not really cooking per se. but i friggin love kimchee.
there was this incredibly mediocre Mongolian BBQ place nearby--before the concept restaurants latched on to it.
then, one day a friend of mine says: the people who own it are Korean--they have a Korean menu on the side. and the place was incredible once you knew that. they didn't give a fuck about mongolian BBQ.
they also sold mason jars of the hottest, best homemade kimchee i've ever had. it WAS spicy for a gringo. it was incredible. you were snarling like Highway to Hell was on the radio and loving it.
i've been buying some "high" quality jarred stuff at the "gourmet markets" or oriental markets......but nothing compares to that family stuff. the market stuff is not spicy at all.
best thing ever: is one day, the family mom who is usually very dour and speaks almost no english: says to me: "yoo likkeee kimmchheeee". smiles really wide.
Kimchee
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I love kimchee. I used to go buy it at a korean restaurant in my hometown. The chick who made it there used to pack it into mason jars and bury it in the ground in the winter. I went to buy it from her one time and she warned me. "Ground frozen all last two week. Kimchee stay in ground too long. It still good, but garlic....uh...(she gestures as if to show it coming out your pores)...uh...you eat, you take two shower per day." BWAHAHAHA. Man, was that stuff good, but she was right...it came right out my pores.
I also had a korean friend of mine whose mom showed me how to make the stuff because she knew I liked it so much.
Basically, you get a couple heads of napa cabbage and tear up and trim the leaves until they're a nice kimchee size. Take about a quarter cup of kosher salt, or enough to coat each piece of lettuce well, and mix the cabbage around in a salad bowl until the salt is evenly distributed. Slice up four or five cloves of garlic length-wise and toss them in with the lettuce so they are coated with salt also. Pack all of this into the biggest jar you've got and put it in the fridge overnight (at least 8 hours). The next day, drain off any of the liquid that has leeched out of the cabbage. DO NOT rinse the cabbage off. Most of the salt is in the liquid that you dumped down the drain.
Here is the part that I couldn't handle... Koreans now take a 2 Qt sauce pan and bring it to a boil. To it, they add one Tbsp of fish sauce. You can get this at just about any oriental market. It's basically ground up, cooked-down, concentrated fish lips and anuses and smells gawdawful. You let that boil for a minute or so and then take 1 Tbsp out of the sauce pan and put it in a mixing bowl. To that you add 1 cup of rice wine vinegar (not the cheap ass store brand white vinegar!), 1 cup of water and a pinch of sugar. Mix well and taste it. It should be vinegary, but not destroy your tongue, either. Add chili pepper flakes (make sure they're the korean kind used in kimchee) to the water mixture, mix them in and add the liquid to the jar. Put the jar back in the fridge for a minimum of three days.
It doesn't taste like "real" kimchee without the fish sauce added in, but I just couldn't stand the way it stank up the whole house. It's still very good without it.
Apologies for not having more exact ingredients, but the way I was shown was "some of this, some of that, taste it and adjust."
I also had a korean friend of mine whose mom showed me how to make the stuff because she knew I liked it so much.
Basically, you get a couple heads of napa cabbage and tear up and trim the leaves until they're a nice kimchee size. Take about a quarter cup of kosher salt, or enough to coat each piece of lettuce well, and mix the cabbage around in a salad bowl until the salt is evenly distributed. Slice up four or five cloves of garlic length-wise and toss them in with the lettuce so they are coated with salt also. Pack all of this into the biggest jar you've got and put it in the fridge overnight (at least 8 hours). The next day, drain off any of the liquid that has leeched out of the cabbage. DO NOT rinse the cabbage off. Most of the salt is in the liquid that you dumped down the drain.
Here is the part that I couldn't handle... Koreans now take a 2 Qt sauce pan and bring it to a boil. To it, they add one Tbsp of fish sauce. You can get this at just about any oriental market. It's basically ground up, cooked-down, concentrated fish lips and anuses and smells gawdawful. You let that boil for a minute or so and then take 1 Tbsp out of the sauce pan and put it in a mixing bowl. To that you add 1 cup of rice wine vinegar (not the cheap ass store brand white vinegar!), 1 cup of water and a pinch of sugar. Mix well and taste it. It should be vinegary, but not destroy your tongue, either. Add chili pepper flakes (make sure they're the korean kind used in kimchee) to the water mixture, mix them in and add the liquid to the jar. Put the jar back in the fridge for a minimum of three days.
It doesn't taste like "real" kimchee without the fish sauce added in, but I just couldn't stand the way it stank up the whole house. It's still very good without it.
Apologies for not having more exact ingredients, but the way I was shown was "some of this, some of that, taste it and adjust."
I would imagine you would use about 2 qt of water (maybe less?).Trampis wrote:What is IT?Whats in the sauce pan that you bring to a boil initialy and how much of IT is there?Variable wrote:Here is the part that I couldn't handle... Koreans now take a 2 Qt sauce pan and bring it to a boil. To it, they add one Tbsp of fish sauce.
Thanks :)
But that's just a WAG.
