Seoul - the National Dish

Kimchi Making
This is the Korean national dish, a pickled (fermented) cabbage that is quite tasty.  Kimchi goes back 3,000 years and the goal was to make the veggie last through the long Korean winter.  In the old days, after all the prep, it would be buried in clay pots underground to keep it cool.  Nowadays, it's stored in the fridge.  The Dodo and I signed up for some Korean culture and we got to make our own.

Step one - quarter a large cabbage and soak in salt water.  You let is soak up to a few days depending on the time of year.  You then rinse it thoroughly and taste.  If it's just slightly salty then it's perfect.  Too salty, keep rinsing, not salty at all - add salt.  Our chef showed us the step but had some pre-soaked ones ready.  He explained that you should be able to bend a piece and not have it snap.

Next, chop five veggies as shown below.  The other seven ingredients make up the "sauce."

Being a competitive couple, we tried to race the dicing.

By the way, Dodo put on her head scarf all wrong - they had a good laugh but let her continue.

Shredding pear.  Him thinking "when will she stop taking photos already."

A group shot.  There was a couple from Jakarta in the class.  Our chef was Korean but bantered with his Japanese helper in Japanese.

Chef counted out the chili powder in cups "one", "two", "three", "four."  He then hesitated and threw in one more cup for good measure.

After stirring up the mix it was time to apply it to our cabbage. 

He instructed us to put the butt end of the cabbage down, holding the leaves in our left hand.  You gently pull one leaf down at a time and slather it with sauce and repeat.

You then take the last leaf and curl it up and around like a comb over.

Most importantly, you seal it in a bag.  Then another bag.  Then you put it in an airtight container.

The smell is so powerful that most Koreans own one or two kimchi refrigerators.  This is an example of one.  Chef opened it and showed us container after container of kimchi inside.  He said that it lasts about 4 years.

We each got a certificate, but more importantly, we brought back two containers of homemade kimchi.  It's in our fridge, percolating.  In a month or so we'll break some out and let you know how it tastes....