It seems I have been a little too much in my head of late, and so I am going to concentrate on the more quotidian side of things for a bit. Today I am in the kitchen.
Sunday I did a lot of work in the garden, Monday I mostly read and puttered. I had a potato, two leftover roasted beets, and the end of the last corned beef, so I made red flannel hash. I also had a couple of fennel bulbs so I roasted those and made fennel pesto with the feathery green leaves. I had a dollop of the pesto for breakfast with my eggs and hash.
This was the second corned beef, the one I dry-brined, and my opinion is softening over time. See my initial comparison here. As I mentioned in that post, I liked that second corned beef thinly sliced and browned in a skillet, much like a corned-beef version of bacon, but I did not like it as much on its own. It kept reminding me of pastrami, and I thought I would reserve that technique for the next time I made pastrami. Now I am not quite so sure. The dry-brined corned beef definitely makes a better hash, and my initial complaints may have been more about the cooking, not the brining itself. Corned beef hash continues to be my favorite use for corned beef.
Yesterday I finally started the sauerkraut. I did something a little different than the way I have done it in the past. I sliced the cabbage into ribbons rather than shredding it. I have found that I like the toothsomeness of pieces of cabbage in kimchi, and I occasionally get annoyed with the fine threads of shredded cabbage in a traditional sauerkraut. So I decided to try slicing rather than shredding the cabbage.
Sauerkraut and kimchi are in many ways simply variations on a theme. Sandro Katz uses the term “kraut-chi” for the ferments he makes, a hybrid between the two versions. I like the idea of this term because it feels less constraining to me, and in the end, all ferments, like all cooks, are unique. I may simplify the term in my own mind to simply “chi”, and in this case I am making a simple cabbage chi, in the manner of sauerkraut. I am not flavoring this chi with caraway, or peppers or in any of the many ways sauerkraut can be flavored, just simple fermented cabbage in its own glory.
After slicing the cabbage, I began brining process, which basically involves using salt to pull the liquid out of the cabbage and begin the ferment. You slice or shred the cabbage, add salt, I used 2% by weight, and then massage or pound the salt into the cabbage. I had too much cabbage to fit in one bowl, 2.7 kg, so I needed two bowls. The work of massaging the cabbage was harder with thicker pieces, and my arthritis acted up. Since I started the sauerkraut in the evening, after dinner, I covered the bowls and left them on the counter overnight.
I wasn’t certain that I had massaged the cabbage forcefully enough. I had brine, but it felt like I needed to massage the cabbage a bit more, so I did. The contents of the two bowls now fit into one bowl, which is the top picture you see. The cabbage will sit in its brine for a total of 24 hours before I pack into a crock or jars for fermentation.
Once the bowls are free, I can start the kimchi. For this batch I am using David Chang’s version from Momofuku. This was my second-favorite version overall from my initial kimchi exploration in 2016. Chang writes that this is a kimchi best eaten when it is young, when it is still in its “prickly, sparkly” stage, and I agree. Chang specifies that the kimchi is fermented in the refrigerator, to extend its youth. This may be my favorite young kimchi, but it does not age well. It is markedly different from my favorite kimchi, the red cabbage kimchi I wrote about making here, from Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot’s cookbook, Ideas in Food. That kimchi is good young, when it is funky and spicy; it grows increasingly layered in flavor through middle age, and at 2 years it has a soft, yet still complex roundness that reminds me of a fine old wine. I haven’t yet created a napa cabbage chi that hits all those markers, but I will continue to work on it. In the meantime, I love Chang’s version and consider it essential. Once I have it in house, I can once again start pursuing the idea of the perfect napa cabbage chi.
