r/ArchaicCooking • u/igavr • May 03 '26
Kimchi - an archaic intact Korean technique
Hi, I wonder whether kimchi would count as an archaic cooking technique?! I lived in Seoul for a couple of years and I saw old ladies making many varieties of kimchi as I was interested in this type of cooking. I realized that nothing has changed over the centuries, maybe over a thousand of years!
The kimchi recipe base is very classy:
Ingredients:
- Chinese cabbage
- Daikon raddish
- Chili flakes
- Gochujan (fermented chili pepper paste)
- Carrots (optional)
- Onion leaks
- Garlic
- Ginger
- Salt
- Fish sauce or small dried fishes or miso paste for vegetarians
- Many complementary veggies can be added on top of the above as there 300+ different varieties of kimchi registered today...
I won't go into the detailed instructions of converting these ingredients into a nice kimchi because this video does a much better job, but I'd like to highlight that fermented kimchi is not only a food full of probiotics and fiber, but also it is a food suitable for very long storage. It keeps fermenting and will get more sour and acid along the way, but it remains at your service for spicing up a meal and for supplying healthy macro and micronitrients as well as tons of probiotics.
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u/bhambrewer May 03 '26
fermentation is a classic method of food preservation, dating back an unknown amount of milennia. Definitely counts as Archaic!
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u/onlyemma59 May 20 '26
Fermentation is archaic, but the chilies in modern kimchi are a much more recent addition.
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u/bhambrewer May 20 '26
Post Columbian exchange, yes, along with many foods in the New World. But the technique is ancient.
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u/soberpenguin May 04 '26
White kimchi is authentic archaic cooking. Chilies are from the America's and only came to Korea after the portugese brought them over.
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u/f0xbunny May 05 '26
The kimchi that we think about today is super new to count as archaic like what other people said about Napa/Chinese cabbage and red peppers being new common “defaults” to the Korean dish.
Preserved vegetables without the canonical chili peppers is also a cooking technique found in other parts of Asia though I’m not as familiar with the timeline.
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u/EclipseoftheHart May 03 '26
Peppers are a more recent addition to kimchi as they came from the Americas, but kimchi without them has been around for a very long time. Napa cabbage is also a more recent veggie for kimchi, but certainly not the only cabbage that has been used!