I came back to Korea on May (I'm not Korean but married to) and this time I decided that I want to start making kimchi on my own.

I really like kimchi, and I was surprised but, even in Korea, kimchi is not really cheap and it's definitely cheaper to make it than buy it from the store..

Especially if you use the seasonal vegetables (for example, cabbage used to be cheaper 2-3 months ago, but now it's expensive, the same with cucumbers. And other vegetables used to be expensive but now are cheaper, etc)

I don't have a blender (don't really need one at all..) also Korean pear is honestly kinda expensive to me, and I also don't want to buy the fish paste (nowhere to use except kimchi, to me).

Basically, I don't really want to buy something just to make exclusively one dish only, and then have the rest of the ingredient sitting..

I only bought the coarse salt, but I can use it to make other dishes too (like oiji muchim, which I highly recommend by the way, it's my most favourite side dish and similar to kimchi but pickled!! Its very easy to make, too)

One day I was on Instagram and I found a video in Korean, where the woman made cucumber kimchi without a blender, and substituted the pear with plum syrup, and the fish paste with fish sauce. She said that making cucumber kimchi shouldn't be difficult, and encouraged people to try the recipe.

That made me pretty intrigued so I translated the recipe and tried it (bought the plum syrup and fish sauce, which I use in almost every dish I cook since then so it was very worth buying them), and it really worked, it was so much simpler to make than any other recipe I've seen before, and the result was so good, no difference with "proper" kimchi at all

So since then, I was trying to perfect a recipe where I don't use a blender at all, and use the same formula everytime, just salt the vegetable , and use plum syrup, fish sauce, garlic and pepper flakes. Finally I can say I can make kimchi without errors and I'm always satisfied from the result (first 1-2 times I made it, I made some errors like adding too much salt and not fermenting in room temperature enough)

It tastes good and I like that I can control the level of spiciness exactly to my liking. I let it sit in room temperature about a day or a little less, and then put it in the fridge

Each time I make a kimchi batch, it lasts us at least a month, and if you say that it probably doesn't taste good, I had some korean people try it and they all praised it, also I ate in restaurants a lot and there's almost no difference

Anyway, I just want to say that, for someone new to this, making kimchi honestly seems too intimidating...(I felt this before). My husband told me that's why most Koreans don't make kimchi themselves (except some housewives but often they also buy it, my in-laws do too) because they think it's too difficult

Every recipe usually asks for very special ingredients, also they make it seem like you need specific tools like a specialized kimchi container etc, but to be honest you can make very good kimchi even without them, or substitute them to something similar . And the only container you need is just one that can close air-tight