Korea and Japan · Volume 55, The Jang, the Ferment and the Divided Table
Kongip-kimchi
Gyeongsang-do
Illustration
- Time
- 720 hours
- Researched
- 12 sources cited
As tradition built it
About a month curing in brine.
Ingredients
The leaves
- 100 leaves soybean leaves, yellowed
- 240 ml salt
- as needed water
The seasoning
- 240 ml anchovy fish sauce
- 2 tbsp soup soy sauce (guk-ganjang)
- 2 tbsp chilli powder
- ½ tbsp sugar
- 1 tbsp garlic, minced
- ½ tbsp ginger
- 1 tbsp sesame seeds, whole
- a little chilli threads
Method
- Gather the leaves into bundles of several each.
- Put them in an earthenware crock, pour in the salt dissolved in water, and leave them to cure about a month.
- If you like, blanch the cured leaves briefly in hot water to take off the off flavour.
- Rinse the leaves clean and squeeze out the water firmly.
- Mix the seasoning ingredients. Spread a dab between every two leaves, layering them as you go.
Notes
No institutional gram or millilitre quantities were found for this dish specifically, only the roughly month-long curing timeline; treat the seasoning paste above as a starting method to develop by taste.
The recipe is the Rural Development Administration's Gyeongbuk entry in its survey of regional recipes, as lampcook.com republishes it. Lee Young-jin, in the Digital Cheongdo Culture Encyclopedia, bundles the leaves, cures them in salt water or plain water, may blanch them, and seasons every four or five leaves before packing them into the crock. The RDA notes that plain water keeps the colour brighter.
What a modern chef changes
The same deliberate curing discipline as baechu kimchi, applied to a leaf rather than a head.
Rung 2's principle, applied to a leaf ferment
Method
- Cure the leaves at a controlled, cool temperature rather than an ambient autumn kitchen, for the same reasons given at Rung 2: a stable low temperature favours the fermentation bacteria that build flavour rather than the ones that spoil it.
- Layer the seasoning paste thinly and evenly between leaves rather than in one thick coating, since the leaves themselves are stiffer than perilla and need direct contact with the seasoning to take on flavour through their whole texture, not just the surface.
- Serve as a distinct banchan alongside, not instead of, a cabbage kimchi, precisely to make the point this dish exists to make: that Korean fermented vegetables are a whole family, not one dish under many names.