Recipe: Shortcut on how to make homemade Korean Kimchi
MANILA, Philippines — There is no sense denying it. Pinoys are simply hooked on everything Korean. After succumbing to the charm of K-pop, particularly in music, dance, and TV shows, Pinoys have turned to — and fallen in love with — Korean food.
This includes Korean meal staples, such as Kimchi, which is a side dish made with salted and fermented vegetables, most often napa cabbage, and is often substituted with Baguio pechay.
While there are many Korean grocery stores around and they all carry ready-to-eat kimchi products in bottles and tubs, Pinoys like to venture into making their own Kimchi. It can be a tedious process, though. But there is a way to be able to make homemade Kimchi without much effort.
The shortcut is to use ready-made Kimchi sauce so you only need to work on the cabbage. There are now Kimchi sauces that can be bought off the shelves of grocery stores, especially Korean grocery stores.
One such convenience product is Bibimbud Original Kimchi Sauce, an all-purpose sauce that Pinoys can use in recipes that require Kimchi or Kimchi sauce, such as Kimchi Fried Rice.
Good as a dip, spread, marinade, or dressing, it comes in 250-gram pouches so it can be used for multiple purposes.
Procedure:
1. To make Kimchi with ready-to-use Kimchi sauce, simply separate the leaves of one (1) kilogram of Baguio pechay. Wash well.
2. Stack up the leaves and cut in half vertically to make two almost identical halves. Slice off rough white edge of the leaves. Discard. Then start slicing horizontally into 1/2- to 1-inch thick strips all the way to the top.
3. Place in a bowl and add salt. Let stand and allow cabbage to absorb the “saltiness” of the salt for 1 hour.
4. Drain off water. Press or squeeze pechay leaves and let excess water drip off.
5. Add paste-like Kimchi sauce to the pechay leaves and mix well. It starts to ferment at this point.
6. Transfer to a jar, refrigerate, and consume as needed. When getting a portion of the Kimchi from the jar, make sure you use a dry spoon so the rest does not get contaminated.
