The Essential Book of Fermentation (35 page)

Kimchi

This is the recipe for kimchi that I suggest you start with. You can add and subtract vegetables as you see fit and as vegetables become available through the seasons. Just be aware that summertime kimchi will ferment rapidly, while cold winter kimchi will take more time to get just right. And remember, too, that refrigeration slows fermentation to a crawl, putting the microbes into a kind of suspended animation. This recipe can be doubled or tripled, depending on how many hungry kimchi recipients are waiting. Of course, all ingredients should be organic. Vegetables or other ingredients dosed with pesticides or preservatives will kill off or set back the beneficial fermentation microbes.

Also, in my home batches of kimchi, I sometimes use one head of green cabbage and one head of dark purple cabbage. When the fermentation is finished, the cabbage in the kimchi turns a beautiful pink color. Same holds true for sauerkraut. If you don’t want pink kimchi or sauerkraut, don’t use red cabbage.

A final word about this recipe. Follow it for your first batch, then relax and get creative with subsequent batches. I just made a batch using about 2 dozen rosettes of tatsoi, a small cabbage-family plant with spadelike leaves that we grew in our garden, plus a couple of our own garden carrots. Instead of cutting the carrots into rounds, I shredded them so they would ferment more completely. Instead of cutting a daikon radish into rounds, I peeled a root, cut it in half crosswise, then cut each 5-inch piece into long sticks, the way you’d cut a carrot when making celery and carrot crudités. I had 2 small heads of bok choy. One I reduced to whole leaves, the other I cut crosswise into ¼-inch slices. In other words, ferment what you like, cut it as you please, and keep the vegetables weighed down and under the brine for safe and tasty results.

Makes 3 or 4 pints

Vegetables

½ cup sea salt

2 quarts filtered or spring water

1 large head napa cabbage

3 medium carrots

1 daikon radish

3 scallions

Paste

3 serrano chiles, or to taste

2 tablespoons dried shrimp (optional)

One 5-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated

6 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

½ cup sugar

½ cup fish sauce (without preservatives)

1.
Place the salt and water in a ceramic crock or glass container and stir until dissolved. Remove the outer leaves from the napa cabbage and slice the remainder crosswise into ¼-inch slices. Place these in the crock with the brine.

2.
Slice the carrots, daikon radish, and scallions into very thin rounds and mix them into the cabbage and brine. Place a plate on the vegetables to hold them under the brine. Weigh down the plate with a closed jar of liquid, bottle of wine, or gallon-size, closed zip-top freezer bag with at least a quart of water in it for 6 hours, either during the day or overnight.

3.
After the soak, drain the vegetables in a colander and place them in a bowl. Reserve the liquid brine.

4.
Stem the chiles and slice them in half lengthwise. Use as is if you want a hot and spicy kimchi, or for less heat, remove the seeds and membrane and discard. Mince the chiles and place them in a bowl.

5.
Add the shrimp (if using), ginger, garlic, sugar, and fish sauce to the bowl with the chiles. Transfer to a food processor or blender and whiz to a thick paste.

6.
Put half the vegetables and half the paste back into the original crock or jar and mix thoroughly. Add the remaining vegetables and paste and mix thoroughly again.

7.
Crush the vegetables with your hands, as if performing deep tissue massage, squeezing and crushing, for about 5 minutes, until all the vegetables are thoroughly crunched.

8.
Put a plate on the vegetables in the crock to push them slightly under the juices. If the top seems dry, add a little of the reserved brine to make sure everything is wet. Put a weight, such as a closed quart jar of water, on top of the plate to keep the vegetables under the surface.

9.
Cover the crock containing the submerged ingredients with a cloth to keep out insects. Punch down the kimchi every day for a week to release carbon dioxide gases and to mix the ingredients. When it tastes right, about a week or two later, spoon the kimchi into canning jars, add a little of the brining liquid so everything stays wet, screw on the lids with metal bands, and store in the fridge for up to 3 or 4 weeks. When you open the jars to use some of the kimchi, you’ll allow any buildup of CO
₂
to escape. Be sure to share with family and friends.

