Day 87 -- OMG, Kimchi! And I'm Addicted!

I wonder if Betty Ford has a program for kimchi addicts?  Yesterday, I bought my first jar of kimchi.  It was pricy -- $6.00 for a 16 oz. jar.  I found the Sunja brand at my local health food store and found out it was one of the few vegan kimchis available.  Most kimchi aficionados will tell you that the real flavor punch in kimchi comes from the fish sauce or dried shrimp or anchovy sauce.  But none of those are vegan and I don't care anyway because I like this vegan brand just fine.  But at $6.00 a jar, it's going to put me in the poorhouse.  I'll be poor, but my digestive system will be working like a charm.

Kimchi is one of those fermented foods -- probiotics -- that are supposed to be really good for your digestion.  It's also fat-free and low in calories, so warmed up with a bit of brown rice, it's a nice little light meal.  Most Korean cooks make their own kimchi, so I've decided that I'm going to give that a try.  Yes, it's supposed to make your house and your fridge smell like a garbage dump, but I have a fridge in the basement that could certainly serve as a storage facility for noxious experiments in kimchi making.

My first goal is to reproduce the Sunja kimchi.  These are the ingredients for my first batch

1 head napa cabbage
3 or 4 carrots, peeled and grated
1 small daikon radish, chopped
1 bunch of scallions, chopped
About 1-inch size of ginger, peeled and chopped finely
Coarse Korean sea salt
Crushed Korean red pepper
Sugar or agave nectar

This pdf, Heidi's Kimchi Recipe, is a primer on the process of making kimchi.  I"m going to try using my crockpot crock and a plate, then cover it with plastic wrap or the crockpot lid.  The trouble with mold comes when the veggies come in contact with oxygen, but if you cover the pot and let the CO2 escape, the oxygen in the pot will be displaced by CO2.  After the proper prep of the veggies, the kimchi needs to sit and ferment for 2 days.  Then, you drain off the salt water and pack it in jars and put those jars in the fridge, loosely covered to allow for additional fermentation.

But first, I need to fnd Korean red pepper (which my local Asian market was out of) and Korean sea salt (I'll use kosher canning salt if I can't find sea salt).  I'll let you know how it turns out!