High-alcohol Kombucha

January 2, 2018 by hillarystarbright

It’s possible!

If you are like me, you are a huge fan of kombucha and all of its amazing healthy properties. But did you know that you can make your booch with the alcohol level of a good double IPA, and still retain those healthy vibes?

If you live in the southern California area, you are probably already familiar with Boochcraft. They make an amazing product. They have a few different varieties, but they all clock in at 7.0% alcohol.

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This past summer, I visited the Boochcraft brewery (here in San Diego county, along with a few thousand of the best breweries in the world), and learned a few tips to try to make it myself.

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After my trip to the Boochcraft brewery, I had to first invest in some supplies.

In addition to purchasing a SCOBY and a metric ton of pure cane sugar and black tea bags, I bought a 6.5-gallon brewing bucket with a spigot at the bottom (Trust me, that bottom spigot will come in handy later…):

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I also bought a 6-gallon clear plastic carboy for the second ferment.

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If you’ve never made your own kombucha before, it goes like this:

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You obtain a SCOBY. That’s the funny-looking squishy thing at the top. It’s concentrated yeast and it’s what will give turns tea into kombucha. (You can obtain these online or get one from a friend who brews their own kombucha. It is also possible to grow one, but that takes a while).
You brew strong black tea with a large amount of sugar in it. For one gallon, you will need 14 cups water, 1 cup sugar, and 8 tea bags. Brew it and let it cool, then add it to the liquid that comes with your SCOBY and place the SCOBY on top (it might sink a little, this is fine).
Let it ferment for 5-7 days.
Congratulations, you have now completed your first fermentation! Now for the second ferment (also known as 2F).
Pour the kombucha into bottles and add fruit juices, or other sugar or flavoring.
Let it ferment for another 3-5 days.
Put it in the fridge and chill it, and it’s ready to drink!

This will make “regular” kombucha, which will have a negligible alcohol content or less than 0.5 percent.

To make your kombucha extra alcoholic, it only takes another step, another ingredient, and a bit more time.

Step one is the same. Obtain a SCOBY and brew your tea, and let it ferment for about a week. The difference comes in the second ferment.

Essentially, I placed my (pretty large) SCOBY in the bucket with about 5 gallons of brewed sweet tea (note: if you use a large bucket like I did, the SCOBY will expand to the size of the bucket!), then for the second ferment, I placed it in a large plastic carboy instead of glass bottles.

Don’t add any juices or extra flavors yet.

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To add extra alcohol, you need to add extra yeast and sugar to the existing ferment.

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For one gallon of kombucha, you will need one cup of water and one cup of sugar, Bring it to a boil, let it cool, then add between 1/2 -3/4 tsp. of champagne yeast.

After it starts to react (you will see lots of bubbles and/or foam), add it to the carboy filled with the partially-fermented kombucha.

You will also need to let it ferment for a few days (maybe even a week) longer than a standard 2F. I discovered that the best method is to use an airlock cap, and then when the mixture stops bubbling, it’s ready.

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Now it’s ready for you to test, flavor and enjoy!

Testing:

There are two different ways to test your home-brew:

a triple-scale hydrometer, but this requires that you take a pre-fermentation reading and a post-fermentation reading to get an accurate percentage of alcohol content; or
a refractometer, which is slightly more expensive but is very easy to use – after calibrating it, you simply put a drop of liquid on a slide and view it through the scope, and it tells you the alcohol content.

Summer Favorites

July 22, 2014 by hillarystarbright

If you are a regular reader of this blog, thank you. Sometimes my daily or weekly food projects aren’t much more complicated than “hey, I smoked this tasty chicken,” so I don’t always do a full blog post on everything I make. I do not post often enough, so I thought I would remedy that by sharing with you some of the foods that have been pleasing crowds at Casa de Starbright all spring and summer long.

Also, if you are so inclined, I encourage you to check the links on the right of this page and follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, which are updated far more often.

First up is the old standby: beer-can chicken. I do this all the time. It takes only a couple of hours to smoke, and every time it’s perfectly juicy and tender. if you have a vertical smoker like I do, you don’t even need one of those fancy racks … just manipulate an empty aluminum can snugly into the inside the bird, make sure you can see the tab through the top (see picture below) and then when you set the whole thing on your smoker you can work the chicken’s legs around so it’s sitting up on the can. Then you fill up the can with the liquid of your choice (pretty much anything except really strong liquor as that will just be a fire hazard), coat the outside with a dry rub and a bit of oil, and smoke it til the internal temperature is at least 160.

