Charlotte Cooks - Kimchi

ANNOUNCER 1: This is a production of a PBS Charlotte. ANNOUNCER 2: The following episode of Charlotte Cooks is brought to you by Central Piedmont Community College and viewers like you. Thank you. [THEME MUSIC] Hi there, and welcome to today's edition of Charlotte Cooks. I'm chef Pamela Roberts, and I'm really excited you're here with me today. We are going to be cooking food without using any heat. We're going to be using all raw foods today. So in order to do raw foods that are going to be served immediately, without any cooking, from a food safety standpoint, we're going to want to use some hand protection. So we're going to use some gloves. We're going to put on some gloves so that whenever we touch our food today we're not to be transmitting any kind of things that might be living on our hands or underneath our fingernails or anything like that. One thing I want to caution you about. If you're handling food, and you're looking at your fingernails, if you look at your hands like this and you can see fingernails above your fingertips, your fingernails are too long to be handling food. They need to be short, because you would not believe all the stuff that lives underneath your fingernails. So when you raw foods that are not going to be cooked, served right away, you need to be wearing some kind of a hand protection so you don't transmit anything that might be living on your hands to food. Because the last thing you want to do is make anybody sick, OK? So what we're going to be making today, after all that, we're going to making kimchi. There's another reason you're going to want to be wearing gloves, because kimchi is what? It's hot and spicy. And so you don't want any of that hot, spicy stuff to be on your hands. Because it does burn your skin. If you touch your eyes, you're going to have burning eyes. If you touch small children, they're going to cry. We try to avoid that at all costs. So what are we going to use for fresh kimchi? We're going to use cabbage. If you've not ever had kimchi before, you're in for a real treat. You can buy commercially prepared kimchi in the store. We're going to show you how to make it fresh from the very beginning. You can eat it from the very beginning. And then you put it in a glass jar and let it age and age and age, because it really doesn't go bad unless it gets moldy or full of bacteria, which is why we're wearing gloves. It looks like this when you buy it from the store, and you could tell that it's aged a little bit because the cabbages will get really, really soft. And you can see all the spices in this. You should smell this. The aroma is woo-hoo, amazing. So we're going to show you how to make this and you can eat it fresh. I tell you what, when I make this at my house, it never gets to age like this because we eat it all up fresh. You're going to find that as kimchi ages it just gets hotter and nicer. It's got-- takes on a really, really wonderful characteristic. So one of the first things we're going to use is let's talk about cabbage. We want to use a tender cabbage. You can use the regular old green head of cabbage that's nice and hard like you use for coleslaw. But what I'm going to choose is a savory cabbage. Savory cabbage has these wonderful, textured leaves on here. I love the textures of these leaves. What you could do with these leaves is you can actually take these, they have such a beautiful texture, and use these as decorations. You could use them as serving dishes. I mean they're absolutely gorgeous the way they look. But for this recipe, we are going to use a half a head of cabbage. If you wanted to use a different kind of cabbage, you could use a Napa cabbage, which this is what they've used in that commercially prepared kimchi, and you can see all of the nice, heavy stocks that are on the Napa cabbage. So here we have Napa cabbage. Napa cabbage comes in long, tight heads, like this. Savory cabbage comes like this, in a nice head like regular green cabbage. There's something else you can add to your kimchi if you wanted to, and that is bok choy. Bok choy, you can get it large like this or you can also get it in the small baby kind. It doesn't matter. It adds a nice, fresh, fresh quality flavor to the kimchi. And do you have to use it? No. You can use a combination of any of these three. You can use one. You can use two. That's the beautiful part about this recipe is that it is very, very versatile. So one of the first things we're going to do is we're going to take our cabbage and we're going to cut this core out, OK? Because the core is very tight and very hard, and it is going to hold everything together. So we're going to cut the core part and then we're going to take our cabbage and we're going to slice it up into nice little what we call a chiffonade. And all you have to do for that is just slice it very, very thin with your knife. OK. I'm just going to take this like this. All the way around. You don't want it to be too big, so when you come across these little rib sections, you want to make sure that the rib sections are being sliced nice and thin. It'll age. It'll be fine if it's not really thin. But I find that the kimchi makes a much, much, much finer salad