I understand kimchi needs to ferment a while (weeks? months? I’m not sure) in a sealed container before you can call it kimchi. What I don’t understand is why the container has to be buried. Wouldn’t it work just as well to leave it sitting on a shelf in the pantry?
It would ferment very quickly if you just left it sitting outside. You want to ferment to a certain degree and then stop there. Nowadays they have fancy refridgerators that do that for you, but in the past people would bury their kimchii instead and take it out one pot at a time. Usually it only takes a day or so at room temperature for the kimchii to become ideal (although YMMV; some of my relatives liked theirs practically raw, while others waited until the smell could kill a white person at 100 paces :p).
I had a Korean sister-in-law for a while. My brother moved his family in with my parents while I was still living at home. She made a pot of Kimchi and set it on the enclosed back porch. It exploded. There may be other reasons for burying it but I think not having your entire home reek of it for days in the event of explosion might be one of those reasons. Our eyes watered for days whenever we went out on the porch. She made good kimchi though. I bought some at the store recently because I was craving it, and wanted to make some of those pancakes with kimchi in it, but it wasn’t as good as hers.
Oh, yeah, it does explode if the container is too tight and it ferments too quickly. It ALWAYS happens to someone after an international flight. Korean people just have to take their kimchii with them everywhere.
Related, but does anyone know any good Kimchi brands? I’ve tried one store-bought brand in the past and it wasn’t too great (tasted sort of bland and plasticy), and it’s not a type of food that encourages one to be exploratory…
I have access to Uwajimaya in Seattle (for any other Seadopers.)
I don’t have any historical or culinary insights to add, but kimchi, especially buried kimchi always makes me think of my old friend Sang Moon. 
That’s a cute story.
Sage Rat - there’s a brand called Jong-ga-jip ( 종가집 ) that’s fairly popular in Korea. It’s generic but okay.
Quick question. I keep buying jars of “Korea Kimchi” at my local asian grocer, eating half of it and then losing it in the back of the fridge. By the time I find it again, it is 3 or 4 months later. :smack: How long does kimchi last in the fridge?
That’s really a matter of personal taste. Old kimchii has a very strong taste - some people actually prefer it well-aged. It doesn’t go “bad” if that’s what you mean.
If you don’t like the strong taste of aged kimchii, you can cook it into a stew or put it in fried rice. The latter is probably the easiest. Chop the kimchii up into small pieces and cook it in a frying pan with butter. Add diced ham (or ground beef), vegetables of choice (onion, green pepers, mushrooms, etc) and fry up. Oh, and add rice while you’re at it. 
Cold, day-old rice works best, IMO. (Kind of like the way stale bread is the best for French toast.) Garnish with toasted sesame seeds.
With stew, it’s best to cook the kimchii a bit first (in sesame seed oil, if you like) before adding water and simmering. Usually my mom adds pork, tofu, mushrooms, green onions, and garlic somewhere along the way. It tastes great but your entire apartment will know what you’re having for dinner.
Now I’m hungry. 
I love kimchi jjigae (stew). I had a roommate in college who would always open the window when I made it. I noticed that it attracted flies.
That’s great news! Just what I was hoping to hear.
Hah! I was practically drooling as I typed that.
I’ve had grocery-store kimchi of two types: the first type comes in a plastic tub, like cottage cheese, and is not ‘fizzy’. The second type comes in a glass jar with a bulging screw-on lid, and is apparently carbonated by fermentation (instructions: “wrap jar in towel and open over the sink to avoid spills”). I find the fizzing to be disconcerting when I am biting down on cabbage. Is authentic homemade kimchi fizzy or flat? The kimchi in our local Korean restaurant is not fizzy, but that may be just to accommodate local palates.
Did anyone else read the thread title and immediately think of the MAS*H episode “Of Moose and Men” where Frank sees a Korean family bury a kimchi pot and he assumes it’s a mine?
The difference between fizzy and flat is probably the levels of fermentation and how tight the container is. My guess about the restaurant kimchii is that it’s either “new” kimchii or it’s left in an open container that they just scoop it out of.
That’s the kind we have at our local market (I recognize the instructions!). I like the fizziness from the active fermentation. I wonder, too, how authentic it is. Authentic or not, I love how it tastes!
If you have a local Korean supermarket you’ll find all sorts of kimchi. “Regular” cabbage kimchi (several varieties), radish kimchi (several varieties), something my wife calls “water kimchi” which doesn’t have any red in it at all but is still strongly flavorful, etc. We’ve usually got 3 or 4 varieties in our fridge at any one time. Most of it we buy, but she makes a really good traditional cabbage style at home (though no burying of pots).
I love kimchi cold out of the fridge, and like it mixed into the pancake and fried rice and such, but I don’t like the hot kimchi stew.
My wife says there is a Korean saying roughly translated as “without the kimchi there is no life.”
There used to be a Korean restaurant around here where your meal came with a whole array of cold appetizers/side dishes (in round dishes arranged in a triangle pattern) – kimchi, and several pickled vegetables which, based on what I’ve read in this thread, were probably also varieties of kimchi, tiny dried fish, noodles, and so on.
Closed some years ago. 
Have you ever been to a Korean restaurant where that’s typical? Is there a collective name (along the lines of dim sum) for such dishes?
Banchan. All Korean restaurants around here have them. It’s a given in any “authentic” Korean restaurant.