kohlrabi kimchi, 24 hours later

summer fare

We decided to join our neighborhood's CSA this summer, and are enjoying a fridge OVERFLOWING with fresh, local, organic produce.  We've got so many vegetables, in fact, I'm already searching for ways to keep them beyond their normal refridgerated life. 

My answer is always: make kimchi!  The variety I made last night was seafood-less, so technically, I'm not sure it can be called kimchi.  Maybe a spicy Korean-inspired pickle?

Recipe:

Group A

-3 or 4 tblspns Sea salt or Kosher salt

-3 or 4 Kohlrabi hearts, trimmed of outside layer and sliced into bite-sized pieces
Group B
-3 Radishes, finely minced
-2 Hakurei turnips, finely minced
-1/2 Spanish onion, finely minced
-4 Scallions, finely minced
-4 or 5 cloves of Garlic, finely minced
-1/3 c Parsley, finely minced
-3 or 4 tblspns dried red pepper flakes
-2 tblspns Sea salt of Kosher salt
-cracked black pepper to taste
-fresh squeezed juice of a lemon or lime

Dump all peeled and sliced kohlrabi pieces in a large bowl and sprinkle generously with salt, tossing in bowl to ensure that all pieces are coated. Set aside for 30-45 minutes to allow the salt to draw water out of the vegetable.

In a separate, smaller bowl, mix all ingredients from Group B, beginning with the radishes, turnips, onion, scallions, garlic and parsley and lemon/lime juice and the salt. Toss to ensure the salt gets on everything, then add the pepper flakes and black pepper and toss some more. Set to the side to let the juices mix.

After 30-45 minutes, a significant amount of water will have been drawn from the kohlrabi slices by the salt. Drain all of this off and lightly rinse excess salt off the vegetable and put back in the large bowl. Now mix the spicy mixture of Group B ingredients (with juice) in, tossing until thoroughly encorporated. Move mixture from bowl to a clean and dry airtight container, cover and put in a cool, dark place for a minimum of 2 weeks. The salt will continue to draw water from the kimchi until the veggies are completely covered in their own fluid.

This is the fluid level in my kimchi last night, right after making it.  Already (I excitedly checked this morning) there's about two inches of fluid in there. 

kimchi jigae

It's not your average American chicken noodle soup! Kimchi Jigae is a crave-worthy treat that I indulge in at my favorite Korean restaurant year-round. Now I'm gonna try making a big pot of it at home, thanks to this post!

via Daren

Yum, gotta try this!

Kimchi Rice with Bacon and Eggs recipe from Chef Sohui Kim of the Good Fork, Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Cucumber Kimchi

Second of the three kimchis made in my class at ICE on May 3 is a cucumber kimchi, made with kirby cucumbers, garlic, sea salt, ginger, shrimp paste, chives and red pepper powder. This kimchi is very similar to the pickles I love to buy from Pickles Guys on Essex- the spicy garlic, full sour variety, but with an added burn of ginger, and an added seawaterness of the shrimp. Though this kimchi is technically edible directly after making, we were instructed to wait at least 3 days to help the cucumbers leak out more of their moisture and mix flavors with the so. I've been trying hard to resist eating it, but it taunts me each time I open the fridge! I came home from class with two containers of it, and have since condensed them into one container due to my picking at them and the natural shrinkage of the contents as they loose water. Last night, I tasted it again and I think it's safe to say they've reached they optimum eating date! They were garlicy, spicy, briny and allover delicious. Surprising to me was that the cucumbers seemed to have actually become more crisp than originally. How this was achieved through loosing water, I'm not sure. But I like them. A lot.

These are extremely easy to make. Essentially, you chop up the kirby cucumbers in regularly-sized chunks and salt them liberally with seasalt. You let them sit like this for an hour or more, then pour off the water. While they're leaking fluids, you make the so: mince garlic, grate ginger, chop chives, and add seasalt and red pepper powder. This mixture, too, will bleed fluid (which you keep).