if you've got everything shredded nice and small. So you're going to take this. You're going to put this into a bowl. And at this point in time you can go through this with your hands. If you find any big pieces that don't break up, you can choose to break them up with your fingers, you can choose to put them on your cutting board, but when you find pieces like this-- this is still part of the core-- you want to get rid of this core. You don't want that, OK? You want everything to be nice and loose and nice and soft and tender, because as we go through this process, this is going to continue to age. But what's going to happen is the water from the cabbage is going to start leeching out. Now how are we going to start making that water in the cabbage start leeching out? Here are some of the ingredients that we need for our dressing for our kimchi. First thing we're going to use is about a tablespoon of sugar. I'm going to put this in a bowl. You can use the nice organic sugar if you like. You can use-- I would not use a brown sugar or a molasses or honey because it's going to contribute too much of a flavor. What this sugar is for is this sugar is here to counteract any bitterness that we might find in something called "fish sauce." Now fish sauce is one of those Asian ingredients that is really, really, really kind of bizarre. Because if you were to taste fish sauce right off, you would immediately want to pull out your tongue and go shave your mouth and go oh, argh, that tastes horrible! Because it's got a horrible flavor of on its own. All it is, is fermented anchovies and water and salt. But it's one of those magic ingredients that really adds a little extra something to Asian foods that is just beyond belief. So what we're going to do is we're going to dissolve our sugar in our fish sauce. And I'm going to use two tablespoons of fish sauce, twice as much as I have the sugar. 2 tablespoons. I'm going to mix that up and just let that dissolve. I could add a little bit of salt at this point, but also you have to remember that your fish sauce is considered a salt product, so you could add a little bit of salt if you wanted to. Just a little bit, not much. Now we're going to pour this all over our cabbage, OK? And it doesn't look like much. It's all we need to get it going. Take my rubber spatula and scrape all this out and get this into the bowl. And we're going to stir this up. When you stir this up, what you're doing is you're just introducing salt to the product. And what's going to happen is the osmosis process, where the osmosis is where the liquid inside the cabbage is going to come out and dissolve the sugar and the salt and it's going to bring it back into the cabbage. And what it's going to do is it's going to help the cabbage release its water. You put this on here and you let the sit 15, 20, 30 minutes. I've already got some that have been soaking over here, because I want to show you what it looks like, the difference, OK? This one's been soaking for a little bit. And you could see at the bottom of the bowl, see how much water that is coming out? That's water from the cabbage, and that's what you want. That's part of the dressing. So it's kind of like cabbage juice that becomes part of your dressing, OK? So we're going to mix all this up. Now we're ready to add the rest of our ingredients. I'm going to put this one on the back, and I'm going to let this sit for a little while. So the rest of my ingredients for this, we're going to add some shredded carrots. And here's the beauty of this. You can shred your own carrots or you can go and you can buy them already shredded. The big thing about adding carrots to it, guys, is you want them to be small and you want to be thin. You want to be tender you don't want to put a big hunk of carrot in here, because if you go to eat it you crunch on a big hunk of carrot, it's the hardest part in the salad. That's just not very pleasant. So we're going to add some carrots and here. We're adding this for color. We're also adding it for a little bit of nutritional value. But remember, if you can't cut them yourself to be this small, then go ahead and buy them shredded. You can buy them in the bags, OK? So you mix that in. Already your salad is looking quite nice. Next thing we're going to add is a little bit of lime juice, a little bit of seasoned rice vinegar. We're also going to be adding a little bit of our spice, and I'm going to talk to you about our spice in just a moment. We're going to be adding a little bit of toasted sesame oil and some low sodium soy sauce. Why am I choosing the low sodium soy sauce? Because we've already got plenty of salt in here, OK, with the fish sauce, all right. So for toasted sesame oil, remember this is the Asian kind. This smells like burning tires, all right? But it is just like the fish sauce in that it adds a tremendous amount of flavor. Be careful. Just a little dab will do you, OK? So we're just going to put a little bit of this in here. Don't even measure it. Just a few drops. Just a little drizzle. That will add enough flavor to do the entire dish. I'm going to take my lime and I'm going to add some zest. Use your micro plane so you get it off nice and fine. If you