[HN Gopher] The Kimchi Masters of South Korea
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The Kimchi Masters of South Korea
Author : petethomas
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-07-17 02:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| vkhadilkar wrote:
| https://archive.md/Fyx6P
| nxobject wrote:
| It's fascinating to learn about the large diversity of
| ingredients that go into kimchi (of all types) - from seafood
| (shellfish, fish) to fruit (pears, jujubes, etc...) and spices...
|
| One of my first questions: how will climate-change affect the
| composition of "complex kimchi"? Will the changes be profound (at
| least to Korean tongues), as with coffee?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how will climate-change affect the composition of "complex
| kimchi"?_
|
| Why would you expect it to?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Availability of ingredients?
| briandear wrote:
| It won't have any effect. A nuclear war with the North is more
| likely than kimchi suddenly haven't climate-change ingredient
| problems.
| cryptica wrote:
| First time I tried Kimchi, I didn't get it. It just tasted
| bitter. But I grew to like it a lot after a few more times.
|
| It seems to serve a similar role in Korean cuisine as the pickle
| in American cuisine or the pickled ginger or wasabi in Japanese
| cuisine.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| There's a huge variety of kimchi tastes, and not just small
| nuances for connoisseurs.
|
| Kimchi can be a palette cleanser kind of thing, but it's also
| frequently the main flavor of a dish more akin to sauerkraut.
| slothtrop wrote:
| It should taste sour, salty, spicy, and a tinge sweet. I've had
| good and bad kimchi, the difference can be substantial. The
| best has far and away been what I made myself.
| pyromaker wrote:
| I'm blessed to remember fondly of my childhood where my
| grandmother, mom and aunties made kimchi altogether as a family,
| put them in large pots, men dug holes in the ground and put them
| in. Then, we took some out for tasting in a middle of cold snowy
| winter. The memory alone makes me salivate today.
| sva_ wrote:
| I find this topic of fermented foods in different cultures
| pretty interesting. Surely they enabled people to survive a
| rough winter with food shortages. From an evolutionary
| perspective, it could be said that those peoples who didn't
| learn to produce fermented foods might've perished from
| starvation. It is an art that shouldn't be lost.
| Loughla wrote:
| The Amish near us grow an assload of Chinese cabbage, bury
| it, and use it as a store for winter. It's vaguely like
| sauerkraut, but infinitely worse.
|
| It's the definition of emergency food, because you have to be
| VERY hungry to want to eat it.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Why not put in the little extra effort to make something
| that's at least an acquired taste, like kimchi, instead of
| something universally reviled?
| jareklupinski wrote:
| you don't want to have to dig up your emergency reserves,
| only to find they've already been dug up and eaten at
| someone's wedding
| vain wrote:
| I really don't see the correlation with food shortages.
| Cabbage isn't nutritious at all. You'd need to eat 8 to 10
| heads of cabbage to get 2000 Calories
| shagmin wrote:
| Calories conventionally come from grains. If you measure
| cabbage's nutrition by its minerals and vitamins it packs
| quite a punch.
| glutamate wrote:
| Apparently protein as well? I remember reading that
| cabbage is the highest yield protein per acre. It's just
| wrapped in a whole bunch of greens you have to munch
| through first.
| gsbraitberg wrote:
| Cabbage yields about 1000 lbs protein per acre, vs 3000
| lbs protein per acre for soybeans.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| As my sibling comment points out, it's full of
| micronutrients, which can be hard to come by when there
| isn't much growing. Having access to a decent source of
| electrolytes and vitamins really blunts the impact of
| having unreliable or inadequate food for a prolonged
| period.
| hooverd wrote:
| Kimchi is easy to make at home too. The Maangchi recipes are
| pretty foolproof.
| jimkoen wrote:
| No it's not. I wish.
|
| I have tried 4 times now, and I'm pretty sure it's because the
| only recipes I find are from Korean-american migrants, meaning
| that they'll use kosher salt, which we in Europe don't have.
| The salt/water ratio will be off, which will prevent
| fermentation (and lead to oversalted kimchi).
|
| If anyone here is a Korean and knows of a somewhat traditional
| kimchi recipe using metric units and table salt, I'd be stoked
| if you would post it in a comment.
| appplication wrote:
| I have used maangchi's method as well as fermented a couple
| dozen other sorts of things over the years. It would be hard
| to argue that fermentation is prevented. In my experience it
| is a very active ferment.
