making kimchi

Late fall is kimchi season, and all I hear about from my students is how tired they are because their family made kimchi over the weekend. Since my culinary preferences have become fairly Korean, I've been intrigued by this sudden burst of kimchi stories.

Everybody is having kimchi parties! All the aunts, uncles, and cousins make a trip to grandma's house and make mass quantities of kimchi to last all of them for most of the upcoming year. I imagine mountains of kimchi from the way the students talk about it -- they have 15 family members helping, use 100-200 cabbages, complain of sore shoulders and backs for several days after.

I found out that not many people actually know how to make kimchi now -- grandma knows, but often not mothers, and rarely the daughters. I couldn't believe this, because the food is just short of a cultural obsession here. Realizing this made me want to learn how to make it more than ever, since it's sort of a dying art. Most kimchi is made in China and imported -- ironic, huh?

Then a student in one of the other classes that I've become friends with told me her family (just her mom, dad, and sister) would be making kimchi this weekend, and invited me along. Whooo! I was so excited: where and when would I ever learn to make kimchi again? And when would I get a chance to make such a colossal amount of anything?

So this afternoon I went to her family's apartment to see what this kimchi season is really all about. Her family was really funny and nice and since Ellie (the student) speaks English well and I've been learning more Korean lately, the language barrier wasn't even an issue. Really, I was in heaven.

As you can see, there's quite a bit of hot red pepper sauce and vegetables here...I was shocked by the size of these buckets! And I really didn't expect that much red pepper sauce -- where does it all come from?

It's made from crushed dried chili peppers, water, garlic, salt, sugar, boiled anchovies, miniature pickled shrimp, and I think some other stuff, but I don't remember it all.

To the red pepper sauce they added sliced radishes and some sort of leafy green (they didn't know the English name for it and I didn't recognize it) before putting it on the cabbage. While Mr. Oh (the dad) was mixing this sauce he was sweating a ton -- it was pretty thick and there was obviously a lot of it.

The cabbages in the buckets had been salted, rinsed, and wrung the day before. There were 50 in all -- you know, 4 people don't need too much kimchi.

Each cabbage had been cut into fourths. We took a fourth, put red pepper sauce between each leaf, bundled it up with the longest outer leaf, and packed it into the plastic bins you see stacked around. It wasn't that difficult, but the pile of cabbage just never ended. There was always another cabbage.


After I put in my quota of one large tub, they let me fill a little tub to bring home with me -- although this is actually a ton of kimchi. Good thing I like it.

The final product. They have two kimchi refrigerators, where they will keep all of this during the upcoming months.

So now my cultural identity is becoming blurred, as I look proudly the little bin of kimchi I made and anticipate all the kimchi jjigae I can make for many months to come. I told them I would be sure to make kimchi with my family when I go back to the States.