Kkakdugi (Cubed Radish Kimchi)

Variations

• Chonggak kimchi: made from small ponytail radishes with their greens attached. Almost the same method; the difference is that they are used whole rather than cubed, so the leaves give it a different bite.
• Seokbakji: the radish cut into larger, flatter pieces. The wide slices served in seolleongtang restaurants are this, and for the same reason they take longer to ripen.
• Gul-kkakdugi: with fresh oysters, made in winter. A big lift in savour, but it will not keep — eat it within a week.
• With persimmon: a regional version that adds sweet persimmon. The sugar and enzymes speed the fermentation up.
• Summer radish: summer radish is sharper and more bitter, so add a little more sugar or some grated pear.
• Without jeotgal: for a vegan version, replace the salted shrimp and fish sauce with 2 tbsp soy sauce plus shiitake and kombu steeping liquid. The savour is shallower, so a tablespoon of ground dried shiitake makes up the difference (building umami).
• What sour kkakdugi is for: past two or three weeks it turns sour, and that is not a failure but a second ingredient. Use it instead of cabbage kimchi in kimchi jjigae, or chop it into kimchi fried rice — it carries less liquid than cabbage kimchi, which actually makes it better for frying.
• What it is eaten with: it is the partner to the rice-and-soup dishes — seolleongtang, galbitang, gamjatang, yukgaejang. Its job is to cut rich, fatty broth with acid and crunch, so the pairing is structural rather than a matter of taste.

Tips

• Do not skip the salting. It is the whole dish. Radish is over 90% water, and if that water comes out after you have seasoned it, the result is a lot of thin brine and very little flavour. Thirty minutes salting and twenty draining is what gives you crunch and concentrated seasoning at the same time (salt and seasoning).
• Do not rinse after salting. Cabbage kimchi rinses its brined leaves; kkakdugi does not. Rinsing strips the salt, you compensate with more fish sauce, and it ends up saltier.
• Leave the skin on. The skin and the layer just under it hold both the aroma and the lactic bacteria. Scrub the dirt off with a brush. The green shoulder end is sweet and the tail end sharp, so mix them.
• Hold to 2-2.5cm. That is the size at which it stays crunchy and still ripens through within a week. Cutting them evenly is the only part of kkakdugi that takes any skill (knife skills).
• Coat with chilli first. The gochugaru takes up what water is left and the colour sets into the radish, so the garlic and jeotgal that follow are not washed off. Changing only the order changes the colour (chilli and heat).
• Cool the rice paste completely. It is food for the lactic bacteria, and added hot it kills them first (fermentation basics).
• Go light on the ginger. A teaspoon is enough. Unlike garlic, too much leaves a bitter heat that becomes more pronounced as it ferments.
• Press it down and force the air out. Kimchi ferments anaerobically. The surface in contact with air softens first and grows a white yeast film. Cling film laid against the surface is the easiest fix (fermented pastes).
• Judge the room-temperature stage by temperature, not the calendar. A day at 20°C, half a day in a 25°C summer, two days at a 15°C winter. Bubbles and smell are the signal.
• Do not fill the jar. Brine rises as it ferments and overflows. Four-fifths is the safe line.
• Keep the brine. Kkakdugi liquid is a noodle broth in its own right, and a splash of it in cold noodle soup is common practice.
• For the first two days it is not kkakdugi yet. Freshly mixed it is just spicy radish; until the acid develops it does not taste like this food at all. Waiting a week is part of the recipe (serving temperature).