| ortusdux wrote:
| https://www.bonappetit.com/story/what-is-kosher-salt
|
| https://www.maangchi.com/blog/using-salt
|
| https://www.maangchi.com/recipe/tongbaechu-kimchi
| haunter wrote:
| > kosher salt, which we in Europe don't have
|
| We do (whatever Europe means in this context) but no offense
| if you can't even find salt then how do you manage gochugaru
| or fish sauce for example?
|
| I did the the Munchies kimchi several times and it was always
| perfect
|
| https://youtu.be/hM-v5nTp0J0
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/nzkpj7/homemade-kimchi
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Weigh your cut vegetables, then add 2-4% salt by weight.
| Thoroughly mix it in a glass bowl by hands and let it weep
| out water. Let it sit in a jar with weights to keep the
| vegetables below the brine water level. After a few days
| (depending on heat and the desired softness and fermentation)
| drain the excess brine and add chopped garlic, green onions,
| ginger and chili powder (I usually leave a bit of brine to
| wet the chili powder). And seafood if you're interested. Pack
| this into jars and let it sit in a cool place for awhile (I
| use the fridge if I have space, otherwise a root cellar, or
| in the ground works).
|
| But yeah, 3% (non-iodized) salt by weight. You can top off
| the brine with filtered water if your vegetables don't weep
| enough, but this hasn't been a problem for me.
| gomox wrote:
| Kosher salt and table salt of similar chemical composition
| (i.e. not the 60% potassium "low sodium" stuff) should be
| interchangeable if measured by weight?
| dunham wrote:
| And you have to use kosher salt by weight too, because
| Morton's is twice as dense as Diamond. (see
| https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-
| cha...)
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Table salt has iodine and other additives. Use kosher salt
| or pickling salt.
| hooverd wrote:
| Iodine doesn't matter. You do have to account for the
| difference in weight/volume vs table salt though.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| You can also get pretty close by salting the cabbages a lot,
| then rinsing them once they've gotten seasoned enough to be
| pleasantly salty.
|
| Also it's quite hard to oversalt kimchi in my experience.
| You'll need to ferment it longer but eventually the sourness
| will balance out the salty
| hooverd wrote:
| Use about half the amount of table salt to kosher salt for a
| salt and rinse step. Then shoot for 2% by weight. Generally I
| avoid salting ferments by volume. I saw a recipe in the
| sibling comments.
| ncarroll wrote:
| Also, be sure your salt doesn't have any additives. Some
| "table" salts have anti-clumping ingredients added. These
| will prevent the ferment. I ferment a lot and use sea salt
| (Meeressalz) without any troubles. Good luck!
| sva_ wrote:
| Not sure if you're unaware or don't care, but sea salt
| contains microplastics. You can get untreated alpine salt
| (Alpensalz) pretty cheap (presuming you live in or around
| Germany)
| wavefunction wrote:
| https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/en
| try... They are are everywhere.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| On the surface. Not necessarily in the caverns, where it
| is 'mined'.
|
| OTOH thinking about the large trucks, tractors, and other
| machinery operating down there, there is probably
| contamination too, just by abrasion from the rubber
| tires, or beltways.
|
| Pick your poison :)
| bane wrote:
| tl;dr You _can_ use table salt if you wish, but you need to
| use less. This article might help [1] as might this one [5]
|
| Not Korea, but my wife is native born. Her family recipe is a
| little different than the ones I've seen online, but the
| result is still kimchi. There's also literally hundreds of
| different kinds of kimchi, so there's definitely flexibility
| built into the concept.
|
| It's not really Kosher salt that Koreans use, but very coarse
| sea salt. It's usually sold in stores in Korea (or Asian food
| stores elsewhere) either in big bags by the kg [2][3], or
| often in a big bin near the produce in a grocery and you just
| scoop up as much as you need into a container and pay by the
| kg.
|
| The problem you are having is not the ingredients in the
| salt, it's the coarseness of it. With sea salt, or kosher
| salt, the grains are very large and so you get less salt per
| unit volume. I'm 100% certain you can track down some kind of
| large grained coarse salt as it's used in all kinds of
| cooking settings, often as a late-in-recipe seasoning on
| breads and meats. It's likely to either be coarse grained sea
| salt, unground salt, or even a coarse grained mined salt like
| Himalayan pink salt. I believe there's a well known French
| coarse grained grey sea salt called Moulin & Cuisson or Le
| Guerandais or something that would be a good substitute.
