I Have Too Much Damn Cabbage
The CSA is great…ish.
A few weeks in a row they’ve sent me home with a huge head of cabbage.
My fridge is filling up with cabbages.
Now, I like cabbage as much as the next guy, but I have, like, 3 moves with cabbage:
- Make a big coleslaw, eat like half of it, throw the rest out.
- Stir-fry it and serve it with rice for dinner. (Alongside A MEAT, usually)
- Toss chunks of it in borscht.
Four moves if you include the exciting game of cabbage ball.
Since cabbage in the fridge lasts for yonks, I’ve been focusing on trying to eat other CSA vegetables - the ones that go bad basically right away, like zucchini and kale - and letting the cabbages build up.
So, now, I have three gigantic cabbages in my fridge! This is starting to become a cabbage problem!
Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make some ferments.
I watch some videos online (this is usually the way to begin):
and I’m off to the races - well, not quite off to the races. I don’t really have a good container for fermenting things - you know, “gigantic jar” or “multiple gigantic jars”.
Some people even have these awesome giant earthenware self-burping pots:
So cool! But also: that doesn’t look like it would be practical to cram into my dishwasher.
I found a beautiful one made in Canada on Etsy for like $200 and I thought “nice! but 2L is kinda small, actually, and also I am not going to spend that much for a hard to clean pot that I only use once or twice.”
Lotta good buzz behind these relatively inexpensive E-Jen Kimchi Pots:
For Fermentation, We Love E-Jen Containers
For fermentation of all kinds (like sauerkraut and kimchi), we love E-Jen Kimchi Containers. They keep vegetables in the brine for lacto-fermentation.
So, I picked up two little (“little”) 3L E-Jen tubs (one for Kimchi, one for Sauerkraut) and got to work.
Two big heads of cabbage cut into delicate ribbons filled my biggest bowl, the one I use for breadmaking, and I thought “oh no, there is no way this is all going to fit into these two little 3L buckets”. I separated the cabbage into two teams, “sauerkraut team” and “kimchi team”, and added onion, garlic, jalapeno, bell pepper, coriander, black pepper, and mustard seed to sauerkraut team, as well as 2% of the mixture’s weight in salt.
Kimchi team got more of a workout: the cabbage got dressed with green onion, gigantic white radish I found at the H-Mart, and some jalapeno pepper. It spent some time with salt, then had all of the salt washed off again, then I added a slurry of flour (not rice flour, just flour flour, sue me), water, onion, garlic, fish sauce, anchovy paste, salt, and a whole bunch of starting-to-get-a-little-long-in-the-tooth gochugaru.
Surprisingly, the intense process of beating up these cabbages significantly en-smallened them, and they did, in fact, fit into these 3L containers!
it has been two days
my whole home smells like the inside of a garlic’s butthole
Brief strategy/stank management update.
Weeks Later:
Okay, so!
How’d it turn out?
The Sauerkraut: 8/10, delicious sauerkraut. It’s sauer, it’s krauty, it has a nice balance of flavors, it’s great on hot dogs, it’s everything I wanted the sauerkraut to be.
The Kimchi: 2/10, dubiously edible. I sent some home with some friends - for which I might have to apologize because this is some trash-tier kimchi. I let the Kimchi ferment for much less time than the sauerkraut, at first, because fresh kimchi can be super delicious (local Korean restaurant Sooda serves a fresh kimchi that’s real good) - but I’m relatively certain that I used way, way too much garlic, because this kimchi is so eye-wateringly pungent that it burns when it hits your tongue - not good spicy burn, baaaad garlic burn. This absolutely eradicates any of the interesting, varied, funky flavors and replaces them. With garlic.
When I was new to cooking, I thought “there is no such thing as too much garlic”, and then I learned that even this beautiful bulb has its limits, around the time that the person who sat nearest to me on the bleachers was 3 seats away.
When I went out of town, I tried leaving it on the shelf for another week to see if some more intense fermentation could arrest that garlicky attack on the senses, but nay, I came back and it was just as potent as before.
It’s basically inedible when raw, and so the only way I can imagine using it is in stir fries where I can tame some of that brutal allium pungency with some cooking. Also there’s pounds of this stuff.
My granddad used to say: you can’t make a kitchen mistake so bad that you can’t eat it, unless you do, then don’t eat it. This kimchi is definitely on the border.