My wife grows these awesome French Breakfast Radishes in May. They are the first bounty of our new farm in Caledonia. They didn't sell out at the Trinity Bellwoods Farmer's Market so I decided to try my hand at a Korean style of fermentation. I was impressed at how easy, rewarding and delicious it was.
Start with making a brine for your radishes:
Add 30g of kosher salt to 1 liter of distilled water(or leave a liter out at room temperature over night to allow the chlorine to evaporate- (chorine could kill the wild yeast necessary to create the lacto-fermentation.) and stir to dissolve the salt.
Slice the radishes (you can also leave them whole or quarter them) and put them into a crock or glass jar.
Pour the cooled brine over the radishes, weigh the radishes down with a plate to ensure they are submerged. I brined them for 3 hours. If I left them whole I would have brined them overnight.
While you're brining. Grab an onion, a thumb sized piece of ginger 3 garlic cloves and 2 tablesoons of chili flakes. (I Found 2 fish peppers that we grew last year and added them in as well) If you like things less spicy go with 1 tablespoon of chilies.
Grate everything into a paste.
After 3 hours the radishes should still have a bite and be salty. Drain them and reserve the brine. Mix them with the paste.
Transfer the mixture into a clean crock or glass jar. Use your fingers to press the radishes tightly into the jar. If the brine doesn't cover the radishes you can add some of the reserved brine. Weigh the radishes down again. Its essential that the kimchi is deprived of air to allow it to ferment properly. Also if any product is above the brine it could grow mold and go rancid. It tasted quite salty and had an overpoweringly strong onion pungency.
I removed the weight and stirred the contents and tasted the progress every day. I noticed that the pungent onion flavour mellowed out into the dish I know as kimchi.
(In The smaller jar I added I tablespoon of Thai fish sauce it didn't drastically change the flavour- just deepened it a little.)
This is the final product. After 7 days it took on a nice pink colour and the pungeny mellowed out, it still has a nice crunch and mouthfeel. It is still spicy and I love it. I gave some to my neighbors Korean girlfriend- she said it needs some sugar!
It did not grow mold.
The next time I do it I'm going to put a cloth over the top to keep the fruit flies away.
It did not grow mold.
The next time I do it I'm going to put a cloth over the top to keep the fruit flies away.
Here's my next project: Fermented Carrots and Turnips. Yellow and red carrots in a ginger garlic and coriander brine. And Turnips 4 ways: Thai (red curry paste, ginger, fish sauce) Japanese, (konbu brine, soy, szechuan peppercorns ginger) Middle Eastern (shwarma style- pomegranite seeds, red beets ras al hanout) and Indian (ginger, garlic, whole tumeric and whole garam masala) we'll see...