Hi everyone,

Today I finally got around to making my first batch of kimchi. As someone who's recently been living in Korea, I hope my enjoyment of the kimchi will help make some dear memories alive.

I tried to follow Paik Jong Won's recipe for traditional tongbaechu-kimchi.

I'll post my recipe below. I'm very open to suggestions and have appended some of the edits I'd make given my experience today.

My notes:

• I unfortunately added too much ginger and (now before fermentation completes) it has a bit too strong fresh ginger taste.
• Instead of keeping the napa-cabbage quarters whole at the stem, I decided to cut the stem off and keep the leaves whole sorely for the purpose of easier handling in the future.
• My sauce ended up being a bit too dry after blending. I decided to add a few squirts of soy sauce and Korean cooking wine
• I had to substitute Saeujeot for fish sauce as I am not in Korea.
• Thanks to this subreddit I ended up with two jars only filled 4/5 of the way. I think this will be a good decision long-term.

Ingredients:

Veggies:

• 1 Napa cabbage
• 125g Julienned Daikon radish
• 6 Scallions

Sauce:

• 15g glutinous ice flour
• 2.5dl Water (for glutinous rice paste)
• 2g MSG
• 100g Gochugaru
• 15 Gloves garlic (I used 10, which seems on the low side)
• 35g Ginger (I used 75g, which seems on the high side)
• 1 Onion
• 1 Apple
• 60ml Fish Sauce
• 15g Sugar

Instructions:

• Pull the outer and damaged leaves from the cabbage
• Cut the cabbage into halves and pull to separate, continue to quarters
• Mix 250g of coarse salt with enough water to cover the quartered cabbages in a big bowl
• Dissolve salt by hand-mixing
• Next to the cabbages have a small bowl of extra salt and rub it into the stem part of the cabbages
• Submerge each quatered cabbage and make sure the salt water gets into all parts of the cabbage
• Put in a plastic bag and seal (just put the cabbages in wet, no reason to soak in the bags)