Cooking with kimchi

What to cook with kimchi

Kimchi belongs in a Korean kitchen, but it does its best Western work as a seasoning: it brings acid, salt and heat all at once, which is exactly what melted cheese, cream and beef fat are missing. Four dishes below. The useful part is not the recipes — it is knowing which pot to open for which one.

Young or sour? Match the pot to the dish

Our kimchi is raw and unpasteurised, so it keeps fermenting in your fridge and it is a different ingredient in week one than in month three. Neither stage is better. They are for different jobs, and this is the one thing a recipe written from a supermarket jar cannot tell you.

Stage	How it tastes	Use it for
Week 1–3	Crisp, bright, lightly sour. Still tastes of raw cabbage.	Raw, as a topping — burgers, sandwiches, salads, alongside a roast.
Month 1–2	Deeper, properly sour, softer. The chilli has settled in.	Anything with cheese. The acid is strong enough to cut fat.
Month 2–3	Sharp, soft, fizzy. Too sour for most people to eat plain.	Cooking. Heat rounds the acid off and concentrates it — this is the best cooking kimchi you will get.

If the end of a pot has gone sharper than you like, that is not a pot going off. It is the pot arriving where these recipes want it.

Kimchi toastie

Serves 215 minutesMonth 1–2 kimchi

The one everyone makes first, and the one most often ruined by wet kimchi. Drain it properly and the bread stays crisp; skip that and you get a steamed sandwich. Sour kimchi beats young here — you want it to cut the cheese, not sit politely next to it.

Ingredients

• 4 slices of sourdough or another firm, close-crumbed bread
• 120 g kimchi, drained hard and roughly chopped
• 100 g aged cheddar or gruyère, coarsely grated
• 20 g soft butter, for the outsides
• 2 spring onions, sliced thin (optional)

Method

1. Put the chopped kimchi in a sieve and press it with the back of a spoon until it stops dripping. This is the whole recipe. Keep the brine you press out.
2. Butter the outside face of each slice. Build inside: cheese, then kimchi and spring onion, then the rest of the cheese. Cheese on both sides glues the sandwich shut.
3. Cook in a dry pan over medium — not high — heat, pressing down with a spatula, 3–4 minutes a side, until deep golden and the cheese has run.
4. Rest for a minute before cutting, or the filling slides out. Stir the reserved brine into mayonnaise and serve it alongside.

Creamy kimchi pasta

Serves 220 minutesMonth 2–3 kimchi

Korea and Italy build flavour the same way — ferment, fat, salt, starch — which is why this works rather than merely surprising you. The step people skip is frying the kimchi until its edges catch. Raw kimchi stirred into cream tastes like a mistake; caramelised kimchi tastes like a sauce.

Ingredients

• 200 g spaghetti or linguine
• 150 g sour kimchi, chopped, plus 2 tbsp of its brine
• 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 100 ml single cream
• 30 g parmesan, finely grated, plus more to finish

Method

1. Start the pasta in well-salted water. Keep a mug of the cooking water back before you drain.
2. Meanwhile fry the kimchi in the butter and oil over medium-high heat for 4–5 minutes, without stirring much, until the edges darken and catch. Do not rush this.
3. Add the garlic for 30 seconds, then the brine. Let it hiss and reduce to almost nothing.
4. Pour in the cream, simmer for two minutes, then add the drained pasta with a splash of its water and toss hard until the sauce coats rather than pools.
5. Off the heat, stir the parmesan through. Salt is unlikely to be needed — the kimchi brought it.

Kimchi mac and cheese

Serves 440 minutesMonth 2–3 kimchi

Macaroni cheese is rich to the point of dullness by the third forkful. Kimchi is the acid that fixes it, and a baked dish is forgiving of a very sour pot — the oven takes the edge off while keeping the flavour.

Ingredients

• 250 g macaroni
• 150 g sour kimchi, drained and chopped
• 30 g butter and 30 g plain flour
• 500 ml whole milk
• 150 g mature cheddar, grated, plus 30 g for the top
• 40 g coarse breadcrumbs

Method

1. Heat the oven to 200 °C. Cook the macaroni two minutes short of the packet time and drain — it finishes in the oven.
2. Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook for a minute. Add the milk a splash at a time, whisking, until you have a smooth sauce that coats a spoon.
3. Off the heat, stir in the 150 g of cheddar until it melts, then fold through the kimchi and the pasta.
4. Tip into a baking dish, scatter the breadcrumbs and remaining cheese over, and bake 20–25 minutes until blistered and brown at the edges.

Kimchi burger

Makes 220 minutesWeek 1–3 kimchi

The only one of the four that wants a young pot. Here the kimchi stays raw and its job is crunch and cold against hot beef — cook it or use a soft, sour one and you lose the entire point.

Ingredients

• 2 beef patties of about 150 g, at room temperature
• 60 g young kimchi, drained, left in long pieces
• 2 tbsp mayonnaise mixed with 1 tsp kimchi brine
• 2 slices of cheddar and 2 brioche buns

Method

1. Stir the brine into the mayonnaise and set aside. Toast the cut faces of the buns in a dry pan.
2. Season the patties well and cook them hard in a very hot pan, 3 minutes the first side, 2 the second, laying the cheese on for the last minute.
3. Build: mayonnaise on both halves, patty, then the kimchi piled on top of the cheese so it stays cold and crisp. Close and eat at once.

Vegetarian and vegan versions

Our standard kimchi contains seafood, so it is not vegetarian. The vegan version is entirely plant-based and behaves identically in all four dishes — same ferment, same seven days, same three months. For the toastie, the pasta and the mac and cheese, swap the SKU and change nothing else.