Kimchi is a fermented salty, mildly sweet, sour and spicy Korean condiment. The most common kind of Kimchi is made with salted Chinese cabbage, white radish, carrot, spring onion greens and a variety of seasonings. This condiment can be made with other vegetables too. While Kimchi tends to have non-vegetarian ingredients traditionally, it can be made vegetarian too. Today I’m sharing my recipe for a vegetarian/ vegan Easy Kimchi. Since it is fermented, it is a gut healthy food.

Kimchi is believed to have originated in Korea over 3000 years ago as a way to preserve summer produce for the extremely cold winters. Originally Kimchi was made only with radish. Increased trade with other countries during the Goryeo period meant other vegetables were grown and used in Kimchi. There also very many different ways of making and seasoning Kimchi. I believe Koreans make about 200 different kinds of Kimchi!

I discovered Kimchi thanks to Korean dramas! Sometime towards the end of the pandemic, I discovered the world of Korean drama thanks to my daughter. It showed me a people and culture I found interesting. While television drama isn’t the best source of authentic information, it can be an introduction to many things. So I learnt that Koreans seem to love alcohol (beer and soju especially), pork any which way, Korean beef, takeaway food, tteokbokki, rameyon, kimbap, kimchi, and rice among other things.

Korean meals typically are centred on cooked rice or rice porridge, and a broth/ soup or stew or both. You may also find noodles and/ or dumplings. These come with a variety of “banchan” or side dishes, one of which Kimchi is generally a given. These vegetable, seafood and meat side dishes will vary in number and help balance out the meal nutritionally.

My Easy Kimchi is not made the traditional way, so it isn’t authentic in that sense. I have made adjustments based on ingredient availability and personal taste preferences. Let’s start with the ingredients for Kimchi. While Kimchi is not really difficult to make, it does involve a number of ingredients.

Chinese cabbage, Napa or Savoy cabbage is the best cabbage to use for Kimchi. The Koreans use a different variety of radish in Kimchi, but regular white (Indian mooli) or Daikon radish works well. You can make Kimchi without it too. Other vegetables in Kimchi include carrot, spring onion greens and chives. These have to be cut wuite thin and long about the length of matchsticks. The spiralizing blade on my peeler does a perfect job of this.

The first step to making this dish is to clean and salt the Chinese cabbage. In my shorter Kimchi recipe, the salted cabbage is allowed to sit for a couple of hours. The slat draws out the water in cabbage. The cabbage is then rinsed well with water before proceeding further. Cabbage is not cut but brined and salted leaf by leaf for traditional Kimchi. My easy version calls for cutting the cabbage into chunks and tossing in salt.

The next important step is make the cooked Kimchi paste. For this a little bit of rice flour is cooked into a slurry with stock or water. I prefer to use brown rice flour and water. Vegetable stock will give a more umami flavor. This slurry is blended into a smooth paste with ginger, garlic, onion, sugar (I prefer jaggery), soy sauce, and soaked red chillies/ red chilli powder or Gochu-jang paste. Gochu-jang is a Korean fermented spicy red chilli paste. You can buy it or make your own using one of the many recipes on the net.

Koreans generally love spicy food. The fire and deep red colour in this Korean condiment comes from Gochu-garu (Korean red chilli flakes/ powder) or Gochu-jang (red chilli paste). I used ready made Gochu-jang. Dried red Byadgi chillis work well too. Soak them in a little water and add while grinding the Kimchi paste.

Sugar is added to sweeten the cooked paste that makes this condiment, but I have come to prefer powdered jaggery. That’s not traditional at all but I like it like that. The sour taste or tang in Kimchi comes from fermentation. I like a slight tang in my Kimchi, but do not like it very fermented. I have worked around this by adding a little tamarind pulp to the Kimchi paste. This gives this condiment a slight tang without the fermentation normally needed to produce it. You can leave it out if you prefer.

What can you do with Kimchi? Eat it as a side dish with rice, noodles, dumplings, rice porridge/ kanji or even with bread. It’s a really good ingredient to use in a sandwich. So here is my version of Kimchi. Please feel free to adjust quantities of the ingredients to suit your taste.

The post Easy Kimchi appeared first on My Diverse Kitchen - A Vegetarian Blog.

This October Elle picked a sweet savoury Fig Onion Walnut Flatbread for us Bread Baking Babes to make. As the name tells us, it is a rosemary scented flatbread topped with figs, onions and walnuts. I guess I don’t need to tell you all about how well figs and walnuts go together. Even less that figs and walnuts with caramelised onions on rosemary bread is an absolute winner.

This bread might seem a little like a fig and cheese pizza without the cheese but isnowhere near it. A lot of people tend to liken every flatbread with topping to a pizza. That’s doing them both a huge disfavour! Here, the dough is flavoured and quite different. There’s potato water (water in which potato chunks have been boiled), rosemary steeped olive oil and fresh rosemary in it. You can always use regular water instead of potato water. That works just as well.

The topping is lovely too and uses dried figs instead of fresh ones. This means you don’t have to wait till figs are in season. The figs are soaked in Marsala wine to soften them in the original recipe. I used lightly sweetened apple juice instead. Caramelised onions, walnuts, orange zest, crushed pepper and salt in the topping range zest in the topping makes for a very interesting and delicious bread with sweet and savoury flavours.

The dough is easy enough to make and needs a one hour preferment, the regular two proofs, the second one being just 15 minutes long.  The recipe below makes one large flatbread or multiple smaller ones. This Fig Onion Walnut Flatbread has slightly crisp edges and beautifully soft yet slightly chewy texture.

This month’s bread recipe is adapted from Joanne Weir’s More Cooking in the Wine Country. I changed some parts of it. For one, I personally find the yeast too much in a lot of bread recipes these days. I don’t like the yeasty taste in bread, so prefer to use a little less yeast and allow it to proof a little longer which also improves flavour.

The Bread Baking Babes are –

Bake My Day – Karen

Bread Baking Babe Bibliothécaire – Katie

Blog from OUR kitchen – Elizabeth

Feeding my enthusiasms – Elle

Girlichef – Heather

A Messy Kitchen – Kelly

My Kitchen In Half Cups – Tanna

Bread Experience – Cathy

Karen’s Kitchen Stories – Karen

Judy’s Gross Eats – Judy

The post Fig Onion Walnut Flatbread appeared first on My Diverse Kitchen - A Vegetarian Blog.