Our first attempt at fermentation

Over the weekend between some gleaning of the gardens and coop cleaning and building a raku kiln for my wife's pottery, I collected up some of our smaller heads of green cabbage that had split open or were just too small to do with much with and decided to use them to make some kimchi.

While we have made sauerkraut in the past this was a little different in the sense we used a 1-1 brine (1 Tbsp. salt - 1 cup of water) solution and submerged the cabbage, carrots and diakon.  Traditionally salted cabbage is all that is used to make the sauerkraut to draw out its own water and when it is warm out it usually goes bad for us.
I ran into problems in that no two recipes for kimchi were the same, some where more of a pickle using vinegar, to me that is not conducive to fermentation.  Some didn't even provide measurements, an assumption that the authors made that could lead to failure.  After reading up in some of my fermentation guides I came to the conclusion that as long as the brine is correct to the amount of vegetables we would be good.


With four heads of cabbage in hand I removed all the damaged leaves and sent those off to the chickens, since cabbage and kale are two of their favorite things.  Loosely chopped the cabbage in to larger chunks and diced the carrots, about 1 cup, and shredded about 1 cup of diakon, placed them in an 8 cup fermentation crock and proceeded to mix 8 Tbsp. of kosher salt to 8 cups of water and cover the vegetables with the brine.  The key now is to keep the vegetable submerged in the brine so I placed a plate that was about the same diameter as the crocks opening the pressure of the brine on the surface of the plate kept it submerged.   Covered it all with a clean towel to allow it to breath and set it in the corner of the kitchen out of the sunlight but warm (around 70 degrees), this is where I have mixed information and we will update the post on the overall out come.  Some recipes call for 24-72 hours to let soak, others say 24 hours and I found several that called for 4 weeks.  We welcome any recommendation any of you might have on what you do for fermentation.  I opted for a wait and see, since I like my kimchi to have a crunch with heat ( that part is coming in a minute).

After 24 hours, and another day of garden work and some squirrel hunting I checked the vegetables and the cabbage and carrots where soft but snapped when bit so I decided now is the time to process the paste.  The paste is the part where the additional flavors are added, I opted to go with an onion, six cloves of some spicy red garlic and 8 dragon chili peppers along with a good chunk of ginger with a Tbsp of fish sauce.

Some recipes called for hand mashing, grating or food processor, I chose the food process and again this should be a paste but the onions left so much liquid it was impossible to make a paste, but the smell was wonderful.

Now we took the cabbage, diakon and carrots out of the brine using a metal colander to separate the liquid from the vegetables, make sure to set the brine to the side, you are going to need it.  Place all the vegetables in a glass bowl or metal pot, do not use plastic bowels or utensils for processing due to inviting bacteria into your mix.

Dump the paste mix into vegetables and mix thoroughly with clean utensils so that all of the vegetables are coated.  Grab yourself some of your canning jars or 1/2 gallon glass jar and pack the vegetables into the jars.

Now the key is to only pack to the fill line of the jar(s) so that there is about 1/2 inch of head space. Ladle the brine into the jar(s) to cover the vegetable, cover and shake to get the air to rise to the top and add more brine to cover if needed.  The key is to keep the vegetables submerged so you do several things, you can place a stone, (make sure it has been washed and boiled for 10 minutes) on top of the mixture to keep it packed, this is good for small pints or quart large mouth jars or if you use a 1/2 gallon pack it only half full with vegetable cover with brine and take a second jar pint size will work, fill with extra brine or water, tie a string around it and lower it into the container so that it compresses the vegetables, the sting will help you remove it later.  You can loosely close the jars or cover with a paper towel and use the ring to hold in place.  Place the jars in a container to catch any brine that leaks out during the fermentation, this should also force any air out of the containers, and place in a cool dark location for fermentation to continue.

We will continue to update this post as we progress on the fermentation and let you know of any adjustments we have to make in the mean time here are some fermentation troubleshooting tips at Makesauerkraut.com