Vegetarian kimchi 1.0

Okay, I am not very good at the food blogging thing. I completely forgot about taking pictures of the Korean tacos and kimchi potato salad that I wrote about last time. But I did make some fishless kimchi, and I do have some photos of that to put up, which is more interesting anyway.  Like this one:

The color got a little muted when I uploaded this picture.  Trust me, in real life, it is BRIGHT red.

Looking up recipes for kimchi can be intimidating because everyone has their own way of doing it. Some recipes make it sound easy, some get mystical and cult-like about the benefits of kimchi making, and some are just completely intimidating ("People who say they got it down after the first couple of attempts are either a) lying, b) geniuses, c) don't really know what good kimchi tastes like or d) have low standards and expectations."). After getting rather overwhelmed, I finally decided to just do it, which is a strategy that I should probably employ more often in life.

All of the recipes had certain ingredients in common: napa cabbage, uniodized salt, water, gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes), garlic, green onions, ginger, and almost always fish sauce. Many of them also used onion and Korean radish, and some used dried salted shrimp. Some of the recipes called for a paste made of mochiko (rice flour), water, and sugar (or Asian pear); the sugar is supposed to help start the fermentation, and I think the mochiko is for texture. A couple called for an acidic ingredient, like vinegar or lemon juice.

The methods were more straightforward. First, you need to cut the cabbage into pieces and salt it, either by brining it or by coating it with dry salt, to inhibit the bad microbes and encourage the right kind of bacteria (Lactobacillus) to grow. Then you blend up everything else into a paste, usually using a food processor, and coat the cabbage leaves with the paste. Sometimes the cabbage sections are left intact (in which case they're sliced into bite-size pieces before serving) and sometimes they are chopped into pieces. You pack the whole mixture into a jar, leave it at room temperature for 24 hours, then put it in the refrigerator. And that's it.

Ultimately, I picked the intimidating recipe (from Eat, Drink, Man) because it was very specific, and I halved it so that I would only use one cabbage. I also tweaked the ingredients a little, mainly to avoid the fish sauce, since the point was to make vegetarian kimchi. I used gochujang (red pepper paste) instead of fish sauce, since I think it's more interesting than soy sauce (a substitute that I saw in a couple of places).

Kimchi, trial 1
1 napa cabbage (about 1300 g)
a lot of sea salt
1/4 cup mochiko (sweet rice flour)
3/4 cup gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes)
1/2 bulb garlic
1.5 oz ginger
2 tablespoons gochujang (Korean red pepper paste)
1 bunch green onions, white parts whole, green parts sliced into 2-inch pieces
1/2 cup water
1/8 cup sugar

I cut the cabbage in quarters lengthwise, rinsed it briefly, and thoroughly sprinkled it with salt.

I let it sit for about 4 hours, turning it over after 2 hours, then rinsed it three times. After doing this, it was way too salty, possibly because I used fine sea salt instead of coarse sea salt. Obviously, kimchi is supposed to be salty, but it shouldn't taste like eating a salt lick. So I soaked it in clean water for about an hour, changing the water periodically, which made it a lot more palatable.

I cooked the mochiko and water over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until it bubbled, then stirred in the sugar. In the food processor, I blended the garlic, ginger, and the white parts of the green onions into a paste. I combined this with the mochiko mixture, then mixed in the green parts of the onions, the gochugaru, and the gochujang. I also added a bit of the liquid from the purchased kimchi to make sure there were some good bacteria in there, but I don't think this is strictly necessary. I let this mixture cool.  I was still trying to un-salt the cabbage, so there was plenty of time.

I cut the cabbage into strips and mixed it with the mochiko-garlic-gochugaru paste so that the cabbage was completely coated, then put everything in a big glass container.

(Sorry about the somewhat funky picture. It was the middle of the night.)

I put the jar into a plastic bag, then put the bag into a tupperware container, which I left in the garage for 24 hours. I checked it periodically and right around the 24-hour mark, I finally saw some bubbles. Then I put it in the fridge and went away for the weekend. When I came back about four days later, it was noticeably bubbly and starting to get sour.  Today, about two weeks later, more than half has been eaten and the remaining kimchi is definitely sour.

So what did I learn from this experience?

First of all, there was the salty cabbage problem, which was probably my fault for using too much salt and the wrong kind of salt. I read that the cabbage stays crunchier if you use dry salt instead of brining it, and my kimchi does indeed have a good texture. But I think brining would give you more control over the salt level, so that's what I'll try next time.  In any case, it showed that a) it's a good idea to taste the salted cabbage, and b) overly salty cabbage is not a dealbreaker if you soak it in plain water for a while.

