Coming back to a cold and wintery London, we decided we wanted tasty, fermented and spicy dishes – and what better than homemade kimchi?!
There are lots of recipes online (particularly from Korean bloggers, like this one) so if you want to make your own, we’d encourage you to do some research online as a starting point.
For those in London, and would prefer a more hands-on lesson, we attended an excellent lactic fermentation workshop held by The Fermentarium a couple of years ago. As a result, we have made plenty of wonderful kimchi and sauerkraut since then!
This time, we kept the recipe simple.
We brined chinese cabbage overnight, and made a paste of ginger, garlic, spring onions, Korean red pepper flakes and a touch of sugar. So this batch is also gluten-free and vegan1.
Homemade kimchi is surprisingly easy to make, and it has a much fresher flavour than that in the shops so we’d encourage you to try it sometime! This is our current batch:
Since it was cold this January, the kimchi took a little longer to ferment than usual (five days in the end); however, our patience was rewarded with a beautiful, bright red and delicious tasting kimchi!
Of course, you can just eat it as is, but we also like to find interesting ways to use it into our everyday cooking.
Here are three ideas to get you started:
Idea 1: Kimchi-fried eggs (vegetarian, gluten-free)
Idea 2: Kimchi-flavoured vegetable stew (vegan, gluten-free)
Idea 3: Kimchi stir-fried udon (vegetarian)
We hope you enjoy lots more kimchi after reading this (and hopefully trying out those recipes)!
- As a side note, some versions of kimchi that you can buy in shops contain fish sauce and soy sauce, so do watch out if you are vegan / vegetarian or do not eat gluten. ↩︎