Korean Mung Bean and Kimchi Pancakes
(Nokdu Bindaetteok)

Jennifer Harris, my original kimchi teacher, posted this recipe for her Facebook friends to try. It combines beans, vegetables in the kimchi, and rice flour for a nonmeat source of good protein, although ½ cup of cooked ground pork could be added to give the pancakes a flavor boost. The dipping sauce is powerfully salty, so you might consider making a sweet and sour sauce (equal parts simple syrup and rice vinegar with a squeeze of lime juice) instead. Unless the kimchi has some strong spicy heat from chiles, the pancakes will be rather bland. You can spoon Sriracha or other hot sauce on the pancakes to enliven them, but if the kimchi is spicy, it will make a more integrated flavor and overcome the blandness. Don’t overcook to dark brown—these are best when golden brown. And they’re filling. One pancake was plenty for me. Finally, they are really good.

Makes four 6-inch pancakes

Batter

1 cup split dry mung beans

1
²
⁄
₃
cups water

¹
⁄
₃
to ½ cup rice flour

¾ cup
kimchi

Cooking oil, such as canola

Dipping sauce

¼ cup organic tamari

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

½ teaspoon sesame seeds

1.
Soak the mung beans in a bowl with the water overnight.

2.
Combine all the dipping sauce ingredients in a bowl, cover, and refrigerate.

3.
Drain the beans, reserving the soaking liquid. Place the beans in a blender or food processor with 3 tablespoons of the soaking liquid and whiz until they form a smooth paste.

4.
Add
¹
⁄
₃
cup rice flour to the paste and blend again. If the batter seems too thin, add the rest of the rice flour. If it’s too thick, add more soaking liquid. Aim for the texture of a typical pancake batter.

5.
Fold the kimchi into the batter, mixing thoroughly.

6.
Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small skillet over medium heat. If it smokes, it’s much too hot. Add ½ cup of batter to the pan and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until the rim of the pancake is a deep, golden brown, then flip and cook for 2 to 3 minutes on the other side. Repeat with the remaining batter to make 4 pancakes, adding more oil to the skillet as needed. Serve hot with the dipping sauce.

Making Pickles

When I lived in eastern Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were Deutsch—German—and not Dutch), I shopped every week at their markets, especially at Zerns in Gilbertsville and Renningers in Kutztown. These were the real thing, with Amish and Mennonite horse-drawn buggies tied up outside, and true Pennsylvania Dutch farmers offering their foods for sale inside.

Among their sausages, scrapple, and head cheese, they also offered chowchow—a pickle of many kinds of summer vegetables. What I realized about all these foods was that they originated many centuries ago, when the progenitors of the Amish and Mennonites were still in the Black Forest of Germany, when there was no refrigeration, and when this was how you preserved foods for the winter months. The fact that pickled vegetables bring a load of lactobacilli to the diet was a bonus.

The fabled “pickle barrel” of the general store of yesteryear also contained brined cucumbers preserved by lactobacilli. Even today, when you mention pickles, most people think first of cucumbers, although just about any vegetable can be pickled, as you can see in the pickled vegetable medley that is chowchow, usually consisting of green tomato, cabbage, chayote, red tomatoes, onions, carrots, beans, asparagus, cauliflower, and peas. The Pennsylvania version is usually made sweet with added sugar, while the version served across the Deep South came to Louisiana when the English forced the French settlers called Acadians out of Nova Scotia. These refugees found a home in French-influenced Louisiana, where they are known to this day as Cajuns. Cajun chowchow is less sweet than the Pennsylvania version.

Because we are a hamburger-eating country, and a sliced dill pickle goes so well with that and many other sandwiches, let’s start making pickles with cucumbers and then move on to chowchow. The fermented cukes I’ve made are nothing short of wonderful. I serve them to visitors to my home, and they say they’re the best pickles they’ve ever tasted. So be prepared for high quality.

As spring fades into summer, cukes will start appearing at the farmers’ markets. Look for pickling cukes about 3½ to 5 inches long and about the width of a plump sausage, rather than big, long ones or short, round ones. If you want to make small cornichons, look for 2-to 3-inch warty, curved cukes. If you plan on growing your own, there are superior varieties to be found at www.rareseeds.com. Look for thin-skinned varieties bred specifically for pickling, and harvest them while they are still young and 5 inches in length or less. As they grow bigger and longer, the seeds inside start to mature and turn hard, making them less pleasant to eat.

Once again, it’s the lactobacilli that work their wonders on cucumbers, turning them into pickles by metabolizing the vegetables’ sugars into lactic acid, imparting flavor, enhancing texture, and helping to preserve them—to say nothing of their beneficial probiotic effects in your digestive system. Even when you can excess pickles in canning jars to store them, killing the lactobacilli, you still get the benefit of the metabolites they produced when alive.