Quick Kimchi (Mak-kimchi): Fermented in Two Days

There is a kind of kimchi for high days and holidays, and a kind for Tuesday. This is the Tuesday one. Mak-kimchi — mak roughly meaning “carelessly” or “roughly” — is the everyday version that skips the whole-cabbage theatre. You chop everything into bite-sized pieces, salt it, dress it, and pack it away. No fermenting crock buried in the garden, no waiting a month to taste your work. Two days at room temperature and you have something bright, sour and alive that will keep improving in the fridge for weeks.

I keep a jar going at all times. It turns a bowl of rice and a fried egg into dinner, sharpens a pork stir-fry, and once it gets properly funky, becomes the backbone of jjigae and kimchi fried rice. The small clever twist here is the rice porridge — a quick slurry of glutinous rice flour and water. It sounds fussy but it earns its place: it helps the chilli paste cling to every piece and, more importantly, gives the lactic bacteria a hit of simple starch to feed on, so fermentation gets going faster and the flavour rounds out sooner.

Where mak-kimchi comes from

Kimchi is not one recipe but hundreds — a whole grammar of fermented vegetables that varies by region, season and household. The grand version, baechu-kimchi, packs seasoning between the leaves of halved whole cabbages and is the dish families make together during gimjang, the late-autumn ritual of preserving enough kimchi to last the winter. UNESCO added gimjang, the making and sharing of kimchi, to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, recognising it as much for the community it builds as for the cabbage it produces: neighbours gather, share labour and portions, and reaffirm a sense of shared identity.

Mak-kimchi is the unfussy cousin, the kind you make in a single bowl on a weeknight because the jar ran low. The name is telling — mak carries the sense of “roughly” or “haphazardly”, the same mak you find in makgeolli, the cloudy, roughly filtered rice beer. The chilli that defines the modern red kimchi is a relatively recent arrival: capsicum peppers reached the Korean peninsula in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, most likely via Portuguese traders through Japan, and gochugaru only became central to kimchi over the following couple of centuries. Older kimchis, and some regional ones still, are pale — seasoned with salt, fermented seafood and aromatics rather than chilli. What hasn’t changed is the principle: vegetables, salt, time, and the gentle work of wild lactic bacteria.

What fermentation is actually doing

It is worth knowing the biology, because it tells you what to watch for. Salting the cabbage draws out water by osmosis and creates a brine hostile to spoilage microbes but tolerable to Lactobacillus and its relatives, which live naturally on the vegetables. Starved of oxygen under the brine, these bacteria convert the cabbage’s sugars into lactic acid. That acid is what makes kimchi sour, drops the pH low enough to preserve it for weeks, and produces the carbon dioxide you see bubbling and hear hissing. A dominant early player, Leuconostoc, gives that clean, fizzy, faintly sweet tang of young kimchi; as it acidifies, more acid-tolerant Lactobacillus species take over and the flavour deepens into the funk of a mature jar. Nothing here needs a starter culture — the microbes arrive with the cabbage. Your only job is to build the environment they like.

How to make it

Start with the salting, which is the only step you can’t rush. Cutting the cabbage into 4 cm squares first means it salts evenly and quickly — about 1.5 to 2 hours rather than the half-day a whole head needs. Dissolve the 60 g of salt in a litre of water, pour it over the cabbage in a large bowl, and weigh it down with a plate. You want the stems pliable: bend a piece of white stem and it should fold rather than crack. Under-salted cabbage gives watery, dull kimchi; over-salted needs more rinsing and tastes flat. Two thorough rinses under cold water after draining strikes the balance; squeeze gently and leave in a colander.

While it salts, make the rice porridge: whisk the tablespoon of glutinous rice flour into 120 ml of cold water in a small pan, bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 2 to 3 minutes until thick and glossy, then cool it completely — adding it warm would shock the garlic and ginger and could kill off the microbes you want. Build the paste in the bowl you’ll mix in: 4 tablespoons of gochugaru for colour and a fruity, low warmth, plus 5 grated garlic cloves, a grated thumb of ginger, 2 tablespoons of fish sauce for savoury depth, 1 tablespoon of sugar to balance, and the cooled porridge. Korean chilli flakes are essential here; ordinary crushed chillies are far hotter and will give you heat without the gentle, almost smoky character. Use 4 tablespoons for a medium kimchi, more if you like it punchy.

Wear gloves — the chilli will find every cut on your hands and remind you for hours. Massage the paste through the drained cabbage, the radish matchsticks, the spring onions and the sesame seeds until everything glows red, then pack it tight into a clean jar. Pressing firmly forces the brine up to cover the vegetables, which keeps them under liquid and away from the spoiling air. Leave about 2 cm of headroom, because it will bubble and rise, and seal the lid only loosely so gas can escape.

Fermenting, storing and using it

Stand the jar at cool room temperature, around 18 to 20°C, on a plate to catch any lively overflow. After a day you’ll see tiny bubbles and smell a clean sourness; open it and taste. In summer one day may be plenty; in a cold winter kitchen, give it two. Warmth speeds the ferment and heat above roughly 25°C can make it sour too fast and turn mushy, so keep it out of a hot spot. Once it tastes pleasantly tangy, move it to the fridge, where fermentation slows to a crawl and continues for a month or more, deepening as it goes.

A few honest notes on what can go wrong. If the top layer dries out or discolours, just press everything back under the brine — the vegetables must stay submerged. A fizzy hiss when you open the jar is good news, not gas to fear; a soft, ripe, sour smell is right. What you do not want is fuzzy mould or a sharp, acetone-like reek, which mean it was too warm or not submerged, and the jar should go in the bin. If you can’t find Korean radish, daikon is the correct substitute; a wedge of crisp apple grated in adds a lovely sweetness and a little extra sugar for the bacteria. For a vegan jar, swap the fish sauce for 1 tablespoon of light soy plus a teaspoon of white miso — you’ll lose some of the marine funk but gain a savoury roundness that’s no lesser, just different.

Eating it at every stage

One of the quiet pleasures of keeping a jar is that kimchi is really several different ingredients depending on its age, and it pays to eat it accordingly. Straight out of the salting-and-mixing stage, before it has fermented at all, it is closer to a fresh, crunchy, spicy salad — geotjeori in Korean — and it is lovely like that alongside grilled meat or a bowl of plain rice, all bright chilli and snap. At the two-day mark it has that clean, gently fizzy sourness that suits a fresh application: piled onto a fried-egg-and-rice bowl, tucked into a toasted cheese sandwich, or eaten simply as a side dish, or banchan, next to almost anything.

Then it ages. As the weeks pass and the acid builds, the raw crunch softens and the flavour turns deep, sour and funky, and this is when you should cook with it rather than eat it fresh. Sour kimchi is the whole point of kimchi-jjigae, the bubbling stew of kimchi, pork and tofu that is one of the great cold-weather dinners, and it is what gives kimchi fried rice its savoury backbone. A tablespoon of well-aged kimchi and a splash of its brine will lift a pot of noodles or a pancake batter. Nothing is wasted: the older it gets, the more useful it becomes for the pan, so a jar that is past its fresh-eating prime is not a jar gone off, it is a jar ready for its second act.

The real reward comes at the two-week mark, when young, crunchy kimchi turns soft and sour and ready for the pan. Don’t throw away that brine either: it’s liquid gold for noodle soups and marinades. If fermenting things has caught your interest, my fermented hot sauce works on the same lactic principle with chillies instead of cabbage, and for a faster, no-ferment hit of acid to keep alongside it in the fridge, a jar of quick pickled red onions is the perfect foil. Make a jar this weekend, and you’ll wonder how the fridge ever managed without one.