All about kimchi

At the heart of Korean culture is the beloved golden child of our cuisine: kimchi. Recent news of kimchi’s ten million dollar export deal had a higher media value than news of any ten billion dollar steel export deal. Although kimchi may seem well-known now, real kimchi is still yet to be discovered abroad. The kimchi situation is similar to how so-called Italian carbonara pasta in the US or Japan may come served smothered in cream sauce (I felt it was more of a soup than a pasta sauce there). A dining reporter at The New York Times once filmed the process of making kimchi and posted it on their website. It was amusing to watch— I couldn’t help but smile as they put in anchovies instead of fish sauce. It was almost endearing! Oh, the finished product did look like kimchi. It even looked good. I was almost fooled until she said, “Put it in the refrigerator first.” She put the kimchi in a pretty pickle jar and topped it off with “…and it will be ready to eat tomorrow.” That reporter must’ve forgotten that kimchi ferments. Fresh radish kimchi is hard to eat. Unripe radish is hard, and even has a whiff of grass. Obviously, once it ripens, it tastes like heaven. I once heard an anecdote from a Korean student who had studied abroad in Japan. Heavy with a hankering for kimchi, he visited numerous supermarkets. Kimchi often went on sale under the assumption it would soon rot. However, to him, the marked down kimchi tasted particularly good. For the Japanese, there is no concept of