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| Kimchi Soup |
Previously, I've attempted to tackle kimchi using David Chang's recipe from the
Momofuku cookbook
.While I'm perfectly OK with a departure from traditon, which Chang definitely does in his recipe (e.g. addition of sugar, ect.), I just wasn't happy with how it tasted. To me, it was a quick and easy introduction to kimchi, but just wasn't enough. The December issue of Fine Cooking had a kimchi recipe that got me thinking again. Me being me I scoured the internet for traditional and authentic recipes for kimchi. One small problem was that kimchi is a household staple for Koreans. Many make it at home with passed down family recipes that, of course, live on via word of mouth. And being a family recipe, there are a multitude of variations. I finally settled on a mixture of the Fine Cooking recipe and a quick blog post I found integrating some of the Fine Cooking ingredients (e.g. anchovy paste and a
touch of sugar) with the more traditional (e.g. grated apple, onion, and rice flour/water paste) along with some of my own (e.g. fish sauce) since I forgot to, um, pick up dried shrimp on my ingredient run. After combining all of the above with some napa cabbage, scallions, daikon, garlic, and ginger I let it ferment for 3 days at room temperature. Normally, this would result in an extremely funky kimchi, but since my apartment is SO cold (
even in Los Angeles) it resulted in a nice mellow funkiness, which I prefer in my kimchi. Following this I let it age in the fridge for a week. I was very happy with the resulting product and will probably use the same ingredients again, but maybe trying some additions such as dried shrimp and sweet rice flour instead of regular rice flour. The end product was eaten plain and made into delicious kimchi friend rice and kimchi soup from the
No Recipes blog.