This is the chicken I smoked on the Fourth of July, alongside a homemade pastrami brisket (just a corned beef brisket coated in brown sugar, black pepper, coriander and paprika, and then smoked), and a foil packet full of garlic, onions and other items.

I usually have a packet of something random smoking alongside of my meat. If I have a few extra cloves of garlic or jalapeno peppers, those will always get smoked. Sometimes if I have a huge surplus of onions or other fruits I will smoke those for a BBQ sauce, and sometimes I will also smoke the sauce ingredients with the meat the sauce will be used on, which is always delicious.

Here, I smoked a nice rack of baby back ribs … this is the “after” photo when they came off of the smoker, and before smoking they only had a very basic dry rub. On the top rack of the smoker I had a few small foil packets, containing red onions, whole heads of garlic, and two ripe peaches.

After about an hour I took the fruit, onions and garlic off the smoker, and put it all in a pot on the stove with a large can (14 oz.) of crushed tomatoes, 2 cups apple cider vinegar, 2 tbsp. kosher salt, 2 tbsp. brown sugar, and 1 tbsp. each of black pepper, oregano, paprika, cumin and chipotle chili powder. The smoked peaches and onions had the same smoky flavor as the ribs, so it wasn’t too sweet, and the sauce complimented the meat perfectly.

And a couple of days later on some BBQ chicken breasts, served with roasted corn and some warm greens.

Of course, one cannot forget the cocktails! Homemade tepache is getting to be one of my favorites … it’s so simple, it’s delicious and unique … and it impresses the hell out of your friends when you tell them you just made your own alcohol.

Check out my first blog post here about tepache, back when I was just discovering it, but know that this is just as adaptable as any fermented drink like beer or kefir … adapt it to your tastes and style. I’ve tried it with a whole pineapple (you can re-use that boozy fruit later) or just the core and peel, and I’ve also added whole peaches to the mix. Te-peach-e is definitely something you should try.

I’ve also tried making it in my Korean fermenting crock, and lately with my new Farmcurious airlock cap set (see below), and if you are into fermenting at all, I would definitely recommend one of these cap sets. It makes fermenting anything really simple.

Of course man cannot live by meat and boozy fruit alone, so we must also make somewhat healthy snacks. I guess. Sorta healthy. It has fruit in it.

I subscribe to a number of websites wherein people send me samples of things. Like, all the time. At any given moment I have no less than a dozen sauces, glazes, toppings, jams, jellies, pickles, and various other things in jars, most of which I have not made myself. One of those jars happened to contain a salted caramel sauce for desserts, so I decided to see what it could do with some grilled fruit.

Pineapples and blueberries happened to be both ripe and in my kitchen, plus a single slightly underripe peach. They made very lovely skewers, and were topped with the salted caramel glaze right at the end for a little extra sweetness. It was perfect.

I also got to enjoy a number of awesome food festivals so far this summer, including a Greek festival … where I may or may not have bought a hunk of homemade feta cheese the size of my head. There were no witnesses who are talking. However, I did entertain my guests with many, many, many feta cheese dishes for the next few days, including this … well, can you even call this a “recipe” or a “dish”?

Slice a watermelon. Crumble some really good feta on top. The end.

Seriously, that’s really all there is to it, and I could totally eat that entire plate right there. The slightly salty flavor of the feta is so perfect with the melon. I have also seen a number of variations on this dish, but all of them seem way too complicated to me. One called for freezing the slices of feta, then coating them in breadcrumbs and frying them, then serving those fried cheese squares in the most picturesque, Pinterest-worthy plating with the perfectly molded hunks of watermelon you’ve ever seen.

However I am a simple girl. Like my adorable niece right here. All she needs is some fruit to match her outfit, and look at that smile! She doesn’t even need the cheese! (But don’t omit the cheese unless you are also a baby.)

This summer, I also started cooking with orzo for the first time, and I think it is going to be my go-to starch for cold salads from now on. Orzo is actually made of barley, so it’s extremely healthy for you. It also cooks up in no time, chills really quickly, too, and then takes whatever flavor you give it. And it holds its own with hearty veggies. What more can you ask for?

