Hello and best wishes, everyone!
Mostly, I thought I'd document my first kimchi making experience, but I'll digress a bit first. The last blog post, I mentioned liking Genmaicha and corn tea, but didn't go into much detail. Here's a few more pictures, before and after steeping.
This is the Genmaicha. You can see the green leaves interspersed with the toasted brown rice. Sometimes the rice has exploded, looking like mini popcorn. The rice adds a nice hint of savory flavor, making the tea really tasty with a meal (or kimchi!).
And here's the corn tea.
The corn tea basically tastes like liquid popcorn, so it is kind of an acquired taste. As you can see, my teapot has a filter in the spout, so that I don't have to make loose teas on a cup by cup basis, which is great since I usually feel like drinking tea a few cups at a time. And they go fantastically with homemade sushi, like this one:
Eggtastic! Inside the roll is some thinly sliced omelet. I love to get the quail egg yolk when going out for sushi, so I decided to give it a go myself, except I don't have quail eggs on hand. Therefore I tried chicken. As you can see, there's a bit of a size difference. In fact, the yolk barely fits on the roll . . . ha. The taste is still delicious, although it's not totally balanced, and tricky to eat. As an aside, since I like to eat raw and over-easy eggs often, I spend the extra dollar or so to get the pasteurized ones (when I can find them), or else the organic/free range ones.
Well, enough of that. On to the kimchi. I basically followed Maangchi's recipe and directions for easy kimchi. You can find her awesome blog here:
http://www.maangchi.com/. Also thanks to my sis for recommending it to me! I decided to make a large batch of mixed kimchi, using napa cabbage and cubed korean radish. The first step is rinsing the kimchi-to-be, where a large sink comes in handy.
After chopping up everything, it gets a hefty sprinkling of salt.
This is just after salting. I let it sit for about an hour and a half, mixing every half hour to make sure the salting proceeds evenly.
In the meantime, I made the dressing for making the cabbage into kimchi.
This is some water, sweet rice flour, and sugar, boiled until just translucent. I needed to cool it down before adding other ingredients.
After cooling, I added onion, garlic, ginger, fish sauce, hot pepper flakes, sliced up green onion, korean chives, and carrots. Yum! Here is the cabbage after salting (notice how much it shrank) with the prepared dressing.
After salting, the cabbage/radish mix gets a good rinse and drain before mixing it with the dressing. Here's the process of mixing. David got me a two gallon bucket, which I'm stuffing the kimchi into to ferment.
Here are a few views of the bucket full of kimchi!
Since it doesn't need to be completely anaerobic, the airlock is not really necessary. I used it anyway, since David had a few extra lying around, and I needed to block the hole in the lid (the bucket is designed to do small test batches of beer, hence the space for an airlock).
This is right after stuffing the fresh kimchi down into the bucket. I pressed it in because the fermenting process works best in low oxygen conditions.
(see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_bacteria)
After two days fermenting at room temperature in the bucket, here is what the kimchi looks like. The top layer looks a bit dry, because there was a gas pocket pushing a layer of kimchi up from the dressing below. I guess I packed it in pretty well! You can see little divots, where the gas escaped.
Here's the fermented cabbage after I pressed it back down into the dressing, so it won't dry out.
Tastes almost right. I think it'll take just one more day of room-temp fermenting, and then I'll refrigerate it. The acidification convinces me the fermentation is under control, and the production of gas is a good sign, too, though a bit smelly!