When both the so and the cucumbers are ready, hand-blend them together and package up!

Next time I make these (and mark my words, I WILL be making these again), I think I might cut out some of the ginger, and add more of the red pepper. To me, the ginger gave the kimchi an almost basic quality that burnt my tongue too much.

Stay tuned for my final installment of the kimchi chronicles, Napa Cabbage Kimchi, after they've sat for another month and I can report back.

Water Kimchi

Mool kimchi is a type of kimchi made to be eaten cold in the summer. Unlike the kimchi I was familiar with prior to this class, water kimchi is not fermented for a long period of time before being eaten. After preparing this type in class, it really hit home that using the word "fermented" to describe kimchi is an inaccurate translation of what kimchi is. A better way to describe it, maybe, is to say that kimchi is a vegetable dish that is cooked or marinated in its own juices with the help of salt, kind of like ceviche, and most like pickles.

Water kimchi is a refined dish that layers the delicate essences of vegetables into a cold broth. The result is literally a water essence with some finely sliced fresh red radish and nabak (refers to the regularly square-cut shape & size) Napa cabbage slices. Although water kimchi is a very fine dish, the preparation takes a lot of elbow grease. This kimchi is "royal style" and was made for the king, who was considered too divine to eat foods that weren't first broken down into finer bits and then remade in the image of the food they were (pork chops were boned, finely minced, and then reshaped on the bone before being cooked).

Our version of water kimchi includes Korean pears, white onions, garlic, Korean radish, Korean cucumbers, and ginger. All of these were minced or grated to a fine pulp, then strained through mesh, blended into distilled water and flavored with lots of lemon juice, salt, and fine pepper flake, then garnished with the fresh radish and cabbage. We were told this water kimchi can be served on its own or over cold guksu (thick wheat flour noodles). I ate a small bowl this morning and it was surprisingly savory, delicious, and refreshing!

Update: I demolished the rest of the water kimchi last night, over cold brown rice. It was so scrumptious!

I love the smell of fermented cabbage in the morning

Saturday morning, I headed to midtown's Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) for my first recreational cooking class- how to make kimchi! I've loved kimchi since childhood, but until recently was only really aware that a few types existed. Moving to New York and eating Korean food opened up my eyes to lots of other varieties of kimchi. In my class, I learned to make three kinds:

-Bae-choo kimchi (Napa cabbage kimchi in the peasant style) - this is the kind I've known since childhood, not pictured but found here

-Mool kimchi (Water kimchi in the royal style) pictured here:
-Oh0yi So-Bahk-Yi kimchi (Cucumber kimchi) pictured here:
Aside from learning how to make these (totally different) kinds of kimchis, I learned a little bit about the philosophies of Korean food. Can you tell I'm totally stoked on this class??

Kimchi making is pretty time-consuming. Though there is no actual cooking with heat, there is a ton of preparation involved, which explains why this is usually made with the help of all the women in a village or family. The cabbage, for instance, needs to be washed, divided in quarters, rinsed, salted, then soaked in salt water for hours, then be carefully rinsed several times, then drained thoroughly, the stuffed with So, which is a whole separate process requiring many steps and careful attention. Traditional kimchi recipes don't have precise measurements- instead the recipes are passed down through families, and are committed to taste memory and muscle memory to make. Kimchi making is very much a sensual experience. You must handle the vegetables (carefully) a lot. It is said that two people could make kimchi with exactly the same amount and quality of ingredients, as well as the same fermenting time, and yet their kimchi would come out tasting different because the heat from each maker's hands would leave an imprint on the final product.

Right now, I have samples of each of the 3 kinds of kimchi we made in my fridge. I'll report back on the blog about the results of each when I taste them. Right now, 2 of the 3 can be eaten now, though only 1 has actually reached its prime eating time: the Water kimchi....

Check in on my next blog entry to read more about my adventures in Water kimchi!!