This tasty salad is a 1-lb packet of orzo, boiled about 6 minutes in salted water, then cooled, and tossed with extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, green peas, diced carrot, sautéed yellow squash, sliced red onion, and bits of leftover pastrami.

Tepache

September 18, 2013 by hillarystarbright

Many of you may remember my last blog post (or you can read it here) about all of the fantastic things I discovered I could make in my awesome fermenting crock. In the few months since I have had the crock and have been researching cool things to make in it, I discovered two very important things.

1) Fermented food is awesome; and

2) Alcohol is technically a fermented food.

Yeah. I know. I practically found out about some drink called Tepache by accident, and then I didn’t believe that the only ingredients were pineapple and sugar. I was literally standing in my kitchen, carving up the fresh pineapple, shaking my head and thinking to myself that this was a waste of a perfectly good fresh pineapple. Luckily they happened to be on sale for like a dollar, and they were insanely sweet and fresh, so I figured what the heck. I put the chopped pineapple in my crock, with the peel and core and all. Not the spiky part on top, though.

I simmered in a few cups of water (depending on how big your vessel is, see below about what sort of containers you can use**) with some piloncillo (again, adjust this to your tastes, how much you are making and how sweet that pineapple is) until the sugar had dissolved. Then I waited until it cooled and poured it into the crock. I added a cinnamon stick, a nutmeg seed and a few whole cloves to the crock as well.

Four days later, it was bubbly, foamy, and smelled like booze. I strained out the fruit (oh yeah, keep it for a garnish or something, cause it’s pretty boozy, too) and ladled it into a few jars for easy serving. It was delicious!

Especially in early summer in southern California, all of the ingredients for tepache are readily available and pretty darn cheap. I found the fresh fruit for about $1 each, and those packets of piloncillo and spices were about a buck each.

I should point out here that there are literally hundreds of different ways to make this. A lot of people only use the pineapple rind and core but not the soft fruity part — personally I like it better with the fruit, so I can eat the yummy fruit later. It’s wonderful. You can also add spices — the first time I made it, I went a little too heavy on the whole clove (it can be a little overpowering if you’re not careful), and so I had to adjust the spices. But I definitely recommend one or two whole cinnamon sticks, and a whole nutmeg seed, too.

The first time I made tepache, it took four days to be fully bubbly and ready (your nose will know). The second time, it was considerably warmer in my kitchen and the fermenting process only took three days. Just keep an eye on it and if it looks like it’s fermenting too fast, move it to a cooler spot.

I also found some recipes for making tepache by only fermenting it for two days, then adding beer to the mixture, letting it sit one more night, and then drinking it immediately. It just speeds up the fermentation process to add the beer, so do it if you need to, but otherwise, there is no need to rush it.

I also tried it once with one of those big, juicy, fresh peaches chopped up along with the pineapple and spices and sugar. It had a distinct peachy flavor and it fermented a little faster, in three days instead of four. I assume that had to do with the additional sugar from the peach.

I used my awesome fermenting crock, but there is no reason you can’t make this with a regular mason jar. Of course, you’d need a pretty large one, or several smaller ones, and make sure that the fruit, spices and sugar/water mixture is evenly distributed among all of the containers if you use more than one.

If you use a mason jar, don’t seal it completely — cover the lid with a cheesecloth, or put the two-piece lid on the jar but don’t screw it in and let it sit loosely. In 3-5 days, you’ll notice the foam.

This drink is delicious by itself, but it’s perfect for a hot summer day, over a glass of ice, mixed with a light Mexican beer (Tecate or Pacifico, etc.), and with a twist of lime.

Cheers!

Pickles and probiotics … four recipes in one

June 2, 2013 by hillarystarbright

*Cabbage Kimchi, Sauerkraut, Dill Pickles and Hot Sauce

My apologies for not posting a new blog post in so long, as you can see I have been busy with experimenting.

A little over a year ago, I tried my hand at fermenting — my own homemade kimchi in a few different-sized mason jars. I adapted this recipe from Recipe for Disaster, using a mixture of pre-made, store-bought Thai curry/chili paste, and pureed fruits and vegetables, which I used to coat cabbage, fresh herbs and shredded carrot. I then put the kimchi in a few different jars and let each jar ferment for a different amount of time so I could determine which one I liked best.

