Hello, hello! Welcome back to another post on my food blog. Happy National Cabbage Day! Today, I’m sharing with you a very special recipe.. my long awaited.. the very Best Cabbage Kimchi recipe! This one pays special respect and honors to my mom and grandma who have spent the past 3 – 4 decades perfecting their craft of making Kimchi. That’s a LOT of kimchi made during that time. And of course as always, they don’t really go by any sort of recipe or exact measurements. It’s really just sort of a “손맛” that they’ve developed over time.
Therefore, I’ve spent the last few years, since maybe 2015, just hanging around my mom and grandma and helping them every time they made kimchi. I was able to learn a lot and have developed this recipe for you to be able to easily follow and replicate almost the same quality of kimchi that my mom makes.
Mom’s Touch
“손맛” or “엄마의손맛” means “Mom’s Taste” or “Taste of the hand” in Korean. It can mean a lot of different things to different people. To me, it symbolizes my roots and flavors that I’ve grown up eating and loving. It reminds me of home: the taste that can’t really be reproduced just anywhere. It’s almost as if, the actual physical hands have a sort of flavor that is imparted onto the dishes. And so, my mom’s and grandma’s touch is that special to me and has led me to share this recipe with you all today. It’s my attempt to immortalize their kimchi-making craft and to give it the respect that it’s due.
Variations
There are so many different variations of Kimchi that you can make: baechu (cabbage) kimchi, baek kimchi (white), kkakdugi (radish), chonggak kimchi (ponytail radish), oi kimchi (cucumber), buchu kimchi (chives) and more. Personally, I have a hard time picking which one is my favorite. I love ALL of them! Haha. Each of them has a distinct flavor and texture. But, there’s one commonality that brings them all together: the sauce.
Kimchi Sauce
The sauce is commonly made up of some ratio or combination of gochugaru, garlic, ginger, salt, and sugar. There are other ingredients added for extra flavor and contrast that is specific to each dish. For instance, my mom’s baechu kimchi (Cabbage) consists of the above mentioned ingredients plus:
- onions
- fuji apple
- fish sauce
- 새우젓 or shrimp jeot (salted fermented shrimp)
- scallions/leeks
- chives
My mom also adds “갓” or mustard greens into her cabbage kimchi specifically for the winter. Still to this day, I really don’t know the exact reason why she is so adamant about putting this in during the winter. I’m thinking maybe it has to do with the season that it’s commonly grown in?
If I were to describe it, it adds a nice layer of bitterness which really helps to round out and cut into the richness/sweetness of the kimchi. It’s simply delicious. She also adds raw oysters or squid into the kimchi sauce during the winter. I absolutely love this seafood taste, and it only happens during winter so it won’t go bad outside during fermentation.
Kimchi is so delicious. You don’t even have to be Korean to enjoy it. My Italian and Indian co-workers absolutely LOVE kimchi. I made them each a batch and they devoured it. It’s not only lavish in flavor, but it’s also full of health benefits as well! [There’s an interesting article on the New York Times that I read a few months ago that finally acknowledges this fact]. Do check it out if you’re a glass-half-empty kinda guy like me, haha.
Kimchi is versatile as well. You can use it in so many different ways and incorporate it in many different dishes; serve it traditionally as a side dish or incorporate it as a star ingredient in an entreé, like Kimchi Jjigae or Kimchi Fried Rice. Anyways, enough babbling, let’s get to it! The BEST Napa Cabbage Kimchi you will ever taste. Set aside 3-4 hours of your time, and I promise an eternity of happiness, figuratively speaking. Hehe.
Napa Cabbage – We’re using Napa Cabbage for this recipe for obvious reasons 🙂
Coarse Salt – to season Napa Cabbage
Onions – Base for the sauce
Sweet Rice Flour – To prepare porridge-like vehicle for the sauce
Fuji Apple – Adds acidity and sweetness
Garlic & Ginger – Absolutely crucial aromatics
Saewoo (shrimp) Jeot – Provides a nice salty fermented and umami flavor for the sauce
Fish Sauce – Provides umami flavor
Sugar – added sweetness
Gochugaru – for obvious reasons (spicy kick and red color)
Radish – for the filling & texture
Scallions/Chives – for extra texture and freshness
The BEST Cabbage Kimchi
This recipe is my translation/interpretation of my mom’s/grandma’s recipe that they’ve been using for decades! It’s proven to be the most delicious you’ll ever have!
