All Posts

Every post on Korean Table, grouped by topic, newest first within each topic. 43 in total.

Topics: Kimchi & Fermentation (10) · Ramyeon, Snacks & Drinks (5) · Food Science & Safety (7) · Sauces, Pantry & Substitutes (12) · Cooking, Dining & Holidays (7) · More (2)

Kimchi & Fermentation (10)

Ramyeon, Snacks & Drinks (5)

Food Science & Safety (7)

Sauces, Pantry & Substitutes (12)

Cooking, Dining & Holidays (7)

More (2)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kimchi Without Fish Sauce: What Replaces the Umami

Image
A 2021 study in the journal Foods tested whether tomato could stand in for the fish sauce Korean cooks use in kimchi. The tomato came out ahead. You can read the study yourself here . A hot-water tomato extract measured 33,328 mg/kg of glutamic acid, the compound behind savory umami taste, against 21,032 mg/kg for commercial anchovy fish sauce in the same test, roughly a third less. The tomato version also carried less salt, 1.13% versus 1.87%, and far fewer of the volatile compounds that give fish sauce its funk. It can. You're not chasing a lesser copy of the real thing here. Skipping fish sauce means replacing what it does in two ways. It builds a savory backbone into the paste, and it jumpstarts the fermentation. Why Most Kimchi Isn't Vegan to Begin With If you assumed kimchi was just cabbage, chili, and garlic, you're not alone. You're also not right. Traditional recipes, and most jars on a grocery shelf, lean on jeotgal — salted seafood, usually myeolchi-aekj...
Read more

Kimchi Probiotic Counts by Fermentation Stage

Image
Whether store-bought kimchi is still alive, and whether a jar fermented in the fridge ends up with fewer lactic acid bacteria than one left on the counter, are two questions with published counts behind them. Four papers are collected below, each one with its temperature, its duration and its sample attached. None of these studies measures "probiotics" in any regulated sense, and none of them follows the bacteria past the plate. The unit throughout is the colony-forming unit, one cell alive enough at sampling to grow into a visible colony. From under-ripe to properly sour The World Institute of Kimchi keeps a public explainer page on kimchi lactic acid bacteria , posted 17 May 2024. It puts the early, under-ripe stage at about 100,000 lactic acid bacteria per gram of kimchi, with acidity below 0.3%, and 적숙기 (jeoksukgi), the properly ripened stage, at more than 100 million per gram, with acidity running 0.3–0.8%. A thousandfold difference separates the two stages, and the ...
Read more

Is Kimchi Too Salty? 593 mg of Sodium per 100 g

Image
How much sodium is in kimchi? 593 mg per 100 g. The figure comes from the World Institute of Kimchi (세계김치연구소), the government-funded research institute in Gwangju, and it is the number quoted whenever kimchi gets called a salt bomb. The same page prints a second number right beside it. Potassium, 355 mg. That pairing is the whole argument, and the institute makes it explicitly. Its fact-check card news on kimchi sodium, dated 10 February 2023, sets kimchi's potassium-to-sodium ratio at 1 to 1.7 and puts danmuji, the yellow pickled radish that comes free with your jjajangmyeon, in the row below. Danmuji runs 637 mg of sodium against 42 mg of potassium, so 1 to 15.2. Where 593 mg sits inside a Korean day Those two numbers are not from a national food-composition table. I had assumed they were, until I read the credit line under the table. It points to 서울특별시보건환경연구원, Seoul's municipal public health and environment research institute, and to its 2017 survey of sodium and potas...
Read more