'Tis the Season

It's currently kimchi making season in Korea, where it seems like every mother and grandmother in the country are spending their weekends creating vast batches of the Korean staple to help see them through the winter.

It's traditional to do so at this time of year due to the fact that freshly made kimchi was once buried in the ground in huge pots over the winter - the specific temperatures being a vital part of the fermentation process.
The advent of electricity changed all this of course, and any Korean household worth its salt has its own kimchi fridge these days - huge chest-style refrigerators, the sole purpose of which is the storing of kimchi at specific, regulated temperatures.

We arrived at Lucy's Aunt's house to the sight of the giant container in the picture above. The mixture inside already contained an amazing array of ingredients including apples, pears and turnips, as well as tiny fermented salted shrimp, dried red peppers and powdered lotus flower root.
As wierd as this lot sounds it smelled pretty great, and I watched with interest as Lucy's Mother added a pre-prepared mixture of fish, garlic and ginger, plus rice paste, seaweed and sesame seeds.
Some of these ingredients, or the amounts thereof, are very specific to the Gwangju region - a good example being the raw oyters that were added at the end. Gwangju kimchi is generally regarded as the best in the country, and is usually created with much greater complexity than that made in other parts of Korea.

Once all the ingredients were fully mixed together, and blended to perfection by a process of constant tasting and tweaking, the paste was slathered generously onto each individual leaf of a large batch of Korean cabbage (known generally in the West as Chinese cabbage), and the cabbages then packed tightly into storage boxes to be refrigerated and fermented over the winter.
Some kimchi was kept aside to be eaten immediately, which we devoured with boiled pork in a delicious lunch that was not disimilar to bossam.
We also took a batch of the fresh stuff home, and have already used it to make kimchi fried rice with tuna - a quick and simple lunch and one of my favourites.


PS: Korean food blips are now tagged.