Ingredients
- For Cabbage Kimchi
- 2.5-3 lbs Napa Cabbage, cut into quarters lengthwise (or may slice up into smaller bite-sized pieces for quicker wilting)
- 1/3-1/4 cup coarse salt (depending on size of Napa Cabbage)
- 12 cups cold water (enough to soak cabbages)
- For Kimchi Sauce
- 1/2 cup sweet rice flour (may substitute with AP flour or even cooked rice)
- 3 cups water
- 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
- 1 fuji apple, cored and chopped (peel on)
- 5 large cloves garlic, whole
- 1 tbsp ginger, whole
- 2 tbsp granulated white sugar (sweet n low for special diet needs)
- 1/3 cup shrimp jeot (may add more, as needed)
- For Filling
- 1 Korean Radish, chopped into matchsticks
- 1 long leek or bundle of scallions, chopped into 1-2″ pieces
- 1 bundle of chives, chopped into 2″ pieces (optional)
- 2/3 cup gochugaru (korean red pepper flakes)
- 1/3 cup fish sauce
- Salt, as needed
Instructions
First chop your Napa Cabbage in half lengthwise (only chop about 2/3 of the way and then rip it in half using your hands). Repeat the chop exactly the same way into quarters lengthwise. (You can slice each cabbage quarter at this point into smaller pieces if you’d like. Doing so will make the wilting process a lot quicker: 30-60 min. But, I personally like to leave it in quarters and slice it later myself after the kimchi is fermented and ready to use).
Place the cabbages into a large mixing bowl or basin. Take coarse salt by hand and pour little by little onto each cabbage quarters (closer to the root). Lay out all the salted cabbages flat on the bottom surface of the mixing bowl. Pour in enough cold water to just soak your cabbages (~12-14 cups). Then, sprinkle the rest of the salt on top. Press down and cover with lid and set aside for about 3 hours.
For the Kimchi sauce, start by preparing a porridge-like base by heating up 1/2 cup sweet rice flour and 3 cups of water for about 5 minutes. Stir constantly with whisk or spoon and keep your eyes on it to make sure there are no lumps of flour formed. As my mom likes to describe it, the finished product should look like glue. Set aside to cool off while you make the rest of the sauce.
In a large blender or processor, add in your garlic, ginger, shrimp jeot, sugar, onions, and fuji apple. Blend it all up until a nice, smooth and evenly dispersed mixture is formed. Set that aside.
For the filling, let’s peel, rinse and chop up our Korean Radish into matchsticks. Start by slicing the radish crosswise to make thin circular pieces. Then from there, chop them into thin matchsticks (see video for demonstration). Place all radish sticks into a large mixing bowl. Add in your chopped scallions and chives. Pour in 2/3 cup of gochugaru (plus more based on spice tolerance) and your fish sauce. Wearing rubber or latex gloves, rub in the paste into the radish sticks until completely and evenly mixed.
After porridge is cooled enough, pour that into the radish filling mixture. Pour in your blended mixture as well. Mix it all together by hand. Taste and season as needed.
Take cabbage quarters and mix in the sauce/filling until fully covered. Then transfer over to a large airtight container. Close lid and leave it to ferment at room temperature for 1-2 days, then refrigerate. Or you can store it in refrigerator from the beginning for 3-4 days until fermented and ready to serve. Check back each day to see if water/bubbles are forming and open the lid to smell it. It should be a slightly sour odor, which is completely normal. That’s how you know that it’s fermented.
Slice it up and enjoy as a side dish or as an ingredient into an entreé! Yummmy.
Notes
There are so many forgiving parts to this kimchi making process. It’s easy to adjust how much of any ingredient you want to add by simply tasting it in the end and adding a little more of a specific ingredient. Also, my mom loves to split it into a 2-day process (mainly because she makes kimchi in bulk 20-30 lbs at a time). So she likes to do the wilting process the night before and then the rest in the morning. I’ve adapted it to make it simpler for the everyday home cook, like myself, who don’t have access to those large basins that Koreans use to make large batches of kimchi. Hope this was helpful in any way! Enjoy!
Please let me know what you think in the comments section below. And don’t forget to tag me on instagram @yang.yummm when you share your finished product!
Thank you! See you next time. Yummmy!
