Trying my hand at making kimchi

The first time I ever heard of kimchi (or kim chee, as it's sometimes spelled) was in the excellent 90's TV series "Northern Exposure" (IMDB link). Maurice Minnifield's character got a jar of it from his Korean son. What I learned about kimchi from that episode was that it was made of cabbage, "smells like an old pair of gym shoes" and that that particular batch had been buried in the back garden for four months. The image that this conjured up was that a head of cabbage had just been buried and left to rot for four months. It certainly didn't sound appetising.

A few years later, when I travelled to Japan, I got to taste kimchi for myself for the first time. Despite the image I had of how it was made, I was still keen to try some. I'd already eaten plenty of strange (to me) foods in Japan and found that I liked the taste of most things, even things like "nattou" (fermented beans) that are definitely a bit of an acquired taste. The combination of sour, spicy and crunchy cabbage certainly didn't match my expectation of "rotten cabbage" (it's actually fermented, as I learned later) and it soon became a favourite of mine. Although it's a Korean food, the Japanese also eat quite a lot of kimchi, along with loads of other pickled and fermented foods. I guess that it's a mark of how popular it is that instead of saying "cheese" when posing for a photo, the Japanese say "kimchi" instead.

It's been around 20 years since I left Japan and in that time I can only recall having kimchi once since then, in the Yamamori Japanese restaurant in George's Street in Dublin. As much as I'd been looking forward to it, I didn't actually like their version that much. It might have been quite authentic (I've never had anything there that wasn't top quality and as good as anything I ate in Japan), but I found that it had too much dry heat and that the cabbage was too fresh—it could definitely have done with more fermentation, I thought.

Anyway, all of this is just by way of introduction—the backstory behind why I was keen to plant napa cabbage and why I was looking forward to harvesting it so much. In order to keep these posts "bite-sized" (like a nice kimchi, perhaps?) I'll continue with a couple of separate posts—one on what kimchi is exactly and how it's made, the other on my first foray into making it myself.