Easy Kimchi

Kimchi isn’t all that complicated. At its simplest, you’re mixing vegetables with a spicy paste and letting everything ferment.

I call this an “easy” kimchi because I’m cutting the cabbage into pieces instead of leaving the cabbage in halves and rubbing the paste into each individual leaf. It saves a fair bit of work, and I still ended up with a good batch of kimchi.

I grew the Chinese cabbage, daikon radishes and carrots in my garden, but there’s no reason you can’t buy the vegetables if you don’t have them growing yourself.

I started by trimming and cleaning the cabbage. I soaked the head in salt water for about 15 minutes to get rid of any bugs that might have been hiding in it. After that, I rinsed it well and let it drain.

The cabbage was close to 3½ pounds. I cut it part way down the length of the head and pulled it apart into quarters. I then sliced those quarters into pieces about 2 inches long.

I mixed the cabbage with ¾ cup of pickling salt and let it sit for 2 hours. Every half hour I gave it a good stir so the salt could work its way through the cabbage.

After the two hours were up, I thoroughly rinsed the cabbage three times to remove the excess salt, then drained it well.

While the cabbage was salting, I prepared the other vegetables. I cut 4½ medium carrots and 12 ounces of daikon radish into matchsticks. I also chopped 10 green onions into pieces about 1 inch long.

Normally, I would have used a pear in the kimchi paste, but I didn’t have any on hand. Instead, I used two apples and pureed them.

I mixed the pureed apples with 4½ tablespoons of fish sauce, 1¼ teaspoons of sugar, 9 minced garlic cloves, 2½ teaspoons of grated ginger and 1 cup of Gochugaru, which is Korean chili flake.

Once the paste was mixed, I added the cabbage, carrots, daikon and green onions. I mixed everything together until the vegetables were evenly coated with the red paste.

Then it was time to pack it into the jar.

I packed everything tightly into a 1-gallon jar, pressing it down as I went. Once it was packed, I covered it with cabbage leaves and put the lid on loosely. The fermentation produces gas, so I didn’t want to seal the jar tightly and trap that pressure inside.

I put the jar downstairs where the temperature averaged about 19°C and let it ferment.

After about 40 hours, I tasted it. It was already good at that point, but I decided to leave it for another day to let the fermentation develop a little more.

After that extra day, I moved the kimchi into 1-quart jars. I find the smaller jars much easier to store in the refrigerator and they’re more convenient to use a little at a time.

And that’s really all there is to this version of kimchi. There’s no need to spend the time working the paste into every individual cabbage leaf. Cutting everything into pieces, mixing it together and letting it ferment gives you a simple batch of homemade kimchi without making the process more complicated than it needs to be.

Have you ever used apples instead of pears in kimchi? I’d be interested to hear how your batch turned out.