Second, I thought the kimchi tasted pretty good even before the fermentation got started, which surprised me because I'm not a big fan of raw cabbage.

Third, this stuff has a powerful smell to it, more so than kimchi from a store. It's like driving through Gilroy during garlic season. There's a reason why my kimchi is stored in a tightly sealed jar wrapped in two plastic bags.

(Also, speaking of learning things: if I were a teacher, I would totally have my students make kimchi. The process of making kimchi, even more so than most cooking, is full of examples of scientific concepts that I learned in much less interesting and tasty ways: osmosis, diffusion, pH, lactic acid fermentation, gas laws, symbiosis... Yes, I'm kind of nerdy.)

Overall, this was a really satisfying project that I'd like to do again. It's possible that I don't know what good kimchi tastes like, or that I have low standards and expectations, but I really liked this kimchi. Also, I gave some to my Korean friend and he didn't laugh at me (very much) when he tried it, so I'll count that as a win.

Some references:
Eat, Drink, Man's kimchi page
Kimchi and Kaktugi from maangchi.com
Heidi's Kimchi Recipe
Closet Cooking's kimchi
The Paupered Chef's kimchi contest results

Korean tacos and kimchi sweet potato salad

On Monday, I decided that I was going to make spicy Korean tacos, which I've been wanting to try since they became super trendy like a year and a half ago.  Since I don't live in LA, nor do I have the patience to track down the Kogi truck anyway, making them myself seemed like my best option. In order to do this, I needed to acquire some gochujang (red pepper paste) and some vegetarian kimchi, and I decided that it would be a good excuse to find a Korean grocery store. (I like going to grocery stores. Yes, I am weird, news at 11.) And that's how I ended up wandering around in Hankook for at least half an hour, probably more like forty-five minutes. I may have lost track of time a little bit.

There were many kinds of gochujang. I'm not sure you'd find that many kinds of ketchup in a standard American grocery store. I wanted a container the size of an index card box (do people even use index card boxes anymore? suddenly I feel old), not a five-gallon container, which narrowed it down to a couple of varieties. They were the same brand and their ingredients were very similar, but one of them had some additional seasoning and slightly less sodium. Beyond that, I'm sure the packaging explained the difference quite clearly to people who can read Korean, a category that I definitely don't belong to. I ended up choosing the plainer one, more or less at random. When I opened up the container, there was a plastic flap on the inside that said "NO!" along with a bunch of other Korean writing.

 
I think it probably says something like "NO! MSG" or "NO! artificial ingredients," but it could say "NO! don't use this as an ice cream topping" or "NO! dilute! dilute!" with equal accuracy, and I would not know the difference.

There were also many kinds of kimchi. In addition to the jars and packets of kimchi, there's a section of the store that sells prepared food in bulk, like the salad bar at Whole Foods, and a large proportion of it is kimchi. But for all that, it turns out that there is no such thing as vegetarian kimchi. It all has shrimp and anchovies, kind of like all Vietnamese food has fish sauce. (I swear I've seen kimchi that is just cabbage, salt, and red pepper...but it might have been Japanese kimchi, and Japan is the country that decided it was a good idea to put corn and mayonnaise on pizza, so.) Anyway, after I'd looked at about fifteen different kinds of kimchi, I finally found a package that did not list anything fishy in its English ingredients. The problem here is that products sold in the US have to have an English ingredient label, but sometimes the translation is...loose. In this case, after I'd gotten home, I realized that there were cute little icons on the front depicting cabbage, peppers, garlic, ginger, shrimp, and fish.

Sigh. I used it anyway, because I'm the worst vegetarian ever.  (I'm a vegetarian mainly because I object to how animals are treated on factory farms, not because I feel a deep mystical connection to animals. As such, in situations where I have to choose between eating an animal product or wasting food, I tend to believe that eating the food is the lesser evil.) In any case, next time I'm making my own darn kimchi.

The tacos probably made my non-existent Korean and Mexican ancestors spin in their graves, but they were pretty good (and also INCREDIBLY spicy). I modified the recipe by just cooking the tofu with the sauce, rather than coating it with the sauce and then deep-frying it. This made me feel all health-conscious, but honestly, I'm sure I would have liked the deep-fried version better.

I also made kimchi sweet potato salad, omitting the mayonnaise (because I can't stand it) and the bacon (because so far, there are no pigs made of vegetables), and that was pretty awesome. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for both sweet potatoes and kimchi, but I think they do actually work well together.

I'll add pictures of the actual food to this post tomorrow.

Update: I clearly flaked out on taking pictures, but I did make My Own Darn Kimchi, which you can see over here.