Kimchi is a national dish of Korean cuisine. It is used as a snack, and without it it is generally difficult to imagine any meal in this country. There are many different recipes for making kimchi from Peking cabbage, because each family brings something special here.
What is kimchi
This dish is a special way salted vegetables. This, of course, is cabbage with various additives. Since the products are not heat treatable, they retain a large amount of vitamins. And as a result of fermentation processes, special bacteria are also formed, which are very useful for the proper functioning of the stomach and intestines. Kimchi cabbage should be spicy.
Product selection
To cook this appetizer you will need Beijing cabbage. It should be more than other vegetables. Add carrots, broccoli, daikon. And, of course, spices that will determine the unique taste of kimchi from Beijing cabbage. For the sauce use ginger root, garlic, chili pepper, onions, coriander, red hot pepper. Usually they add fish sauce or shrimp paste to this dish - specific Korean dressings. According to some recipes, shrimp themselves, pineapple pulp, sesame, chestnuts, pear, seaweed, oysters are put here.
Product Preparation
First you need to salt the cabbage. To do this, take a sufficiently large head of cabbage and cut into two or four parts in length. The resulting parts are placed in a container and filled with brine, obtained by dissolving two tablespoons of salt in a liter of boiled water. Salt will dissolve better if the liquid is hot. But for pouring you need to use chilled brine. If vegetables are supposed to be added, they must be salted with cabbage. Water should cover products a little, and from above it is necessary to put oppression. All this will be salted for two days in a warm place, not in the refrigerator.
Pickling
After two days, you need to prepare the kimchi sauce from Beijing cabbage. To do this, chopped red pepper (1-2 pieces) and garlic (5 cloves), grind in a mortar, in a meat grinder or a blender, add a teaspoon of coriander, grated ginger root. Rinse salted vegetables from brine and squeeze. Cut cabbage into small squares to fit in the mouth, and everything else - in thin strips. Mix all the products with the sauce and put away again in a warm place, where they should spend a few more days. It will be possible to eat the result already on the third day, but for long-term storage it is better to pickle kimchi from Beijing cabbage for another two days, so that it turns out at least five. Then you can put the dish in the refrigerator (if you stay, of course). Koreans themselves usually prepare kimchi in a slightly different way: they cut a head of cabbage in half, salt it, then bend the leaves one by one and coat with the sauce. Collect half of the cabbage back and marinate in this form, and cut right before serving. With this method, the snack turns out to be much more beautiful, but you need to be well-versed in how much sauce to smear on each sheet, and to have a certain knack. And they store the finished dish right on the street in front of the house or in a special room.
Cooking kimchi is quite simple, although it will take a lot of time. And the finished dish will delight both guests and owners. Especially if they are spicy food lovers.