안녕하세요! (Annyeonghaseyo! It means hello in Korean) :D
Monday was really gross and rainy outside, and I got soaked walking to all my classes. It was not fun. And of course the best thing to do when it’s nasty outside is to cook something, cause cooking is awesome and always makes everything happier :) So when I came back to my dorm I got working on making some… kimchi!! Yep. I had this brilliant idea yesterday when I finished eating a jar of pickles. For Christmas, my dad had given me some of these delicious spicy Sriracha pickles (they’re called “Hotties,” by Rick’s Picks) and I absolutely love them. They burn my mouth when I eat them and sometimes I have to take a breather in between bites, but they taste fantastic.
Looking at the ingredients on the jar, I noticed that the pickling liquid was made of vinegar, Sriracha (hot pepper) sauce, garlic, and fish sauce, etc. which are exactly the ingredients used to brine cabbage for kimchi. I’ve researched kimchi mainly because of my obsession with Korean dramas. This scene in particular made kimchi-making look extremely fun.
Guem Jan Di and Goo Jun Pyo (from Boys Before Flowers) are making kimchi with Jan Di’s family. Seems like a good time.
Most recipes use Napa cabbage (Napa is the most popular, but some recipes use red cabbage), onions, scallions (aka green onions), sugar, and some add other ingredients like daikon radish, apple or Asian pear. Well, other than the garlic and stuff in the jar from the pickles, I didn’t have any of that. But luckily, the dining hall has pretty much all of it :) I collected an apple (many traditional recipes use apple), a pear (because there were no Asian pears available, I figured the taste of a regular pear combined with an apple would work), a few packets of sugar, and a ziplock bag full of red cabbage, diced onions, and chopped scallions from the salad bar.
My ingredients.
So, I put everything in my bowl and I cut up the apple into slices with my butter knife and added that to the mix.
Slicing the pear into little pieces.
Then I added the pear.
Here's the bowl all full of cabbage and onions and pears and things.
Next, I put all the ingredients into the jar of vinegar/Sriracha/garlic.
Putting the vegetables in.
I added 4 packets of sugar.
I had to shake it around a lot to mix it all together and get all the little garlic pieces at the bottom to incorporate.
… And here it is after 24 hours.
The finished product.
The real test came today when I tried some. I’ve just been letting it sit in the fridge and shaking it around every once in a while to make sure everything is pickled evenly. A lot of people prefer fresh-made kimchi to the kind that’s been sitting around for a long time, so I figured I should go ahead and eat some now. I had never made kimchi before, and I was sort of nervous about how it would taste, but it was delicious!
Here's a close-up.
The red cabbage went really well with the flavor of the apple and pear! It was sweet and spicy at the same time, which was awesome and delicious. I liked it at first, but the flavor started to grow on me even more and I actually ended up eating almost the whole jar :P
Yum.
Well, thanks for reading! And if you want to make this recipe at home, I’ve tried to estimate the measurements as best as I can:
Red Cabbage “Kimchi”
Ingredients:
- The leftover brine from Rick’s Picks’s “Hotties” Pickles,
OR
- 1 cup vinegar (I would use rice wine vinegar) mixed with 1/2 cup water, 3 Tablespoons Sriracha sauce, 6 cloves of chopped garlic, 2 teaspoons of salt, and a few drops of fish sauce
- 1 cup chopped red cabbage
- 1/4 cup diced or chopped white onion
- 1/4 cup chopped scallions (green onions)
- 1/2 pear, chopped
- 1/2 apple, chopped
- 4 packets of white sugar (about 4 or 5 teaspoons)
Directions:
- Mix together the ingredients for the brine in a large jar, or just open the jar of leftover pickle brine.
- In a bowl, mix together all the fruits and vegetables.
- Put the fruits and vegetables into the brine and sprinkle the sugar on top. Close the lid and shake it around really well.
- Before eating, let it ferment in the fridge for anywhere from a day to forever. (Some people like the taste of really fermented kimchi). Just kidding about forever, though. Most websites say that “a couple of weeks” is safe, and 2-3 days is the peak tastiness. You can serve this as a side dish, on top of white rice, try making kimchi fried rice, or even serve little spoonfuls of it on top of rice crackers as a cute appetizer. Good luck! :)
