Oxide

I do the fermentation in a 2-gal Rubbermaid plastic bucket intended for the food service industry. You can get a set of 3 buckets cheap from a Costco Business Center, in the restaurant supply area. While fermenting, I do not snap the lid close, just leave it loosely covering the top so things do not fall in or crawl into the kimchi. After fermenting I either transfer the kimchi to smaller jars and refrigerate or snap the lid closed on the 2-gal bucket and refrigerate it. A 2-gal bucket takes up a lot of refrigerator space.

Folks that do fermenting know to never ferment in a glass jar with the lid tightly closed. It is just a matter of time until the jar will explode. People that do a second fermentation of kombucha in sealed bottles designed to hold in the pressure of beer or ale will put the bottles in a box with a cover to contain flying glass in the event of an explosion.

When I was in Korea a couple years ago, visiting a friend, we at the peppers, fresh, with every meal. They are harvested green, not allowed to go to red. Everywhere we ate green peppers were served as a side dish. It took me a couple of tries to get into it. They are hot peppers, but not so hot that you cannot eat them fresh. Like how some people eat fresh jalapeno peppers. They have an outstanding flavor, fresh, better than jalapenos.

Korean radish, like its cousin, daikon, will keep for quite some time under refrigeration.

Lynnjamin, nicely done. I occasionally make tofu, too. A couple of tips:

1 – after soaking the beans, remove the hard shells before making the smoothy. There is a hard shell on the tip of your finger in your first photo. Soy beans used to be considered poisonous because they interfere with the body’s ability to digest foods. The chemical that causes that effect is found in the hard shell. Use only the softer meaty part inside.

2 – adding more coagulant (I use Nigari, a natural product derived from the sea) will make medium firm tofu. Adding even more will make firm tofu.

I use a simple tofu press available at Amazon or soymilkmaker.com.

In the U.S. an outstanding source of soybeans is LauraSoybeans.com. They sell non-GMO soybeans.

I use a big stainless steel bowl for kimchi and a lot of other foods I ferment. I store the finished product in glass jars or food-safe plastic containers. I have been told and I have read that it is a no-no to use any kind of metal bowl because when bacteria comes in contact with metal it can be killed off. I thought about that … such a small area of the cabbage comes in contact with the metal. Me and my stainless steel bowl have never had a problem with fermentation.

I am pretty sure any alcohol in gochujang or doenjang is negligible/insignificant and lost as soon as warmed or used in cooking a dish with the pastes. There are two kinds of fermentation; one that uses bacteria to ferment, like kimchi, that does not produce alcohol. And there is one that uses yeast to ferment, like beer. Yeast fermentation has two bi-products — CO2 (carbon dioxide) and alcohol.

Unless gochujang and doenjang are fermented with the addition of yeast specifically for the purpose of fermentation, the only yeast available to create alcohol will be insignificant wild yeast that is always present on the soybeans or peppers.

Btw, bread dough produces quite a bit of alcohol when it ferments or proofs. All of the alcohol is lost during the baking of the bread.

Japanese curry is very much unlike any other Asian curry, it is closer to European-style curry. Japanese curry is made with apples (sweet), is a long slow process, thick, and traditionally not spicy in any context. It is considered a child’s dish (not spicy!) though everyone in Japan eats it. J-curry is a popular fast food in larger train stations (rice on a plate with a rolled omelet on top smothered in curry). I occasionally make Japanese curry. I have never had Korean curry. From what I have read, Korean curry is similar to Chinese curry, but nothing like the thinner Thai curries (green, red and yellow) or Japanese curry.

Not a popular dish in Japan but well worth the effort to try and find there — jumbo-size udon noodles in a bowl of thick Japanese curry. Not spicy but very flavorful.

EvilGrin – your comment about coconut milk going well with curry makes me think of Thai curry. It is coconut milk based. I have no idea why Thai curry comes in green or red or yellow.

Just a quick note about “organic” … The word ‘organic’ in relation to fresh vegetables and seeds means two things; (1) not a genetically modified organism (GMO), and (2) produced using sustainable methods, e.g. do not use chemical fertilizers, insecticides, or fungicides that are harmful to the environment.

With regard to seeds, not GMO is very important, how the seeds got here less so. They use of non-organic methods (fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides) is not significance to the seeds … which you are not going to consume but instead grow into something else. I think your organic methodology of growing the seeds is more important than the methodology that produced the seed in the first place.

While I am not completely sold on the needs for organic vegetables, I do avoid GMO’s like they are the black death. Just this month there was an article in the news about birth defects in Hawaii and a possible link to GMO corn consumed by pregnant women there. Currently, the link is not established, just highly suspected and being investigated as the possible cause of the birth defects.