2-year-old kimchi: safe to eat?

Home Forums Korean food discussion 2-year-old kimchi: safe to eat?

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    • #71688
      Trassel242
      Participant

      Hello! I have one question:
      in the back of my pantry I recently found a jar of kimchi (storebought, Wang brand), it’s perfectly sealed, never been opened and it looks just fine from what I can see. The lid does not bulge.

      There’s just one problem: the best-before date is February 2015! Can I still eat it?

      I was going to use it in a BIG pot of kimchi jigae (a variant of it, with kimchi and many vegetables because I have only 100$ to live on for this entire month and need to eat healthy soups and stews for cheap), can I still do this, or should I just throw this old jar of kimchi away? I don’t want to throw it away because it looks like it’s still okay, but if it is inedible then I will do it.

      The jar looks like this:
      A jar of Wang brand kimchi, like the one I have

    • #71695

      It won’t hurt you. Try it! It may be soft, but you’re tying to live on $100 for a month so you may have to sacrifice texture :) Please please let us know what it was like! You know what else I find to be cheap? Eggs. I love Maangchi’s soy marinated eggs. They’re cooked to a medium hard stage, halfway between soft and hard. 8 minutes. That, along with some rice & either kimchi or some other side dish like seasoned spinach or kale… yum.

    • #71697
      Trassel242
      Participant

      I opened the jar and it was fine :) The kimchi had become very red because of sitting in the juices, but it didn’t taste bad. It had gotten soft but that’s okay since it’s going into a soup :)

      In Sweden, we have a dish called “surströmming”, which is fermented herring that is traditionally eaten outside because it smells like death (I’m not kidding, it smells like… unbelievably putrid and awful, unlike the lovely fermented smell of kimchi), so I was worried it would smell like that, but it just has a yummy kimchi smell :)

    • #71698
      Trassel242
      Participant

      I’m planning to cook a “never-ending soup”, you know, when you make a soup base and put some stuff in it, and then you take the leftovers and add it to a pot with more water, more spices and new ingredients and eat that, so it never runs out. I finally got my hands on a big bag of gochugaru (well, not flakes but powder, but I hope it will be the same) so now I have red pepper paste, soy bean paste, kimchi, fish sauce, sesame oil and red pepper powder to use for it! I’m very happy about the pepper powder, now I can finally make my own kimchi!

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