In case you were wondering, the 10-day batch and the 14-day batch were the tastiest.

In all honesty, the kimchi turned out very well and lasted me quite a while, but I was wary of making it at home again after making it in mason jars. If you recall (or read about it, link above), one of the glass jars of kimchi BURST and shards of glass went everywhere. In my zeal to have the tastiest kimchi, I neglected to read about how it actually works … that is, the gas has to escape as the kimchi is fermenting, and as it’s bubbling and getting happy in there, if the gas has nowhere to go, it apparently finds a way.

If you have a mason jar with a lid that is closed, the jar will go boom.

Ruh-roh.

Luckily, I was shopping at a local Korean grocery store recently, and as I was perusing the store’s massive Kimchi Department (no joke, a full section of the store was devoted to nothing but freshly-packed kimchi of various types and flavorings), I noticed this beauty. She was just sitting there on a table full of pots and pans, just looking at me.

She was about $25. I named her Peggy. Now I have no issues making any kind of fermented … anything.

Needless to say, I was inspired. I don’t know a whole lot about fermenting (although that’s starting to change), but I do know that a dark ceramic crock that can let gas escape while it keeps the goodness inside is what you use for pretty much all sorts of lacto-fermentation. Obviously it was designed for kimchi, but it can be used to ferment anything.

I did a little searching and pinning after I got home from Kimchi Land, and was amazed! I can make sauerkraut in there. Plus kimchi can be made from pretty much any type of vegetable, from ramps to cucumber to radishes to bok choy. Ooh then there’s fermented hot sauce and salsa, horseradish and miso, even fish sauce. And I can pickle turnips and beets, cherry tomatoes, even corn on the cob (!) and carrots and ginger for a healthy slaw.

Let me just say I was up late that night on Pinterest.

Had enough of the links? OK, I’ll continue with my experiments. Let’s roll.

Experiment No. 1: of course, I had to make kimchi.

I used the exact same recipe as before (see first link at the top), only I used chili paste from the Korean grocery instead of the Thai chili paste/red curry I used the last time. I pureed an apple and a pear, mixed it with salt and chili paste, and coated leaves of cabbage (Napa cabbage and regular green cabbage) and some shreds of carrot with the mixture.

Make sure every single bit of cabbage (or bok choy, radish, etc.) is thoroughly coated — I put gloves on and literally cover each cabbage leaf by hand to make sure. Then pack it tightly into the crock.

Before:

After:

Be sure to check it in the meantime — you will want to take a peek every couple of days to stir it up a little. After a few days, more liquid will form, and it’s important to keep everything mixed well, and as more liquid forms, keep the solid pieces of cabbage and whatnot underneath the liquid. This kimchi was perfect after exactly 14 days … a little soft but not soggy, and a little sweet but still spicy.

It was delicious.

Note: I should also mention at this juncture that the part between “before” and “after” was two whole weeks of fermenting. TWO. WHOLE. WEEKS. Of my whole house smelling like a spicy cabbage burp. I am the first to admit that my domicile is not conducive to many cooking experiments, in no small part because I have bad ventilation and no central air (I live on the beach in a cottage-style apartment). I also have no cellar or secure back porch. If you are trying to get started fermenting and you have a nice porch or a cellar, by all means, use it. If you don’t, but there is a space in your kitchen next to an open window, that should be fine. Just make sure it’s not in the sun and is still in a relatively cool place. I had to make do with Peggy sitting on a kitchen counter in a stuffy apartment, so it was a little funky. It wasn’t much better with my next experiment …

Experiment No. 2: sauerkraut.

Talk about like, even easier than the kimchi. You basically have to measure salt and water (1 tablespoon salt to every 2 cups of filtered water), and shred the cabbage, and stuff it into your crock. That’s seriously all there is to it.

I really loved reading the Spunky Coconut blog and her discovery of this awesome recipe … you seriously can’t compare the deliciousness of fresh, homemade sauerkraut to anything else. As a child, I hated sauerkraut because the only kind I had ever tasted was the horrible canned mess you get slathered on your who-knows-what-those-are-made-of hot dogs at school or a hot dog stand. I visited Germany as a teenager and for the first time, tasted some homemade kraut, made in a lovely German family’s ancient fermenting crock. It was divine. Used to top an authentic, spiced, meaty, German bratwurst, it’s simply magical.

