You Can Kimchi Literally Anything with This Magic Paste

February 28, 2018, 4:00pm

Think kimchi is just a trend? Nah.

See, kimchi’s not a turmeric cleanse and it’s not a fucking Cronut™. Kimchi’s been around for about a billion years (give or take) as a way of turning run-of-the-mill vegetables into immortal, stank-infused pickles, which have kept the good people of Korea alive and well for centuries.

Videos by VICE

And while most Westerners think of napa cabbage or even daikon when they hear the word “kimchi,” we should be thinking of it as a verb, according to Matt Rodbard, co-author of Koreatown: A Cookbook. You can kimchi just about anything you want: potatoes, pineapples, mushrooms, peaches, and so on.

The secret, as usual, is in the sauce: a quick mixture of sweet rice flour, Korean red pepper flakes, fish sauce (or mushroom powder for vegetarians), garlic, ginger, onions, Korean pears, and a few other easily sourced ingredients. Just pulse it all in a food processor and toss it with your chosen chopped-up fruit or vegetable.

While it won’t have that deep, fizzy funk of well-fermented kimchi, it’ll hit all the right notes in a fraction of the time. Again, you can kimchi literally anything.

But if you happen to kimchi a Cronut™, keep that shit to yourself. We don’t want to hear about it.