Napa Kimchi with Fish Sauce

Early in the summer, I was able to grow three decent napa cabbages. They were really chewed up by slugs but decent regardless so I decided to make kimchi.  And do it the old fashioned way.  :-P 

I used a recipe found here: Maangchi. 

I really like a lot of her recipes except for the salt content.  I used her recipe for Korean red pepper paste (go chu jang) and found it to be way salty, which is my only issue with the paste.  For the most part, the paste has great flavor and right now, I use it for cooking mostly so I won't have to add additional salt to whatever I'm cooking.  This kimchi recipe was great but I highly recommend reducing the amount of Korean pepper powder by a quarter unless you really like it spicy. I reduced it by half and it was way too spicy still. Also, I didn't have radishes at that time so I used carrots, which I really loved!

The carrots and chives (buchu) came from the garden!!  I also only added 1 cup of salt instead of the 1 1/2 cups.  Beyond these minor changes, I followed the recipe.  I generally don't like fishy kimchi, but the fish sauce really mellowed out and produced a great flavor. I also recommend buying latex gloves to spread the kimchi sauce in between the cabbage leaves.  Double up the latex gloves if you can because the hot pepper paste can burn through the gloves eventually.  Believe me, get some gloves!  It is so painful without the gloves!!

After spreading the paste and stuffing my jar with freak'n spicy, bloody red cabbages, I couldn't use the left over pepper paste to make the radish kimchi so I saved it in a jar for later use which was great for perilla kimchi!  See next post. :-)