I let my sauerkraut ferment for about three weeks … technically it was 25 days. However, as you can tell by the photo above, my cabbage was pretty chunky. I prefer it this way even though it takes a bit longer to ferment than it would if I had shredded it very finely with a mandolin or something. This way it was very flavorful and pungent, yet still nice and crunchy. Perfect!

Note: I should also add another tip here. Many of the fancier (ahem, pricier) fermenting crocks come with a nice weighted piece of split stone you can use to hold the cabbage under water during the fermenting process. These are usually the European-style (traditionally German and Russian) crocks, and they are lovely, but they are too expensive and way too large for my needs. Amazon has a comparatively very good price for a nice ceramic crock like this, but you can rarely find a similar one for less than $100. What’s more, they are usually upwards of 5 liters. I am a single girl, but I can’t imagine anyone needing 5 liters of sauerkraut or kimchi … and I bought Peggy for about $25. She holds about 2 liters.

But she didn’t come with a weight. I couldn’t find a plate that was small enough to fit into the crock yet wide enough to hold down the majority of the cabbage, so I improvised and took apart a pie gate, cross-crossing each piece (since it was nice and bend-y and plastic) to hold down the majority of the kraut and kimchi. After packing the mixture inside, I placed one or two whole leaves of cabbage on top, and then held them all underwater with the plastic. A few stragglers aside, it worked out perfectly.

Experiment No. 3: pickles.

I followed this recipe from My Simple Country Life, but it’s pretty basic: for the size of my crock (about 2 liters) I would need about 6 tablespoons of pickling salt for a good, salty pickle brine. Add some adorable Persian cucumbers, fresh or dried dill, a few cloves of garlic, and let it sit for about two weeks.

Before:

Just a couple of days later there were bubbles …

And after 10 days they were perfect.

Many recipes also call for grape leaves, oak leaves, cherry leaves or some other leaf to add tannins to the mixture, but other recipes leave them out entirely. I made mine without any leaves and they turned out great.

Experiment No. 4: hot sauce/ sriracha

I used this recipe for sriracha from VietWorld Kitchen (by the way, a great blog for many other recipes and ideas, if you are trying to learn more about Asian cuisine and cooking), only I used brown sugar, and I used a variety of peppers that probably are milder than usually used in sriracha recipes.

I seriously can’t get over how easy each of these recipes are. I found a bunch of peppers and diced them, diced a few cloves of garlic, added a cup of whey I saved from the last time I made cheese, and a few teaspoons of salt (I ended up needing to add more salt later, but I didn’t want my sauce to be too salty). The VietWorld blog post also has an interesting discussion about using fish sauce or certain types of sugar to make your sriracha more authentic … feel free to experiment. This was just my first try so I am sure I will have to try more variations.

I checked it every day, giving it a little stir and checking to make sure no mold had formed (if some has formed, just skim it off). After just a few days, I tasted it, added a bit more salt, and then used my immersion blender to puree the last little stragglers of chunks of pepper or garlic.

You can learn more about probiotics and all the awesome things they do here, at this great piece on the Kitchen Rag blog.

Happy fermenting!

My first time fermenting … Kimchi = rad

November 9, 2011 by hillarystarbright

Ever since learning about fermenting and kimchi at a pickling class this summer, I have been wanting to try to make my own kimchi. I wanted to research what sorts of flavors and spices most people use, and then I realized … people don’t add tons of spices to kimchi. The best kimchi I ever had was a simple cabbage and broccoli mix with carrots and crisp, fresh-tasting herbs. The best chefs use fresh herbs, fresh ginger and garlic, wholesome vegetables like cucumber, cabbage, radish and green onions, and lots of peppers, both fresh and dried, both spicy and mild. Most recipes also incorporate something sweet like fruit, or even sweeter vegetables like carrots or beets, to balance out the heat of the peppers.

This pot of kimchi has a variety of delicious herbs and vegetables.

