Usually, this dish is served in a sizzling hot pot at a restaurant, ideally after hours of slow cooking so the aubergine and mince pork practically melt into one within the fragrant salted fish sauce.
In order to replicate this at home, you would have to be able to find Chinese salted fish (鹹魚) and have a ceramic pot that you can get up to a searingly hot temperature. Not to mention time.
I came across this Lee Kum Kee sauce satchet for this dish and you know what, it wasn’t bad at all! All you needed was pork mince and aubergines (pre boiled) and simply add the sauce mix. I added about a tbsp of light soy sauce and a tbsp of fish sauce to the mix and it turned out quite well.
Nice, quick dinner dish, perfect with a bowl of rice.
My other half and I have been eating a lot of kimchi lately so I thought I’d give it a go myself. I don’t know much about Korean food but it’s definitely a cuisine that I’ve wanted to find out more about for a while as it’s always so delicious whenever I get a chance to eat it. My husband was recently given a copy of Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking. As with any cookbooks he’s been given (including Snoop Doggs’ – the fried chicken looks delicious) , I’m usually the one getting the most out of them!
I had not come across Maangchi before but this book introduced me to her blog of her mouth-watering Korean home dishes. I was also pleased to read that she is a fellow gamer and that’s where her name came from.
Anyway, I decided to give her kimchee receipe a go once I found a few mason jars.
Pre-salting
Salted
I used 4 small chinese cabbages as I was unable to get Napa cabbages that Maangchi recommended. As you’ll see, the salting process really does shrink the cabbages quite a bit. The 4 cabbages filled 4 x 950ml mason jars so hopefully that will help you work out how much you want to make. The rinsing off of the salt once you have salted the cabbage was quite a time consuming step and doing on a cold day with the running water didn’t help. But I tried to squeeze the water out of each quarter of the cabbage as much as possible because I didn’t want any excess water to be in my kimchi as I understood the fermenting process will draw any further water out from the cabbage as it is. I even used a clean tea towel to soak off any excess water once I squeezed the cabbage.
The kimchi paste was a bit fiddly and I probably could have used the food processor next time rather than hand mashing the garlic, ginger and onions. My newly purchased mandolin (and finger guard!) really speeded up the match-sticking process of the radish and carrots though.
The kimchi paste smelled so delicious as I was smearing it amongst each leaf I had to stop myself from devouring most it! I had made kimchi once before when I visited Korea years ago (only the smearing paste on the cabbage part mind), so I remembered that it was important to get the paste down to the stems of each leaf before folding the quarters back together again. Once they were in the jars, they were ready to ferment!
Kimchi paste
What would I change next time? I’d probably think about using the food processor for some of the bits for the paste. I’d also think about pre-cutting the cabbages before smearing the paste on, although the leaves may not hold the paste as well when they’re cut. I’ll see once this batch has been tried and eaten!
Now we wait…
Scroll Up
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
