingredient and combined with other ingredients to make dishes such as kimchi stew (kimchi jjigae) and kimchi fried rice (kimchi bokkeumbap)."

I saw some big, beautiful daikon radishes on sale at the store a couple of weeks ago. I don't really like radishes, but I had read that daikons are sometimes used in different varieties of kimchi, and seeing them reminded me that I'd wanted to try making kimchi. So, I picked up a bundle... of three. Huge. Radishes.

When I got home and looked up some kimchi recipes online, I discovered that just to get by with basics (so leaving aside powdered dried shrimp and all that good stuff for the moment), I'd also need Napa cabbage, onion, ginger, and garlic, and maybe some bottled kimchi paste. In fact, it sounded like the daikons were a bonus, and actually turn the kimchi into a different variety. In other words, you can make kimchi with cabbage or radishes (or cucumber, etc.) as the only crunchy veggie - you don't have to have both. The recipes also called for a Korean red pepper powder called kochukaru, but since I started this insane quest on a Sunday, it seemed that all of the groceries that might have sold it were closed, and I wasn't about to trek across the river to Uwajimaya (though it was tempting - maybe next time!). So, I ended up using regular ol' red chili powder, and while I am the first to admit that the result was not identical to the bliss I experienced at Big Kahuna's, it was still better than I expected.

Much like my recent experience with shepherd's pie, I was nervous about putting all of my recipe eggs in one basket. So, I went back and forth between two recipes I found online: this one and this one.

I used:

• 2 large Napa cabbages, quartered and chopped into a combination of 1/2-inch little ribbons, and little squares. It's okay if the cabbage doesn't all look the same. It should definitely be a meatier cut than for coleslaw, though.
• 2 large daikon radishes
• 6 cloves garlic
• 3-inch knob ginger
• 1/2 large onion
• 1 cup red chili powder
• 1.5 cups sea salt or regular salt, plus extra for the first step
• 1.5 tablespoons kimchi base (I found a brand called Momoya at Fubonn)

Instructions (again, these are cobbled together from the two sources whose links I included above):

1. Place the cabbage pieces into a couple of gallon-sized bags, layer by layer, sprinkling a fair amount of salt between layers. So basically, add some cabbage to a bag. Reach your hand into the bag to sprinkle salt over all the cabbage. Repeat 2 or 3 times for each bag. You will probably use about 1/4-1/2 cup of salt total.

2. Let the cabbage and salt sit in the bags for a couple of hours (one of the recipes I read asks for the cabbage to sit for 5 hours. I found another one that asks for it to sit for 12 hours. I may try this next time, but I was doing this on a Monday night! I hedged my bets with 2.5 hours). Shake the bags around a couple of times.

3. While the cabbage is resting in the salt, prepeare the other ingredients: fine-chop the onion, mince (or press) the garlic and ginger, and peel and chop the radishes into 1/2-inch cubes.

4. Dump the cabbage from both bags into a colander and rinse really, really well.

5. Mix the chili powder, remaining salt, kimchi base, ginger, garlic, and about 1/2 cup of water together in a bowl. You may need to add more water - it should be sauce-y when it's all mixed up.

6. Dump the rinsed cabbage, onion, and radishes into a bowl big enough to hold everything when it's getting tossed around. Add the pepper sauce to the bowl, and stir, stir, stir!

Now comes the uncertain (for me, because I don't know any kimchi experts, or if I do they haven't revealed themselves) part.

I'm pretty sure the mixture needs to be fully immersed in liquid in order to ferment/pickle. My mixture didn't contain enough liquid as it was, so when I spooned it into the three containers I used, I added a little more water, salt, and kimchi base to each container and stirred the heck out of it until the mixture was pretty much covered in liquid.

Then, I crossed my fingers and let the containers sit on the counter for two days.

And, a week later...

Hey, it's pretty good! (below is a picture with flash - the red color shows up a little better). I stirred it into a noodle soup I made for dinner one night. It gave the soup the perfect amount of kick!