If you love pickled foods, Kimchi should be a nice addition to your plate. Adding fermented foods such as kimchi and sauerkraut help promote a healthy gut, providing it with healthy bacteria.
If I know my friends, I think they would be all over this when seeing how easy it is to make at home.
Buying kimchi is easy, but making it is, of course more rewarding. We are not slaves to store-bought everything right?
This is my first time making kimchi. This may not be the best photo of it, but the ingredients are fresh and nutritious. After eating store-bought kimchi a few times, i kinda knew what I wanted mine to taste like, and viewing a couple of different recipes helped give me some ideas, although I swayed more towards ingredients I had in my kitchen. For example I might have wanted to add sriracha, but instead opted for red pepper flakes.
This kimchi is simply Napa Cabbage, carrots, garlic and scallions. The rest is savory sweet and spicy additions.
Ingredients
- 1 pound napa cabbage
- 3 tbsp Realsalt or Himmalayan Salt
- 1-3 cups filtered water
- 1 carrot, cut into small strips (julienne)
- 3 scallions, cut into big pieces
Paste
- 1-3 tbsp chili flakes or sriarcha sauce is also a good option (3 tablespoons)
- 1 tbsp fish sauce
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 3 cloves garlic, minced or put through a press (hint, don’t overdo the garlic. Choose smaller cloves)
- 1/2 inch cube ginger, grated over a microplane (works great with frozen ginger)
- 1 tbsp natural sugar
Cut cabbage into quarters and trim off excess core toughness. Put cabbage in a large bowl and coat with salt, rubbing it into the leaves. Pour water over it and let it sit for about an hour. Add a few plates to the top to press it down.
Drain and rinse the leaves. Return to the bowl and add the carrots and scallions.
Combine all paste ingredients.
Using food prep gloves, rub paste into cabbage, carrots and scallions.
Find a good sized jar and fit all the pre-kimchi in. Cover and let sit at room temperature for about 3 days. The kimchi I made for this blog was good at 2-1/2 days. But you can actually go longer to 4 or 5 days.
I recommend putting your jar on a plate to catch any oozing liquids; it bubbles up as it ferments—even with a seal-tight jar. Press down cabbage during the fermentation process if it appears dry on top.
Fit For the Kitchen 