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[The How-To Issue]

How to make KoMex kimchi

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Filthy Little Hands

“One in 10 will love it on their first try. Nine of them will be like, ‘Ew, no thank you,’” Lynda Yi says with a laugh. The co-founder of KoMex Fusion was born in Korea, where the fermented-cabbage snack known as kimchi is happily eaten with just about everything. Yi says Vegas’ two KoMex locations (4155 S. Buffalo Drive; 633 N. Decatur Blvd.) go through about 14 gallons a week, so fans are out there. “When it’s perfectly fermented it has a little bit of a vinegary taste, kind of salty, very garlicky, and it does have a very pungent smell. … Think of sauerkraut with a lot of garlic.”

It tastes way better than it smells. And you don’t need to bury it in the ground like they did in the old days. But like her mother did, Yi cooks from the hip at home. “Eye and taste … my mom taught me that way, so I’ve never really used a teaspoon or a measuring cup,” she says. So feel free to tweak this recipe to your spicy and funky levels of bliss.

KOMEX KIMCHI

Makes 1 jar

Ingredients:

1 head Napa cabbage

¼ cup sea salt, extra to taste

¼ cup white sugar, extra to taste

¼ cup to ½ cup gochugaru red pepper powder, to taste

¼ cup garlic, blended fine

¼-inch ginger root, peeled and blended fine

1 tbsp. boiled white rice, blended fine

½ red bell pepper, blended fine

1 tbsp. salted baby shrimp

1 bundle green onion, chopped

Method: Wash cabbage. Chop wet leaves into inch-thick ribbons and put in clean plastic tub. Add sea salt and toss, then let sit for two hours or until leaves are wilted. Rinse cabbage and tub and return leaves to tub. Add baby shrimp (as a fermenting agent, Yi prefers salted shrimp to anchovy-based fish sauce, which can add a bitter note), gochugaru, sugar, blend of garlic, ginger, bell pepper (to soften the spice while kicking up the red color) and rice (which thickens the sauce in a way Yi likes better than rice flour), green onion and a pinch of sea salt. Mix with your hands until leaves are coated. Taste to ensure balance and add sugar or salt accordingly, though remember fermenting will intensify everything. Stuff raw kimchi into sterile Mason jar and cover with plastic wrap, then lid, to keep in moisture and flavor. Leave jar out for 24 hours. Open and press down on plastic wrap to compress kimchi and aid fermentation, cover and refrigerate for about a week, “depending how fast you want to eat this and how crunchy you like it.”

Tips from Chef Yi:

• “Sometimes people put too much salt in there, in the initial process to wilt the leaves. Sometimes they put in too much baby shrimp, ’cause it is very salty, too. That’s usually the rookie-est thing—too much salt.”

• If you don’t like it straight from the jar, try kimchi fried rice, casserole or stirfry with meaty Spam or tofu. It’s good inside burritos and quesadillas and wrapped around raw oysters, and mingled with cold soba noodles.

• You can branch out from Napa cabbage to cucumbers and radishes. Yi says there are probably 15 kinds of popular kimchi in Korea.

• If you’re worried about the day of no refrigeration, Yi says don’t be. “Health Department will tell you, no, you shouldn’t be doing that in terms of temperature. But that’s how you ferment it. … We had to kind of teach our health inspector, too.” The big thing is, don’t cross-contaminate, meaning if your tasting spoon double-dips you’ll introduce bacteria.

Kimchi is not vegan (hello, shrimp). And if you’re not used to eating fermented food, go easy to avoid “unpleasant bathroom trips.”

Tags: Featured, Food
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