It Doesn't Get Much More Korean Than Kimchi

One of the things we love about eating out in Korea are the free, all-you-can-eat  side dishes that come with your meal.  One could almost make an entire meal out of the side dishes.  It is pretty normal that 5-7 small dishes of sides will be brought to your table right before you are served your main dish. (Kindof like bread or chips and salsa in America) The sides vary from restaurant to restaurant depending on what is served but the one that is pretty much standard at all restaurants is kimchi.

These are all free and different side dishes that came with our meal.

As many of you know Russ and I lived in Korea before this experience back in 2000.  When we lived here the first time, Russ took a pretty much immediate liking to kimchi, but it took me quite a bit longer to enjoy it.  I tried it once or twice a week for about 6 months until I could actually say I liked it, but once we came back this past summer we both jumped right into loving it again.  The girls, not so much.  Someone made the mistake of telling them what it is and pretty much they didn't even give it a chance.  Hopefully before we leave here we can get them to the point of liking it as well.

By now, many of you are wondering what this kimchi I am writing about it is.  Here is a definition I found in the dictionary:

A Korean dish made of vegetables, such as cabbage or radishes, that are salted, seasoned, and stored in sealed containers to undergo lactic acid fermentation.

Basically it is spicy, fermented cabbage.  Knowing the definition you can understand why my girls aren't super excited about eating it.  But like I said, Russ and I love it.  You have to have an open mind and like spicy food in order to like it.  We both will eat it plain but love it mixed with a little bit of rice.  The rice acts as a buffer to take away some of the spiciness.  

When we received orders to come over here we both expressed an excitement to do very "Korean" things, so when we were given the opportunity to make kimchi for a day we both immediately jumped on it.  As luck would have it, Uncle Joe was with us that day and he was "lucky" enough to experience this adventure with us.   I talked about the Good Neighbor Program (GNP) before in a hike that we did.  This adventure was another GNP outing, therefore it was not only Americans but quite a few Koreans that participated as well.

We had to get up early and took a  bus about an hour and half outside of Seoul to a locally owned farming area.

In the Korean culture making kimchi is a woman's job.  Therefore, it was a very big deal that there were numerous Korean men there to help as well as they were very excited to see all the American men there to work.

Many of these men were retired Korean military officers.

There were a lot of people there to make kimchi.

My friend and I, before the fun began.  See how clean we are?

Mrs. Lee the ROK commandant's wife

Mrs. Regner and the girls

 Not being Korean, we had no idea what was involved with making kimchi.  Therefore, they had quite a few older Korean ladies there to "instruct" us.  When I say "instruct" I basically mean tell us we weren't doing it correctly.  

They had all the supplies there and ready for us to start when we arrived.

The cabbage is the main ingredient

They brought the cabbage in to us in wheelbarrows.

There are many types of kimchi and many different ways of making it.  The kimchi we made had some radishes mixed in with it.  These are sliced Korean radish.

This is the powdered spice.

Here they are mixing the spices with salt in massive buckets.

  They started with the men bringing in these huge bags of radish and spreading them all along the long table we were all standing at.

That is a lot of radish.

 Next they brought in the spices and spread them over the radish.

We had to mix it all together really good to get the spices all over the radish.

We assumed making kimchi would be messy so we wore old clothes, but we had no idea how messy it would be. We were all covered in kimchi spices from head to toe (literally I had it in my hair and on my shoes) by the end of the day.

The next step was to add some sort of greens to the radish.  I couldn't quite figure out what the green leaves were and no one could tell me in English.

 After it was all mixed together really good they brought the heads of cabbage in.

Because my hands were covered in kimchi spice I wasn't able to take a lot of pictures during the day.  Therefore, most of these pictures are ones I got from someone else which is why we aren't in most of them.

There was an exact science to putting the spicy radish in the cabbage.  You had to open each of the leaves on the cabbage head and rub the spices in each one then you had to put just a little bit of radish in between the leaves.  If you did to much or to little the Korean ladies would take your cabbage head and redo the whole thing.  I pretty much never got the ratio correct.  Thankfully, the ladies were very patient with us.  

Bending over the table for hours our backs all killed us.  Here we are almost done.  Just a few small piles remained.

  That day we made over 1000 heads of cabbage worth of kimchi.  That is a lot of kimchi.  They had cut each head in half in order to get the spices more evenly distributed so we ended up making almost 2500 half heads of kimchi to give out.  The kimchi we made that day was being given to families that are under privileged. 

The finished product.  Looks delicious, doesn't it?

We filled over 200 of these tubs with kimchi and there was still a ton left over. They were heading out to buy more tubs when we left.

Kimchi has to sit a few weeks and ferment before it is good to be eaten, so we couldn't eat any of our finished kimchi that day.  But they did feed us a good Korean lunch.

Uncle Joe had no idea what he was getting himself into when he told us he was coming to stay at our house for a few days.  Thankfully he is a wonderful house guest and just goes with the flow.

 Overall, this was a great experience for our family.  This is something they do every year and we all said on the way home we were looking forward to going back next year.