skinnyminilinny's Journal, 15 Oct 19

Please let me know how it goes! Can you take pics? I love kimchi, but I'm scared to make it myself. The good stuff is SO expensive at the store. 

Binkytexas, we have been making this for years. I am going by memory on the kimchi. Two bags of pre-shredded cabbage for coleslaw. (We buy the kind at Walmart that has the carrot and red cabbage in it). Next we get one large napa cabbage, 10-12 red radishes, 1 green and red pepper, 5 garlic cloves, an inch of ginger peeled and sliced thin, six or eight sliced green onions, all these items need to be cut up in bite-size pieces. We put all the cabbages in a bowl and take a pounder and pound it really good to get the juice to come out. You have to sprinkle sea salt on it while you're pounding. Once you've pounded it real well you put a cover on it and let it sit overnight. The next day you rinse the salt off the cabbage and drain the water real good. And then you add all the other vegetables and the seasonings (1 tbsp chili powder, 10 peppercorns, 1 tbsp of red pepper flakes). Stir in the seasonings and add some fermented starter for vegetables (I buy a box of that on Amazon as well) stir the whole batch over and over and then let the whole thing sit a couple more days. Then we put all of the kimchi into two big 1/2 gal mason jars with the fermented lids (which I also got on Amazon) and let it sit about 5 more days on the countertop. It's delicious! The initial investment for the jars and the lids, the starter and the vegetables can be a little pricey, but after that you use it over and over. Your next batch you just drain out a little bit of the juice from the first batch and start over. You use the jars over and over and you use the lids over and over and there are five packets of starter per box. It's like making kombucha. Once you get the first batch you take a cup of that out to start the second batch, and you use the scoby over and over. There's a lot of information on the internet. and YouTube if you're interested or you can ask me more questions if you're confused about what I say. 

I did take pictures but I don't know what happened to them. I thought they were with my recipe post as an answer to your question. We've been making kimchi for years and we can't live without it. It is delicious and we eat it everyday. When we run low we just make it again. 

What green and red peppers (bell peppers)? Any brand of starter/ fermented lids you prefer? I truly appreciate your taking the time to write all of that down. I wrote it down too! THANKS 

Don't stress over the pics. I've had kimchi before and I'm sure I can find pics online. If I have problems finding them, I'll let you know. 

BinkyTexas, they are bell peppers and I'm going to try and get a picture of the Amazon vegetable cultures and load them on here. 

Binky Texas they are called The Cutting Edge cultures. I did get a picture and I don't know where it's going to show up. But if you go on Amazon and put in vegetable fermenting cultures. It'll pull up a bunch of different brands and this one will say Amazon's favorite or something like that and it's like $22 for the Box. Line of lasted forever I don't use a hole packet each time. I may use just a few sprinkles if I have a cup of the prior kimchi in my recipe. For the first time you might want to use at least a half a packet. It would ferment on its own without any culture, but I'd put the culture in to make it faster.