Learning Kimchi 💥 🍲 Fermented foods.

Today’s post is about Korean food because I got excited looking @slowwalker’s pics of food from the south of Korea.

I’ve only eaten authentic Korean food once in a restaurant in Massachusetts and who knows how authentic it was (Indian food cooked by my Indian friends is quite unlike the Indian food we have in UK restaurants) ... but it was delicious and certainly different to anything I’d tasted before.

I love the tangy, salty fermented flavours and the many, many small side dishes.

Recently, perhaps because we’ve been having a Korean drama immersion in our house this past year, my daughters have become very interested in Korean food and we tried to make our own kimchi. We used cayenne pepper and it was incredibly hot and not nearly as beautiful and red as the kimchi we were trying to make. Today I’ve done my research and discovered Koreans use a chile called gochugaru, which is milder and gives some of their dishes the beautiful redness. I managed to source some in the UK and now we are planning a new batch.

It’s not gone to waste tho as just a tablespoon of it entirely transforms some simple stir fried veggies.

(I’m far from an expert at food photography!)

We’ve been using Chinese cabbage and any radishes we can get hold of as additions to our stir fries but it is time to learn more and create some Korean food (rather than some generic mishmash of ‘stirfry’, though it was delicious!

I’ve been book shopping and I might share some of our successes and maybe some of our failures!

Kimchi, in particular is a fermented food. Although it starts off with vegetables in a brine, the fermenting process produces lactic acid & a bunch of lactic acid fermenting bacteria that you need to promote in your gut. So, it’s good for your health ... not just because it’s made with alkalising vegetables to the most part but also because it’s a probiotic.

Better still, it’s a taste bud explosion 💥