What is this thread all about?
Just a place for general discussion. A place to unload whats on your mind and talk about anything - personal, health, help needed, achievements, daily highs and daily lows, theories, predictions and what have you.
Does not need to be Q related.
Lol... I too started off with heck "what is gochujang?" too!!! I like to cook as well. My favorite meal is "leftovers" "curry".... it starts out as Indian or Thai curry but the addition of gochujuang makes it amazing. I've tried making my own kimchi but didn't like it it, costcos's is way better.
I still make kimchi sometimes but I eat it fresh :)
Kimchi is not an easy beast to tame. Every batch of kimchi is liable to be slightly different, as the complexity of the ingredients (volumes, etc) makes a big difference. And, you really need to eat a lot of really good kimchi to truly know what's what.
But actually, there are dozens of different types of kimchi. What a lot of folks know as simply "kimchi" is in fact baechu kimchi, which is the most common and popular variety among the Koreans.
Love fresh kimchi. Love older kimchi. (When it's older, it's ideal of kimchi jiggae or even kimchi poggeum (fried kimchi).
Kek. Was about to link you to maangchi, as she has become my go-to source for legit recipe preparations. Her Tongbaechu-kimchi vid is the one I love the best.
Dunno about mak kimchi. As I wrote, I'm a kind of purist/traditionalist and I tend to go for the harder, more traditional variations. Don't recall doing mak kimchi all that well, or often.
I've been eating Korea food for about (gulp) more than 3 decades and cooking it for more than two. But I feel like I've only recently mastered the Kimchi beast, and all my dishes have jumped a few levels in the last 4 or 5 years, especially since I learned to follow other's recipes in certain cases, instead of winging it. (I first learned basically by attempting to recreate what I was eating.)
I think the key to making good kimchi is, as I've said, eating a lot of good kimchi. You have to develop that sense of what is what. I definitely think its something you cannot get simply by eating it a few times and then going, like, I'll replicate that via this recipe. But, maybe you can. Like I said, I'm a purist. And Korean food is pretty much a sort of spiritual exercise for me... Actually, most cooking is, come to think of it.