don't have a microplane, you could use a peeler. One of the things you want to be aware that you're not pulling off is that white part that's just under the skin there, OK? So we're going to put that aside we're going to use the rest of that in something else. Next, we're going to use some rice wine vinegar. The rice wine vinegar comes in two forms. When you find it with the red lid, it usually has salt and sugar added to it. That's the one we're going to use today. If you decided you wanted to eliminate the salt and sugar, then you want to choose the one with the green lid and the green label, because that is unseasoned and it's just a perfectly crisp rice wine vinegar, OK? But most of the time when you're doing a recipe, you're going to be looking for the one that has some seasoning in it, OK? We're just going to put a little bit of that in there, about maybe a couple of tablespoons. And now something else I'm going to talk to you about is some of the chili paste that we're going to use. One of the Asian chili pastes that I really, really, really love, and usually they come out of Vietnam, sambal olek. It's describing the chili paste. Basically sambal is a combination of chilies. Basically it's kind of like salsa, OK? Kind of like ketchup. Kind of like mustard. It's a condiment. And when they say sambo, they're talking about a condiment. And then olek is basically just describing the hot peppers that go into it, all right? So you can use this one. This is just chili peppers ground into a paste, and it is hot and spicy. It is really, really, really, really hot and spicy. We have another kind of sambal olek, but this one is they call it chili paste with garlic, because this one has garlic added to it. Now if you're a garlic lover like I am, you are going to want to choose this one because the flavor is incredible. It looks the same, because when you mash the garlic up and mix it in with all these chilies it just sort of incorporates and goes right into it. But you're going to take-- that's a deadly dose here, folks. Plop it in. That's a deadly dose. But you know what? It makes the kimchi. It makes it amazing. It makes it wonderful it makes it absolutely delicious. Cap these up, because boy oh boy the spice from that could come up and really get you in the eyes. We're going to take a little bit of garlic, going to take a clove of garlic put it on the microplane. Why do we put it on the microplane? Because nobody that I know of, as much as I love garlic, I don't even want to bite into a big old hunk of raw garlic, because it's just kind of raw. But if you chop it up like this and mix it in there-- let's see of I can get this out with my spoon-- and put it in there. It's going to be a wonderful garlic flavor without really being too overwhelming with its raw pungency, OK? Add a little bit of your low sodium soy sauce. Not much. Not much. Not much at all. And once again, we're going to stir all this up. And you can see on the bottom of the bowl everything is combining. Oh it smells great. Everything is combining with all of those cabbage juices. And you want to continue to bring these things together, OK? Just continue rubbing them all together as you continue to add to your salad. This is your basic kimchi right here. The next thing that we're going to add to this is a little bit of a scallion and some cilantro. So we're going to take the scallion and the cilantro and we're going to cut the ends off because the ends-- we can use them to grow new babies, but you don't want to grow them, they take too long. And we're going to give these a nice thin slice. And I'm slicing them on an angle so they have some other visual interest instead of just being round. And you also have to remember that sometimes when you are considering making this and you want to use this in another dish-- and I'm going to show you right here at the end how we're going to use this in a noodle salad-- you want to have things cut in different ways. So if you're putting carrots in, in a long shred, then you want to cut your onions in a different shape. You want to cut your vegetables in a different shape, just so you have some visual interest in your salad. Three scallions, three large ones, or however many you like. I love scallions, so I'm going to put those in there. OK, let's stir that up. The next thing I'm going to add in here is a little bit of cilantro. We have our fresh cilantro, and we're just going to take a little bit off the top, pinch it off. And once again I'm going to give it a chop. Just crunch it up. Does it have to be really fine? No, it doesn't. You can actually do this to where it gets so fine it turns into what we call pixie dust, very, very, very, very, very, very little, very tiny. But we don't want it to be that small. We just don't want it to be huge leaves. We want to be incorporated. So I'm going to wipe my knife off. I don't know about you guys, but I love the smell of cilantro as it's being chopped. It just makes me start salivating. I absolutely adore this stuff. I feel sorry for those that don't like it, but I'm sure there's things I don't like that other people go, oh, I'm so sorry you don't like that-- such as persimmons. I don't understand persimmons. OK. Another