Kimchi is a Korian salad made with cabbage. In any city of Kazakhstan you can easily find a place on the market where Korean salads are sold. This is one of the features that distinguishes life in Cyprus from living at home. Sometimes, sending me to the market, my grandmother asked me: “What about you, what do you want? Go buy yourself something tasty!”. So what do you think? Did I choose to take cakes and pies? No, I took Korean salads!
My hubby recently pampered me with a korean Kimchi salad he made himself. He found the recipe on Youtube, a charming Korean woman shares her secrets. The ingredients are listed below, but my hubby made some changes to the recipe, which I will describe in the end.
Original recipe:
Beijing cabbage 1.36 kg
1 cup of water + 6 tbsp. tablespoons of salt
Rice flour / starch / flour 2 tbsp
Vegetable broth / water 1 + 1/3 cup
Garlic 9 cloves
Onion 1 pc (large)
Ginger 2 cm
Daikon / radish 1 cup (chopped)
Green onion 6 pcs
Chinese chives 1 bunch
Carrot 1 pc (1/4 cup chopped)
Salt 3 tbsp
Sugar 1 tsp
Hot red pepper flakes 1 cup
How to make Kimchi
Сut the Beijing cabbage into large pieces, fill it with a cup of water and add salt. Mix thoroughly and leave for 2 hours. Every 30 minutes, the cabbage needs to be gently mixed so that it is well salted and softened.
In the meantime, prepare kimchi paste.
In the vegetable broth, stir the rice flour and heat over medium heat until it thickens and boiling bubbles appear. Remove from the fire.
Chop daikon, chives, carrots and chinese chives.
Blend rice paste with garlic, ginger and onions. Instead of fish sauce add 1/3 cup of vegetable broth and 3 tbsp. of salt. Also add a teaspoon of sugar. Then we transfer everything to a bowl and mix with red hot pepper flakes.
If 2 hours have already passed, cabbage should have been well salted. Now it needs to be thoroughly washed under running water and dried (as much as possible). After that you can mix all the ingredients (kimchi paste, vegetables and cabbage) and transfer to a sterilized dish (jar). Leave the kimchi at room temperature for 2 days to ferment or put in the refrigerator, and after two weeks it will be ready. Bon Appetit!
Our adaptation:
Firstly, when my hubby was salting the cabbage, he did not add water. Cabbage itself gave juice and salted well in 2 hours. In this case, you need about 2 tablespoons of salt and no need to rinse the cabbage under running water. Just drain the natural juice of cabbage.
For kimchi paste, we eventually put 1 teaspoon of salt (instead of 3 tablespoons), a tablespoon of soy sauce and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Also we used less chili pepper flakes: 3 tablespoons.
Instead of a daikon, we had a radish, replaced the vegetable broth with water, put three cloves of garlic instead of six, and we did not have Chinese chives at all (there was a bell pepper instead).
To summarize the list of ingredients in this scenario:
Beijing cabbage 1.3 kg
2 tbsp. of salt
Rice flour 2 tbsp
Water 1 cup
Soy sauce 1 tbsp
Salt 1 tsp
Sugar 1 tsp
Garlic 3 cloves
Onion 1 pc
Ginger 2 cm
Radish 6-8 pcs.
Green onion 3 pcs
Bell pepper 1 pc
Green chilli pepper 1 pc.
Carrot 1 pc
Hot red pepper flakes 2-3 tbsp
Here is a summary in video format:
It turned out very tasty and, I would say, adapted to the European taste, not so spicy! Especially if you live in a country where Korean delicacies are not as easy to buy as (for example) in Almaty, this fermented napa cabbage will delight your tummies! Bon Appetit!
