Easy Homemade Kimchi
Crisp, tangy napa cabbage kimchi you can make at home with simple ingredients. It gets better every day and keeps for weeks. Kimchi is the backbone of the Korean table — eaten with rice, stirred into stews, fried with pork — and the salting step is what separates crisp kimchi from limp kimchi. Salt pulls the water out of the cabbage first, so the paste seasons it instead of being watered down.
Prep time30 min
Cook time0 min
Total time30 min
Servings12 servings
DifficultyEasy
Ingredients
- 1 large napa cabbage (about 1.5kg)
- 1/2 cup coarse salt
- 3 tbsp rice flour
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 cup gochugaru (Korean chili flakes)
- 1/4 cup fish sauce
- 6 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 tbsp minced ginger
- 4 spring onions, cut into pieces
Instructions
- 1Cut the cabbage into quarters lengthways, then into bite-size pieces. Keep the core — it stays the crunchiest part and plenty of people go looking for it.
- 2Toss the cabbage with the coarse salt, using your hands to work it into every layer. Leave for 1.5-2 hours, turning it over once at the halfway point.
- 3The cabbage is ready when a thick piece bends without snapping. Rinse it well under cold water, two or three changes, then drain it thoroughly — standing water will dilute the paste.
- 4Make the paste: whisk the rice flour into a cup of water and bring it to a simmer for 2-3 minutes until it thickens into a thin glue. Let it cool completely before it meets the chili.
- 5Mix the cooled porridge with the sugar, gochugaru, fish sauce, garlic, ginger and spring onions to make a thick, deep red paste.
- 6Put on gloves if you have them and toss the cabbage with the paste, working it in leaf by leaf until every piece is coated.
- 7Pack it into a clean jar, pressing down firmly with your fist or the back of a spoon to push out trapped air, and leave about 2cm of headspace at the top.
- 8Leave at room temperature for 1-2 days to ferment, then refrigerate. You will see bubbles and smell the sour tang when it is working.
Tips
- Taste after a day and refrigerate when it reaches the tang you like.
- Use glass or plastic containers — metal can react with the ferment.
- It will keep for weeks in the fridge and gets more sour over time.
- Open the jar once a day for the first two days to let the gas escape, otherwise the brine will push its way out over the rim.
- When it eventually turns too sour to eat raw, do not throw it out. Fry it with pork belly and a pinch of sugar, or chop it into a stew — very sour kimchi is exactly what Korean cooking wants.
