How To Make Kimchi - Mom's Famous Spicy Kimchi Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How to make your kimchi more spicy? ›

If all you want is More Heat, just use finely minced habanero or scotch bonnet peppers. (Use appropriate practices for handling extremely spicy peppers.) After adding the peppers, stir well and let sit for a day or two to let the flavors disperse.

Napa cabbage

Baechu-kimchi / Main ingredient

The process of making kimchi involves brining (salting) the vegetables to draw out the water, which helps in preservation and allows the seasonings to penetrate the food over time; the final salt concentration ranges from 2-5%. Kimchi is typically fermented by 'wild cultures' naturally present on the vegetables.

Homemade kimchi must be kept refrigerated and will last for up to 1 month. Store-bought kimchi that remains unopened can be kept at room temperature for 1-3 months. If you have store-bought kimchi that's been opened, it will be good for 3-4 days at room temperature and up to 6 months when refrigerated.

Making Kimchi at home is super easy. The ingredients are not hard to source, and the fermentation is faster than sauerkraut. Homemade kimchi is packed with probiotics, making it an excellent choice for gut health.

The use of bold seasonings like gochugaru and, in some regions, salted seafood, offer additional layers of complexity to the overall taste of the kimchi.

Why is the kimchi so sour tasting? Kimchi will always have a high level of acidity. This is caused by gut-healthy bacteria in the kimchi, which create acid during their lifetime, lowering the pH of the kimchi and preserving it naturally. If the kimchi was not acidic (read: sour) it would go bad!

The answer to “do you eat kimchi hot or cold” is really about health, not flavor. Kimchi tastes great cooked into almost anything. But heating kimchi kills the healthy, helpful bacteria that are a product of the fermentation process.

Along with fiber, vitamins, and minerals, kimchi contains natural probiotic bacteria. If you eat them regularly, the probiotics in fermented foods can be beneficial to your gut microbiome. Studies suggest that eating kimchi on a daily basis could help to improve some digestive problems.

Once the cabbage is all quartered, you have to season it and remove most of its water content, which will help to concentrate the kimchi seasoning and make the vegetable more pliable; simply salting the cabbage accomplishes both of these goals.

How long should kimchi ferment? ›

Place the jars on a tray (or plate) in case the juice overflows during fermentation. Let them ferment for about 5 days. Once opened, the jar should be kept in the fridge. If unopened, a jar of kimchi can remain at room temperature for many weeks.

Kept at room temperature, kimchi lasts 1 week after opening. In the refrigerator, it stays fresh much longer — about 3–6 months — and continues to ferment, which may lead to a sourer taste. Be sure to refrigerate your kimchi at or below 39°F (4°C), as warmer temperatures may accelerate spoilage.

If you're using a sealed jar with a lid, be sure to open it once a while, let it breathe, and press down on the top of the kimchi. Once it starts to fermented, store in the refrigerator to use as needed. This slows down the fermentation process, which will make the kimchi more and more sour as time goes on.

Kimchi, the traditional fermented vegetable dish from Korea, has been an integral part of the Korean food culture for thousands of years. Today, it is considered as a symbol of identity for Korean people and is globally appraised as a healthy food.

As a way of preserving the harvest just before winter, Koreans would first salt then tightly pack their cabbages into large clay urns, burying them underground to avoid the frost. The resulting fermented product took on a delicious flavour, and Kimchi began bubbling up across the whole country.

The biggest difference between fresh and fermented Kimchi is the taste. Fresh Kimchi is more like a salad, so it taste more raw, fresh and crunchy. Fermented Kimchi is softer and tangy.

In Korea, Kimchi was traditionally made during the winter months by fermenting vegetables and burying it underground in big brown ceramic pots called Onggi. The labour-intensive process allowed for a lot of family bonding time.

Generally speaking, kimchi can be defined (since around the 19th-century) as vegetable ferments that usually (but not always) contain gochugaru (not always with cabbage).