Make your own kimchi

Kimchi is a spicy Korean staple which is used as a condiment, a side dish, a main course and possibly a desert as well. There are lots of variants and lots of different ways to make it, but I've found a nice simple way of making a dish that isn't traditional but which produces a lovely spicy pickled vegetable dish.

The ingredients are pretty much what you can get your hands on, but it helps if you have some chinese cabbage (such as wombok) and some radish - preferably daikon but ordinary garden works too. I'm using -

Half a wombok cabbage
2 bunches of Gay Choi chinese veggies
1 daikon radish
1 fennel plant
Half a red onion
Half a white onion
A (french style) shallot
A couple of spring onions
A few cloves of garlic
A couple of inches of ginger root
A few chillis
Thai basil leaves

Roughly chop the wombok

 Peel & slice the daikon radish

 Slice the spring onion and the fennel

 Mix the ingredients up in a large bowl

Pour in enough salty brine to cover the vegetables - the brine should be good & salty and made with rock salt (ie no iodine to keep it from sticking) and preferably filtered water. Then hold the vegetables down under the surface of the water with a weight like so...

Leave the veg to sit in the brine for a few hours (or more) and whilst you're waiting, prepare your spices

 Peel the spices - although I like to leave a few chillis whole and push them in later

Chop the veggies into smaller chunks, add a bit of salt, mix together and leave for 10 minutes. Then mix together to make a rough paste - a blender works well but needs cleaning, a potato masher works just as well and is easier to tidy up. At this point you should be thinking about forgetting the kimchi and making a stirfry with the lovely zesty mix. And possibly crying from the onions too.

After a few hours of soaking, drain the brine into a saucepan. Don't dump it down the sink - you'll need it later! Try a few chunks - they should taste good & salty

Clean two or three jars with hot water and dry thoroughly. Hinge-top jars look pro, coffee jars work just as well

Make sure your hands are clean, and push and poke the vegetables into the jars. Fill them in stages and mix in the paste whilst you're doing it, then give them a good stir round. Add in the whole chillis, the thai basil leaves, black pepper corns, fennel seeds and whatever else you have to hand

Push the veggies down nice and hard and top up with excess brine. Cap the jars and put them somewhere warm.

Give the jars a shake every day and if they're in sunlight rotate them. After a few days you'll get bubbles forming as the fermentation gets under way, and the edges of the different vegetables will start to blur together.

The fermentation will increase the pressure in the jar. Not sure if there would ever be enough pressure to shatter a jar, but it's best to open it every day or so to depressurise it. You can see the bubbles at the edges here.

It also helps to push the veggies down under the surface of the brine every time you open it - make sure you use clean fingers! It also gives you a chance to see how it's tasting.

After a week or two the mix should be acidic, spicy and tasty. When it gets to the right level for you just leave it an extra few days (to make sure) and then move it into the fridge.

After that just eat it whenever you like!