story, another time. All right, so now basically what we have here is our kimchi, OK? We've got it all done. Mix it up, and you can serve this right away. This is ready to go. You can also just let this sit here. If you didn't want to use this right away you could-- if your family has any left over, put it in a glass jar, store it in your refrigerator, and it's going to be ready to go any time you want. You can use this-- I could sit down and eat this whole bowl. I love it. It could be my lunch. I love it. Oh my gosh. But what we're going to do with this now is we are going to turn this into a meal, OK? So for my meal I'm going to take a bowl, and I'm going to add-- I'm going to make my dressing first. My dressing is going to consist of three ounces of lime juice. That's fresh squeezed lime juice. I'm going to take my microplane and I'm going to take the zest off of a lime. If you are juicing and zesting your lime spokes, it's always best to get the zest off your limes before you juice them. It just makes it easier to handle. You can use a peeler, and once again, when we're talking about making the other kimchi we are going to be looking at making sure you don't get that white pith that's underneath. You just want to get all the nice pretty green stuff. Or if you're using lemons, you want to use pretty lemon stuff, the yellow stuff. Or grapefruit. Or orange. The zest is the colored part on the outside of your citrus fruits. So now we've got our lime juice. We are going to take a little bit more garlic, put one more clove of garlic in here. Once again, you're going to put it on your microplane simply because this is the best way and the easiest way to get a really nice, finely minced garlic, OK? [BOWL RINGS AS SHE STRIKES IT] Drop all that in there. Quit singing to me bowl. I should say I have singing bowls when I cook. Get all this off here. And it it's not coming off, then rinse it off with your lime juice, because you need it. There we go. All the way out. Get off there. Into this we're also going to be adding a little bit of oil, just regular vegetable oil. Not much. It's kind of like making a vinaigrette, but it's kind of like in a weird vinaigrette way because we're not using the regular vinaigrette ratios, OK? We could take this and add some soy sauce to this. And our dressing is just about ready to be made. We can add a little bit of fish sauce, but I think we have enough fish sauce in this, so I'm not going to add any more fish sauce to that. But one thing I am going to add to that is a julienned red pepper. Cutting peppers is one of those things that you should all know how to do. If you don't, well, you're about to learn. Here we go. I'm going to cut the top and bottom of the pepper. You save these for another use, because these little beauties like this are wonderful for shish kabob for salad, for something else. There's nothing wrong with that. We're just not going to use those today. And you going to cut the pepper open on one side. You're going to open it up and you're going to cut your seed pod out. OK. So you're going to end up with a nice long ribbon of pepper, and your seed pod comes out in one whole piece and you don't have to worry about all these little seeds falling all over the place. And Next thing you're going to do is you're going to flatten your pepper out. Now if your pepper's green, if you're pepper;s yellow, if your pepper's orange, it's going to break in a different way. Your green peppers are going to be a little bit more brittle than your reds, your yellows. Or your oranges. You can use whatever color pepper you want. So when it cracks on you don't worry about it, OK? And cut it into those sections. You're going to take your knife-- please be careful doing this-- and you're going to take that top membrane off. So you have these beautiful pieces of red pepper skin underneath, but you're just taking a very, very narrow cut to remove the membranes. And you're also using this to expose that beautiful red pepper that's underneath. And I'm going to show you a little bit of a difference right here right now, OK? So what we're going to do with this is we're going to take this and we're going to cut it to julienne. Holding my fingers, holding my knife. Notice my knife isn't coming up and going [TAPPING]. Don't do that with your knife, folks. That's a sure sign of an amateur. Rock your knife, OK? Nice and quiet. If you were working in a kitchen with 100 people and they were all doing this [TAPPING] you wouldn't be able to be in there. And that's why we teach people how to use their knives quietly. Notice how these look. I'm going to cut this one that doesn't have the membrane removed. You're going to see a little bit of a difference in how they look. Notice the difference between these two piles. Which one is more attractive? Which one makes you want to go, oh yummy, that looks delicious, OK? These look more juicy and succulent than these do. So I'm going to save those for something else altogether. Put these into our dressing here. Quickly go ahead and do the rest of these. We're going to add a few scallions once again. You have to remember, guys, when you're working with gloves on, too, things are going to be a little bit