How Kimchi Made me Sad

5 Minute Timer. Please excuse spell check for today…

34 minutes past my bedtime and 46 days removed from my last blog, I sit in my newly acquired Beautyrest Posturepedic Plush 2.0 Used Mattress thinking — am I ever going to get to the 25 blog ideas from the past month, 20 of which from my first week living in NYC in over 3 years?

Yeah. I moved to NYC. More on that in a future post.

What is Kimchi?

The Title “What Is Kimchi” reminds me of recipes you click on google that have 750 words before giving the actual recipe. Thankful ChatGPT exists to cut through the noise.

Kimchi is simply a Korean fermented cabbage product. Ugh I want to go on for 25 minutes talking about Kimchi but all I’ll say is my favorite part about Korean BBQ meals is unlimited access to Kimchi, in a similar way.

The only other necessary information is I hate Vegan Kimchi. Ok I don’t hate vegan things. It’s just every time I try a Vegan Kimchi it’s so obvious the utmost important fish (anchovy) sauce and shrimp paste are missing. Maybe there’s a replacement these days…

Funny enough the first time I tried Kimchi was in Charlottesville at the Farmers Market, and for some reason I am certain that was a vegan Kimchi, like most kimchis at farmers markets.

How was making Kimchi

I’m way over 5 minutes fwiw. My WPM is way lower than Peak blog form but it’s a gradual process. Takes time to get back to speed.

First time making Kimchi. On the list for quite a while. I made Kimchi at the Asian restaurant I worked at but that pales in comparison to what we made today (no offense chefs). The TLDR is Kimchi is harder than I thought.

It started Sunday morning in the pouring rain at the best Korean Supermarket in the City: H-Mart. My roommate and I insisted on buying the proper ingredients from the proper market. No premade nonsense.

Very, very fortunately in the sauces section we ran into a Korean Dad who knew everything there is to know about making Kimchi 5 times over. He guided us into buying the proper Red Boat Fish Sauce, Salt, Salted Shrimp, and gave good instructions on how to approach the fermentation. He was great and way more useful than any of their employees (no offense).

It’s so cool how engrained Kimchi is into Korean culture. Proportionately, H Mart has the largest Kimchi section I’ve ever seen.

Alright I need to move on.

So we make the Kimchi. Paste yesterday, ran out of time, cabbage today.

I cross referenced 5 YouTube videos with what that guy said + Gemini + ChatGPT and the conclusion is never enough salt on that cabbage.

Salt draws out water from vegetables, so when making kimchi, you are supposed to salt the cabbage, before adding the past. after a few hours, the salt draws out much of the water so instead of that water piling in the jar in a. few days, it’s already removed from the batch.

I’m not kidding, recipe went perfect up to this point. Even how the large jars just arrived in the mail today and despite dropping and hearing a loud boom int he elevator they somehow managed not to crack.

There was 1 thing off.

Impossible to remove the salt from the cabbage. I tried everything. Did not work.

This is significant because the paste itself is meant to be the salt source, so now with 2 salt sources, this Kimchi will turn out to be a bit too salty. It’s not a big problem as the flavor will still remain, but in all honesty, I was a bit sad that 2 pounds of kimchi may be oversalted.

But I sit back now as I’m typing and realize,

First time making kimchi.

Embrace the failure. Now you know for next time you should buy the red pepper flakes in bulk and do the overnight salt brine soak as opposed to the 3 hour salting.

What’s the worst case scenario of this whole process?

My Kimchi comes out a bit too salty.

I’ll survive.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to write a blog. Instead I decided to find the most inopportune time for myself to jam it into my schedule.

-Jack

PS my kimchi making was inspired by the idea of Kimchi juice