Do-It-Yourself Kimchi

Judging by the search results on his Midtown Lunch blog, Hells Kitchen CSA member Zach Brooks has eaten a lot of kimchi. But what if you craved this pungent Korean sidedish and couldn’t get to midtown Manhattan for lunch? Could you make it yourself at home?

Yup, and the Napa cabbage in the Week 6 distribution is your starting point. Kimchi is essentially a product of pickling, and as pickles go, it is fairly easy to do. A bit of saltiness, a lot of spice and garlic, and you are well on your way to good kimchi. Epicurious has several recipes for kimchi in these search results and a few interesting ways to use it.

Kimchi has a long history in Korean cooking and a few years back, researchers at the Food Safety Research Division of the Korea Food Research Institute found that it did a pretty effective job of killing off salmonella, staphylococcus, vibrio germs and E.coli bacteria. Sounds like a pretty good trade-off for the bad case of garlic breath that you’ll have if you eat too much.