Kimchi is Korea’s most famous food. In November, it is traditional to make enough to last the entire year. We always wanted to see how kimchi was made, and thanks to an office colleague, this kimchi-making season we did.
Our assistant manager in the Mason Korea’s executive office, Conny Kwak, invited us to her apartment, where she and her mother were making their kimchi for the year. (Full confession: I may have hinted, maybe more than once, that I would very much enjoy participating in making kimchi.) Conny and I go way back. Having picked me up from the airport when I arrived for the first time in Korea, she was the first person I ever met from Mason Korea. Obviously, she made a great first impression.
The November season for making kimchi is called kimjang. Large amounts of kimchi are made at this time, because besides being tasty, making kimchi out of vegetables preserves them for eating through the winter months. All sorts of vegetables can be turned into kimchi, but the most common is cabbage kimchi, which is what we made. There are said to be over 200 kinds of kimchi. Further, every particular kind of kimchi is made differently by different cooks, as with any recipe. And then the same kimchi will taste different depending on when it is eaten, since the process of fermentation continues while the kimchi is being stored. Kimchi is often served with meals at restaurants, and every restaurant’s kimchi likewise tastes different.
What does kimchi taste like? The answer, accordingly, is “it depends.” But it is typically an intense and complex flavor, with elements of sharpness, sourness, saltiness, and peppery spiciness. It is the Korean version of a pickle, with some affinities to western pickles such as half sours or sauerkraut. Most Koreans love kimchi and eat it regularly with their meals. Westerners are probably split, with about half enjoying it, and half finding it too intense. I enjoy it, but I do like my kimchi fresher, when it is more lightly fermented. Kimchi that has been fermenting for a long time becomes increasingly sour.
Did I mention that kimchi and kimchi making are on the list of UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity? So we were truly honored and grateful to join Conny and her mother in making kimchi. We arrived around 11:30 am to participate. We learned that Conny and her mom had been up making their supply of kimchi since 6:00 am!
Kimchi has a lot of ingredients. There are the vegetables, in this case large Korean radishes called “mu,” brined nappa cabbage (also called Chinese cabbage, and in Korean, “baechu”), a Korean green called “kat,” which I believe is a kind of mustard green, and green onions. Then there are many sauces and spices that go into the kimchi. These include a kind of fish sauce, a fermented apple/pear sauce, two different kinds of hot red pepper sauces, one made with sticky rice and one hotter than the other, garlic, ginger, the all-important “gochu-garu” (red pepper flakes) and salt. Conny’s family recipe also called for tiny, salted shrimp, another common ingredient in kimchi. However, since I am allergic to shrimp, we left it out of our batch. I should note that many of Conny’s mom’s ingredients were themselves made at home, including the sauces and the red pepper flakes, which she made by drying out red peppers on her apartment roof, and then grinding them.
To make the kimchi, we first julienned the radish with a clever mandoline that cut the radish in two planes at once, in order to produce lots of julienned radish quickly. Conny’s whole family, especially her dad, were very concerned we did not julienne the radish all the way down, lest our fingers get too close to the sharp mandoline blade. Conny would cut the last part of the radish stub with a knife into matchstick pieces.
Once the radish was julienned we added all the ingredients but the cabbage and mixed it with our hands. This is very messy work! Red sauce from the pepper gets all over everything. We wore tough rubber dish-washing gloves to do it. A large flexible mixing area, and a larger mat under that, keep most of the kimchi mix from getting all over everything. But I did manage to get a good amount up my arms, on my clothes and, as Teresa noted, behind my ear. Teresa wondered how I got it in this last place (answer: trying to adjust my mask).
The last step in making the kimchi is to take this mixture, and put a bit of it at the base of each leaf of the cabbage. You pull the outermost leaf down
and out without breaking it from the cabbage core, add in a bit of the radish mixture where the leaf comes out from the core, and then rub the sauce from the mixture all down the leaf. Someone once told Teresa with pride that in kimchi, every piece of cabbage has been touched by a human hand. Once you finish the outermost leaf, you do the same to the next most outermost leaf, and so on, until there is the radish mixture between every leaf of the cabbage. Then you fold over and down all at once all the leaves of the cabbage, so it is more tightly compacted. Once we made several of these, we put them in kimchi containers.
The kimchi is ready to eat in a few days. We definitely have enough to last us through the spring, maybe longer. We did not expect to be sent home with so much kimchi, but Conny and her family are very generous.
They were so generous that after showing us how to make kimchi and making a many month supply for us, they prepared a fantastic Korea lunch for us. Conny’s mom is a brilliant cook. The meal included kimchi pancakes, the best I’ve ever had, japchae, which is a stir-fry featuring glass noodles, yellowtail sashimi, and boiled pork belly eaten with the fresh kimchi, rice, and seaweed soup. It was just amazing. And then they sent us home with a lot of that food too. This meal, the pleasure in making it, the abundance of it, and the sending us away with leftovers, truly felt like the US Thanksgiving, on the weekend of that holiday.
Over lunch, we got to spend more time with Conny’s family, including her husband, whom we had met just briefly at their wedding, her mom and dad, and her darling sixteen-month baby boy. That kid has many wonderful meals ahead of him!
