Introduction to Kimchi

Kimchi is one of the easiest and most versatile Korean side dishes that you can make. It’s basically a spicy pickled vegetable. You salt the vegetable, add the spices, and mix. But for some reason we can't find a good simple kimchi recipe online.

On Youtube.com, we've come across some of the weirdest recipes all calling themselves "authentic" or "traditional." Adding vinegar to your kimchi is not authentic. Pouring anything warm let alone hot onto a fresh mound of Napa cabbage is not only a bad idea, if our Korean moms saw you do that, they'd punch you in the face.

And while Google.com provides you with every possible variation of kimchi, it’s unfortunately just that. Wading through pages and pages of random recipes is not the best use of one’s time.

Finally there’s the cookbook. We went through both Korean and Korean-English cookbooks trying out each and every recipe. The Korean-English versions we encountered were incredibly inconsistent. And while some of the Korean language cookbooks we read were great, it really wasn’t going to be much use to someone who can’t read the language.

We’re not advocating that we are providing the best kimchi recipes online, or that our videos will be the best you see. We are sure there are good videos and recipes out there but what we wanted to do was deconstruct, demystify and simply the process for the everyday person.

Based on this goal, we spoke with our moms who are veteran kimchi makers but they could not stop using words like 'pinch', 'handful', and my favorite 'appropriate amount' to describe their kimchi recipes so we went through hours and hours of videos, recipes, and books, complied all the information and are presenting them in a way which will hopefully turn kimchi making from a foreign concept into something that you can do any time, any day, in any kitchen in the world.

Finally, you will notice that these recipes have been reduced in volume. All the kimchi recipes we encountered required large amounts of ingredients. While an average Korean family might go through several servings of kimchi in a single day, many don't. Therefore, we reduced the volume to make it more manageable.