Steps for Making Homemade Kimchi

​Hello, hello, welcome to The Dish, I'm Natasha Ho, and today I want to talk about one of my absolute favorite things to eat. But one of the things that took me, a really long time to start making at home, and that is kimchi. I did not actually make kimchi for myself until just recently. I was friends with a woman who's based in Seoul, another chef in Seoul, and she encouraged me to get into the kitchen and make my own kimchi.

And so I did a private session with her. And actually that was a masterclass that I did with my private cooking group. And after that, my eyes were completely open. I realized I'd been wasting time this whole time, being intimidated by the idea of making this dish, because I thought I was going to take me a really long time. So I wrote down a couple of notes here for myself so I could actually talk to you about how what you have to do and how long each of those steps takes.

So the first thing in making your kimchi is chopping up your cabbage and the radish. That process probably going to take you about 10 minutes to chop everything up. And then you want to add salt to everything in order to help pull  the excess water, out of the cabbage and the radish. So that's step one. We're about we're up to 10 minutes.

The next step is you want to let those things rest for two to three hours and then you're going to come back intermittently to kind of toss it and make sure that the water and the salt is thoroughly covering everything, and the water is being pulled out. So another five minutes or so for each of those times you're going to come back during that two to three hour period.

Next step, you're going to blend up all of your aromatics. So your spices and your pepper, onion, all of those things, you're going to stick those in a food processor, run the food processor together. So another five minutes or so just to chop up everything so it fits in the food processor. And then you'll wiz it away which will go super, super fast. So now we're adding another five minutes.

Next thing you're going to do is you're going to make a porridge out of water and sweet rice flour. This is in order to feed the bacteria as your kimchi is fermenting, it needs something to eat. So this is going to help make sure it has something to eat. If you made sourdough you know what I'm talking about. So we're going to add another five minutes or so for making your porridge.

The second to last thing you're going to do is you're going to mix everything together. So you're going to add the aromatics, the porridge, the cabbage as well as the radish all together. So I'm going to say that takes about two and a half minutes or so to mix everything together.

And then finally, you're going to pack it into a container, a glass container, so you can store it until it is fermented and ready to eat. So another two and a half minutes for that.

So all in. We've hit about thirty minutes to make your kimchi at home.So even faster than you could probably drive to the store and pick up a fresh batch of kimchi. You can make some at home not counting the two or three hours that it's going to sit, which is in active time. So just remember, that's inactive time. And then a couple of days that we'll need to sit inside of your refrigerator to continue fermenting. And at the end of less than a week, you will have a delicious homemade kimchi sitting in your refrigerator to enjoy.

So there's not going to take as long as you may have thought. As long as I thought, definitely. So I wanted to let you know that in case you're thinking about making kimchi at home, and you wanted to know what's involved. That is what it takes to make kimchi at home. I'll see you next time, bye.