Way back in 2018, I went to South Korea for a wedding. While there, I persuaded an elderly friend of my sister-in-law to show me how she made kimchi. When we arrived at her apartment, the living-room furniture had been pushed aside to make space. She spread a tarp across the floor and set out giant stainless steel bowls of prepped veggies, a bucket of napa cabbage she'd started salting the night before, and two kinds of fish sauce, one of them in a five-liter jug. What impressed me the most was what wasn't there: no recipes and no scale.
We worked through the whole process. Or really, she did. I mostly observed and took notes in awe as she eyeballed vast quantities of food, even the high-impact ingredients that, in inexperienced hands, can turn the end product into a salty disaster. When she finished and filed the kimchi in a special fridge on the porch, my lasting impression was of how she was able to do it without measuring a thing.
As a religious follower of recipes, I left that apartment feeling like I'd been to a magic show. I thought I'd come for hands-on time and a pro-level kimchi recipe but quickly realized I just wanted to understand how she had mastered salt.
Salt is one of the pillars of fermentation. Too little opens the door to unwanted results like mold, and too much just overloads and shorts out your palate. The right amount, however, encourages healthy bacteria to develop complex flavors, while simultaneously and amazingly killing off what's harmful. I'm an avid but conservative fermenter, which means I enjoy the relative certainty of using salt by weight percentages. I put what I'm fermenting on the scale, then mix in a percentage of that weight in salt. I am completely impressed by those who can wing it.
A pandemic or so after my first kimchi lesson in Seoul, I returned to better understand how they do it, this time making a smaller kitchen-countertop batch with Soo Jin Lee, my in-laws’ nanny. Soo Jin grew up with seven siblings in the southwestern Korean province Jeollabuk-do, where she and one other sister were her mother's primary helpers, but I was surprised by her answer when she said where she learned to cook.
“Of course, I learned from my family, but my favorite tips come from TV.”
Whatever the source, she had a cooking style that spoke of ease and experience. By the time I arrived, she was already well prepped, with three quartered heads of napa cabbage she had soaked overnight in a salty brine, all neatly piled and draining on a dish rack. She'd also portioned out broth ingredients and prepped piles of garlic, ginger, scallions, apple, Asian pear, Korean radish, and onion. A bag of bright red gochugaru—the pepper powder that gives kimchi its brilliant hue and fiery flavor—sat on the counter.
Making kimchi can be complicated, because it often contains multiple salt sources: a fish sauce or two, potentially joined by saeujeot (tiny fermented shrimp), plus the salt in the cabbage that may have brined overnight. The idea of making an educated guess on these ingredient quantities gives me the willies. With all of those copious raw flavors, I wanted to understand what Soo Jin was doing to know that she was on the right track.
For kimchi's European cousin, sauerkraut, it's usually more straightforward. When I make it, I weigh out chopped cabbage and other veggies, then calculate 2 percent of that weight to determine how much salt to add. So, a kilo of kraut gets 20 grams of salt. That formula—two percent of salt by weight—is a great starting point for all kinds of fermentation and might change a bit from recipe to recipe depending on what you're fermenting, but it's a great thing to have in your back pocket.
It turned out Soo Jin wasn't completely winging it. She used a 200-milliliter paper cup as a sort of measuring device from time to time to keep her in the ballpark, then fine-tuned from there by tasting.
While her brined cabbage quarters dripped into the sink, she puréed onion, ginger, garlic, apple, and Korean radish with a dasima (dried kelp) broth that had been fortified with dried prawns and a dried pollack head.
At this point, she put on a pair of gloves, a step that no one who will later use their hands to touch other sensitive body parts should skip. She grabbed the gochugaru, poured it over a bowl of Korean radish chopped into matchsticks, added 150 milliliters-plus-a-splash of fish sauce, then a big spoonful of saujeot—salt and salt, really—before taking a tiny bite. Next, she threw in 30-odd quartered scallions and gave it all a mighty two-handed stir before dividing the mixture into three bowls, one for each head of cabbage.
Every cabbage leaf got attention, a dollop of paste spread on each, before the soft, leafy end of each quarter was folded down, and the whole thing carefully swaddled inside the outermost leaf. Since my sister-in-law translated, Soo Jin had not addressed me directly the whole time I was there, but here she turned to me and deposited one spicy, garlicky cabbage leaf rolled into a bite-sized dumpling, directly into my mouth with her still-gloved hand, then made one for herself. Our noses ran and our eyes went wide. It was raw, but good. I was glad I had that taste, a benchmark before salt, microbes, and time started doing their thing in earnest.
And there, as salty sweat beaded on my scalp, was my answer: Taste as you go. Whether it's what their families taught them or something they'd picked up on TV, or both, my Korean guides weren't flying blind. The flavors they created during kimchi making were strong, sometimes extremely so, but by tasting along the way they could confirm where they were on the map and know whether they were heading in the right direction or needed to course correct. If it was tasting particularly salty in an early step, they could back off a bit later and know that flavors would mellow and change as the kimchi fermented.
Back at home in Seattle, I made batches using recipes from trusted sources like Eric Kim and Deuki Hong. I wasn't at the point where I could wing it—far from it, really—but I tasted as I went and was learning those benchmark flavors, and I could imagine getting there one day.
