Korean Table

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. A hot-water tomato extract measured 33,328 mg/kg of glutamic acid, the compound behind savory umami taste. Commercial anchovy fish sauce measured 21,032 mg/kg in the same test, roughly a third less. The tomato version also carried less salt, 1.13% versus 1.87%. It had far fewer of the volatile compounds that give fish sauce its funk, too. You can read the study yourself here . That's the short answer to whether kimchi without fish sauce can taste like kimchi. It can. You're not chasing a lesser copy of the real thing here. You're replacing two jobs at once: the savory backbone fish sauce gives the paste, and the head start it hands 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 ...

Your kimchi isn't fermenting, or so it looks. No hiss, no bubbles, nothing, three days after you packed the jar. A silent lid is almost never the actual problem. It's usually just the wrong thing to be watching. Three things genuinely control whether a batch ferments: how much salt is in it, how warm the room is, and how you're reading the jar. Get those three right and the fizz shows up on its own schedule, not yours. No Bubbles Doesn't Mean Nothing's Happening A plain screw-top jar and a fermentation crock with an airlock don't behave the same way, and that difference alone explains most of the panic. Brine & Bubble puts it plainly: "In a sealed jar like a mason jar with a standard lid, gas builds up between the lid and the brine and simply seeps out without any visible activity at the surface." An airlock forces that same gas through water, so you see it. A regular lid just lets it go quietly. Early fermentation is also weaker than people ...

Yangbaechu kimchi (양배추김치) is what Korean cooks abroad started calling kimchi made with ordinary round cabbage instead of napa — not a hack, a real dish with its own name, born from grocery runs that came back without napa on the shelf. If your nearest H Mart or Asian grocery stocks napa, buy it. This isn't an upgrade, it's what you reach for when the store genuinely doesn't carry it, or you want a jar that's edible by dinner instead of next week. Regular green cabbage sits in every Western supermarket's produce aisle, no special trip required, and that's the whole case for it. Why the Two Cabbages Aren't Interchangeable Napa grows as a loose, oblong head with ruffled leaves that fan upward from the stem, thin enough to fold easily and mild enough that a short brine softens it clean through. Regular round cabbage packs its leaves into a dense, tight head that stays firm raw and tastes more peppery before it mellows, according to Hitchcock Farms , a produc...

Got an almost-empty kimchi jar with an inch of red liquid pooled in the bottom? Here's what to do with kimchi juice before it goes down the drain: cook with it, pickle with it, drink it, or just hang onto it a while longer. That liquid isn't an afterthought. It's the same salt, garlic, chili flakes, and usually a spoonful of fish sauce or salted shrimp that seasoned the cabbage in the first place, now fully fermented and sitting untouched in your fridge door. Most kimchi sold outside Korea comes two ways: a screw-top jar with plenty of brine pooled around the cabbage, or a vacuum-sealed pouch with barely any liquid at all. Buying the pouch kind on an Asian grocery run? Transfer it to a lidded jar as soon as you open it. The juice you're trying to save has nowhere to collect in a flat pouch. And none of this applies to the never-fermented "kimchi-flavored" slaw some supermarkets sell as a shortcut — that's not kimchi, and there's no real brine to save...

Got a jar of kimchi too sour to eat straight from the fridge? How to fix it depends on what you want it for. You can knock the acid back a little in the jar itself (sugar, a pinch of baking soda, a rinse), or you can stop fighting it and cook it, which is what most Korean home kitchens do with that jar anyway. The in-jar fixes buy you a milder side dish, not a fresh one, and I'd rather say that before the tricks. The stew pot gives you something better than what you started with. Why It Went Sour Faster Than You Expected Kimchi doesn't go off when it turns sour. It keeps fermenting. The lactic acid bacteria that give it its taste never stop working; cold only slows them down, and how much cold matters more than most people think. A 2022 study in Foods tracked packaged kimchi at four storage temperatures. At 20°C (68°F) the pH fell to 4.11 within 2 days. At 10°C it took 6 days to reach a similar point. At 5°C, close to where a household fridge sits, it held fairly steady t...

A video of someone fermenting kimchi in a fully sealed glass jar has picked up more than 5.3 million views since late August, and the comment section isn't complimenting the technique. It's warning the poster to get that jar into something else before it turns into what one commenter called a "kimchi grenade." The person behind the clip captioned it as "the appearance and sound of successfully made kimchi after 2.5 days," pointing out that store-bought kimchi doesn't fizz like that. They're right about the fizz. That's real, active fermentation happening. What the caption skipped over is that it was fizzing inside a jar with a tightly screwed metal lid and nowhere for the gas to go. Korean outlets have now covered versions of this clip twice in about a week ( Asiatoday on August 27, then Asiae on September 4, as the view count kept climbing), and both times the top replies say some version of the same thing: move it to a plastic container, or...