Kimchi is also very simple to make, and requires no fancy tools or expensive equipment. Knives to chop the veggies, a food processor to blend the paste, bowls to mix it, and a crock or jars to ferment the mixture. Although traditionally, Koreans put the kimchi in clay pots and bury them underground, sometimes for months or even years, and as you can see by the above photo, it’s made just as well in any non-reactive pot. I adapted Kate’s recipe for kimchi on Recipe for Disaster, because it looked pretty insanely easy, by using a storebought Thai curry paste I love instead of making my own chili paste from ginger and chili flakes…

Feel free to use any of the many kinds of premade paste, or make your own!

… and I added a red and a yellow bell pepper to the fruit blend, and some shredded carrots to the whole mix. Please don’t be shy about changing or adapting this recipe; there are as many kimchi recipes as there are kimchi eaters. This recipe is also comparatively mild … many Westerners probably couldn’t hand the most traditional Korean kimchis. Personally, I can’t handle a whole lot of heat and spice, although I am getting better at it; but Koreans never met a hot pepper they didn’t like.

Hillary’s Sweet ‘n’ Easy Kimchi

– 1 head of cabbage
– 2 onions, one white one red
– 2 cloves fresh garlic and 1 small fresh ginger root, diced
– 2 bell peppers, one yellow, one red
– 2 medium carrots
– 1 apple
– 1 pear
– 2-3 tablespoons Thai curry paste, dissolved in about 1/2 cup warm water
– 1 bunch fresh cilantro or other fresh herbs
– Sea salt
– Water

I chopped the cabbage and placed into a large bowl filled with warm water and kosher salt. Then I drained out most of the water and let it rest for a few hours, then rinsed off the salt and drained all the water out. I chopped the pears, onions, bell peppers, ginger, garlic and herbs, put it all into the food processor, and pureed it into a paste, and I shredded two carrots into the cabbage.

I just shredded the carrots with a vegetable peeler.

After adding warm water to the Thai curry paste and dissolving it (and looking away so it didn’t burn my eyes … whew!), I added it with the fruit mixture and — after donning some plastic gloves — tossed the whole mixture with my hands to make sure every piece of cabbage and carrot was covered in the chili/fruit paste. Make sure it’s coated thoroughly.

It looks like this after all the cabbage is coated.

Then I packed the mixture into a few jars, making sure to pack the mixture very tightly and pack the cabbage firmly inside the jars.

Let it sit at room temperature (in a cool place) for at least 24 hours. Don’t process the jars ever, and don’t refrigerate them until you want the fermentation process to stop. After coating the cabbage completely, there’s a little liquid at the bottom of the bowl, so it just gets transferred to the jars, and even after just a couple of hours, a lot more liquid has accumulated. Since the cabbage leaves have been so totally well-coated with flavor, the more the cabbage ferments, the stronger the flavor of the kimchi will get.

Note: I cannot stress enough — be sure to wear gloves when you mix it up and when you cram it into the jars! You want to make sure it’s coated completely with the paste and packed very firmly into the jars, and the only way to do that is with your hands. But you DO NOT want to get this in your eyes!

I have to admit, I am a little nervous about this experiment. Most Americans like myself have a genuine fear of fermenting anything (that’s just a fancy word for “spoiling” or “rotting”) and the idea of putting a jar full of vegetables on a shelf somewhere and leaving it there until all of the natural chemicals in the foods make the whole mixture start to ferment and pickle itself … well, let’s just say it doesn’t come easy. But millions of Koreans can’t be wrong. It’s incredibly healthy and full of vitamins and all of the good natural acids your body and spirit needs. On the plus side, this is a quick-fermenting mix, so the vegetables will stay crisp and tasty, and I love the idea of a sweet and natural additive. Nothing in this recipe is processed or storebought except the chili paste, and only slightly, and you can adapt this recipe to suit your own tastes.

So, the jars are filled and in a dark spot. Let the experiment commence.

After 24 hours ….

… the mixture doesn’t look any different, although more liquid has accumulated in all of the jars — even the very small one.

After 48 hours …

… Dang. The largest jar has burst. I opened the cupboard where I was storing the jars (in the dark) and saw a shard of glass. It straight popped out by itself. I must have closed the lids too tight. So, please, when you store these, be sure to keep them in a dark place, and keep the lids as loose as possible. Although I understand that the process of fermentation means the release of gasses, somehow I didn’t put two and two together and realize that a closed mason jar would mean the gasses have nowhere to escape. Learn from my mistakes, kids. This could have been a giant mess.

