How to Make Kimchi | Eric Kim | NYT Cooking

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Hi, I'm Eric Kim. I'm a cooking columnist for the New York Times and today I'm going to show you how to make kimchi. I think the main thing I want to say it's not as hard as people make it out to be as long as you know the basic steps which involve brining the cabbage,

saucing the cabbage, and tossing the cabbage like a salad. That's it. It's three steps. So I'm going to show you those three steps across three different recipes. We're going to make a very basic kimchi and then the second one is a a white version and it's called pit kimchi. And one of the main differences

is just that we're not going to use the kochukaru that red pepper powder. And then the last one is the very special grand finale kimchi which is a tongbaechu kimchi which is a whole napa cabbage kimchi. And that just means that instead of chopping up the cabbage into pieces when we brine it, we are going to

cut them in half and brine them as like whole heads. Kimjang is the communal act of kimchi making and sharing. I really like the story of Kimjang cuz it it tells the tale of resilience and survival. One thing that I really found while reporting this story, people who grew up with it grew up with it in Korea. Like

in Korea is where um people would have Kimjangs with their neighborhood or more often than not with families. Korea had a really dramatic history and I think this food item is something that helped people survive and that's something that needs to be said. I really can't talk about kimchi without talking about my mother cuz she's the