slipperier. Is that a word? I don't even know. But they're going to be slippery. And you just want to be a little bit careful with your knife, OK? So you want to go ahead and get rid of these. And I'm going to cut up a couple more scallions. Once again, they're going to be cut on the bias because we want that visual interest. Going to cut from the top all the way to the bottom. You just cut them all the way down to the very end where that scallion green has been broken, and just go all the way to the end. You're going to drop these in here. And once again, all we have in here is our dressing, and so what am I going to do with this? I'm going to take this and I'm going to add a pound of noodles. And these are just spaghetti noodles. You can use soba noodles. You can use any kind of noodle that you want. You can use zucchini noodles if you wanted. Zucchini noodles would make a good salad. And you can take your hands-- this is why we're wearing gloves-- and we're going to toss this around into the dressing. I've got plenty of dressing in here. I'm just going to go and put all these in here. Plenty of dressing. When you cook your noodles, folks, and they're done cooking, I would make sure that you take them and toss them with a little bit of oil. Make it a neutral-flavored oil, not a white truffle oil or anything like that. Just a neutral-flavored oil so that you can add them to whatever dish that you're going to add and they will continue to absorb flavors. All right, so now we've got all this added in here. This is where the kimchi comes in. I'm going to take my kimchi and I'm going to look at it. Do I need to chop it up more? I don't think so. Look at this. It's already it's just like sitting here just getting so mellow. But don't let that fool you. This is some spicy enchiladas, guys. You're into fusion cuisine, right? Spicy enchiladas. I'm going to take this and I'm going to put this into this noodle salad. I'm going to toss it in. So now we can have a meal from this. So next what I'm going to do is I am going to plate this up. And how am I going to plate it? I'm going to plate it by using what I call a tuning fork. And basically our tuning fork is just a long carving fork, a pasta fork. I like calling it a tuning fork because it reminds me of a tuning fork. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a nice little bowl, and you can use a plate, you can use whatever you want. OK kimchi, over here. I'm going to take my salad and I'm going to stick my fork in here and I'm going to roll it. I'm going to get a nice little roll and pick that up and I'm going to put it in my bowl. I'm going to put several of those in here. It looks a lot nicer than just picking this stuff up and just plopping it into a bowl. It actually looks like you gave it some thought. And I think whenever you put food on a plate it should look like you have some form of thought in there so that it doesn't look like it's just haphazardly ended on a plate. People like to eat food that I think people have thought about. All right, since I have more kimchi over here, I'm going to go ahead and grab some. Put some kimchi on the top. And now to make this to meal-- I would eat this all by itself. Oh my gosh, I would eat this just like this. To make it a meal, the next thing I'm going to do is add a little bit of chicken. You can use grilled chicken that you've grilled before. And just put this on the top. Add a couple of pieces on here. And that's all you need. That's ready to go. That's a dish right there for those who eat chicken. We can also take some of these noodles and do another one of these. I'm going to add a little more kimchi to this, just to put it on the top. And then I'm going to add some shrimp to this. You can take the shrimp and you can saute them. These have just been sauteed with a little bit or butter and some lemon and some pepper, and that's it. And you could put these on here and make this into a delicious meal. There's a nice big fat ones. Let's put that one on there. So there you go. Kimchi. There is a dinner for those who eat seafood. And those who don't, well then here you go. I'm going to put this in a bowl for you. You just want to have some kimchi on the side, here you are. And you could make this in as large a quantity or as small quantity as you want, but there we go. There's our fresh kimchi that's ready to eat. Here's our kimchi as a meal with chicken. Here's our kimchi as a meal with shrimp. And I hope you make this, because this is a simple recipe. I hope you enjoy this meal. It's a fun and easy one to make. You can make it as a side salad. You could make it as a main dish. You could keep it a refrigerator and have it as a condiment to eat for a while. I hope you decide to make it and let me know how you like it. I like it. This is one of my favorite things to eat. Thank you for watching this episode of Charlotte Cooks. You can find our recipes on our website at pbscharlotte.org and you can also e-mail me at Pamela.roberts.cpcc.edu. I love to hear from you. Let me know how you like this. Let me know how spiced up you made it. And I'll catch you next time on Charlotte Cooks. Thanks for watching. [THEME MUSIC] ANNOUNCER 1: A production of PBS Charlotte.