For a Master Class in Salt, Try Making Kimchi

Way back in 2018, I went to South Korea for a wedding. While there, I persuaded an elderly friend of my sister-in-law to show me how she made kimchi. When we arrived at her apartment, the living-room furniture had been pushed aside to make space. She spread a tarp across the floor and set out giant stainless steel bowls of prepped veggies, a bucket of napa cabbage she'd started salting the night before, and two kinds of fish sauce, one of them in a five-liter jug. What impressed me the most was what wasn't there: no recipes and no scale. We worked through the whole process. Or really, she did. I mostly observed and took notes in awe as she eyeballed vast quantities of food, even the high-impact ingredients that, in inexperienced hands, can turn the end product into a salty disaster. When she finished and filed the kimchi in a special fridge on the porch, my lasting impression was of how she was able to do it without measuring a thing. Photograph: ED JONES/Getty Images As a religious ... Read full article.