I transferred the kimchi from the broken jar (it did pop out, not in) into a tupperware container and refrigerated it — this will be good for my experiment regardless, because when I eat this, I will be able to tell the difference between this batch and the remaining three jars that will keep fermenting. I am interested to find out the flavor difference between 2-day kimchi and others that ferment for a longer time. I am experimenting, after all.

So this is the 2-day batch. It’s been sitting long enough to ferment (24 hours is the minimum) but lots of Koreans won’t touch a kimchi that has been fermenting for less than a week. I aim to find out the difference. There are four jars with an identical mixture. The first fermented for 48 hours before it was refrigerated, thus stopping the fermentation process.

By the way, when that jar burst at 48 hours, I also noticed that the lids on the other jars were sticking up, and when I loosened the lids on them, they each emitted a little noise. And a FANTASTIC smell. Oh, this will be so yummy.

After 5 days …

… I loosened the rings on the jars again and each one was still fermenting away, as evidenced by the pffftt noise that squeaked out. And honestly, I was still a little wigged out about the breaking glass a couple of days before, so I loosened each ring even more and wrapped each in a brown paper bag. This way the lid could stay loose and nothing will fall into the kimchi, and it would stay dark around the jars. I also put one more jar in the fridge, stopping the fermentation process. Now I have a 2-day jar and a 5-day jar.

After one week …

… Took one more jar out of the cupboard and stuck it in the fridge. I have the 2-day batch, a 5-day batch and a 7-day batch. I also have a tiny, 4-oz. jar that I will keep for as long as I can. Just to see what happens. Maybe one-month kimchi will be the best-tasting of them all.

Kimchi is generally used as a side dish with delicious Korean dishes like barbeque pork or chicken and marinated seafood, or in kimchi soup and kimchi fried rice. The natural fermenting process is very healthy and earthy, and it has a flavor you can’t duplicate anywhere else. I paired mine with an easy and slow-cooked Korean spicy BBQ pork and marinated grilled chicken.

I based the BBQ pork recipe on another ridiculously easy one – my favorite crock-pot recipe for wicked easy pork carnitas. Essentially I just changed the spices; instead of onions, cumin, ancho chiles, paprika, and oregano, I added to a couple of pounds of cut-up pork some good sesame oil, rice vinegar, sambal oelek (red chile pepper paste), fish sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, ginger (you can use fresh or ground), and a nice squirt of sriracha sauce.

I used this recipe for about 2 lbs of pork. I placed the pork in a big freezer bags and mixed this marinade, then let it rest overnight. This is just as good with chicken, although I would recommend using a chicken thigh (with the skin and bone attached) if you’re going to cook it in the crock pot. If you’re using skinless and boneless chicken breasts, marinate them overnight and toss them on the grill or fry them.

Spicy Korean Pork (and/ or Chicken) Marinade

1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp. ground ginger
1 tbsp. garlic powder
2 tbsp. sesame oil
1/4 cup fish sauce
2-3 tbsp. sambal oelek
1 cup brown sugar
1 generous squirt of sriracha

Blend all of the ingredients together and place in a freezer bag with the pork or chicken. Refrigerate and let it marinate overnight.

I started the marinade the night before I planned to have people over to taste my attempts at recreating Korean specialties. The next morning, before I left for work, I put the pork and all the marinade into my crock pot and set it on “low.” I freaking love my crock pot – when I got home 9 hours later, my pork was perfectly cooked and ready. Picture me lifting the lid on the crock pot and shouting “Ooooh yeah” in my Kool-Aid guy voice.

This is so fragrant and awesome.

The kimchi is usually only one of many side dishes in Korean cuisine. Luckily, Koreans dig anything that has been fermented, pickled, or generously spiced. My kitchen never has a lack of delicious and spicy pickled things, so I included rice and a few different pickled sides, like my own pickled carrots and asparagus, my friend the Neighborhood Foodie’s beet-pickled eggs, sliced water chestnuts and bamboo shoots, and some sliced cucumbers.

As far as the taste of the kimchi, I think the batch that fermented the longest (7 days) was the spiciest, but all of them had deep and pungent flavors. If you’ve ever bought kimchi in a store, you literally can’t compare the two. The store-bought jar (at least in my experience) was the polar opposite of this homemade goodness — storebought tastes rancid and spoiled where this is naturally fermented and tastes crisp and fresh.