|
| Most major European cities have a large enough Asian
| population these days that there is probably an Asian grocery
| where you can also check also. (I'm only aware of this
| because when we travel in Europe my wife almost always seeks
| out a few things so we can cook at home instead of going out
| to save some money).
|
| You might also be curious to know that the world's largest
| commercial Kimchi maker has a factory in Europe (Poland). [4]
|
| 1 - https://kimchimari.com/best-salt-kimchi-12-salts/
|
| 2 - https://www.hmart.com/natural-premium-sea-salt-for-
| kimchi-2-...
|
| 3 - https://www.amazon.com/Beksul-Natural-Premium-Coarse-
| Brining...
|
| 4 - https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/11/08/poland-to-become-
| euro...
|
| 5 - https://www.souschef.co.uk/blogs/the-bureau-of-
| taste/recipe-...
| sva_ wrote:
| The maangchi recipe is really good and easy. I wish I could
| find tiny shrimp/saeujeot though.
| ARob109 wrote:
| I'm a first time kimchi maker, used the a Baechu ( napa cabbage
| ) Kimchi recipe from "Fiery Ferments" ISBN-13 978-1612127286
|
| Came out really good despite not having some of the ingredients
| because I'm disorganized (left out carrots, ginger, scallions).
| My Taiwanese neighbor suggested adding apple to sweeten it up a
| bit, cut the sour, and less Korean pepper flakes.. but I like
| mine spicy.
|
| Working on a second batch now.
|
| The book has a couple other kimchi recipes in addition to
| dozens of other fiery ferments.
| an_aparallel wrote:
| seconding Maangchi's site for all things korean food. As a
| Sydney-sider with an ability to sample tonnes of top-shelf
| Korean cooking from local restaurants - maangchi will get you
| cooking most Korean staples just as you get them from the
| restaurants :)
| aeturnum wrote:
| The use of Kimchi as a method of cultural outreach and cultural
| expression is really interesting (and ofc kimchi is delicious).
| My favorite detail is that South Korea funded development of a
| version of Kimchi that was appropriate for space[1].
|
| P.s. another very Korean detail in that story is that Yi So-yeon,
| the first Korean astronaut, later left the program to pursue an
| MBA.
|
| [1]
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/22/489805398/ho...
| anon115 wrote:
| https://pastebin.com/MeLTjuj1
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I miss the Kimchi quesadillas and tacos of Koreatown...
|
| It's largely ultra gentrified into just being another over priced
| neighborhood, but back in 2010 it was something special...
| Loughla wrote:
| Which koreatown?
|
| The small koreatown in STL is still very original. I have to
| take my Korean cousin, otherwise I don't get service.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Mexican fusion sounds very Los Angeles to me, a la Kogi:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_Korean_BBQ
| Ilasky wrote:
| I was in South Korea for about 3 months earlier this year and
| went in absolutely loving kimchi. But what surprised me was how
| much a meal is determined by the type of kimchi that's available.
|
| For example, fresh kimchi is best with boiled pork belly, while a
| more sour kimchi is better for stew. And then there's this "peak"
| kimchi for eating by itself -- it's tremendous when it's
| homemade.
|
| Can't wait to go back to SK and, if you haven't had it, I highly
| recommend finding some kimchi & pork belly. It's an unbeatable
| combo.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'd be afraid to make my own kimchi because it uses seafoods. Who
| knows if I made it correctly till I find out if it lands me to
| the hospital
| tpm wrote:
| The only seafood you really have to use (and if you are making
| vegan then even that is not needed but the taste will suffer)
| is those special anchovies which are frozen and salted so I'm
| not worried (making kimchi myself from time to time). The only
| really important thing is that the result has enough salt in
| it, but recipes make sure to drive this point home.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I'm non Korean, but I've made Napa cabbage kimchi a couple of
| times following instructions from the internet0]. The seafood
| is optional. I used fish sauce, but that's it. It came out
| fantastic, and I encourage you to try it! Her video that
| accompanies the recipe is worth watching too.
|
| [0] https://www.maangchi.com/recipe/easy-kimchi
| antiraza wrote:
| For anyone who passes through Seoul, the Kimchi Museum
| (https://www.kimchikan.com/en/) is pretty fun. It's small, but
| very inviting and informational in terms of the diversity of
| methods and ingredients, the cultural impacts and the science.
| They do classes as well, and it's all quite kid friendly.
| balls187 wrote:
| Palace BBQ in Crossroads Bellevue has okay KBBQ, but their kimchi
| is one of the better ones you can get here (and thats comparing
| to the places in Fed. Way)
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