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INGREDIENT DEEP DIVE 🍳

Kimchi

What is it?

Kimchi is a traditional Korean fermented vegetable dish—most commonly made with napa cabbage, salt, garlic, ginger, scallions, and gochugaru (Korean red chile flakes). After salting and seasoning, it ferments over days to weeks, developing its signature tangy, funky depth.

You’ll find it refrigerated at most Asian markets, or even in a growing number of standard supermarkets.
While napa cabbage kimchi is the most common, there are dozens of variations using radish, cucumber, scallions, or mustard greens.

What’s its flavor?

Taste: Sour, salty, lightly umami (from the fermentation)

Aroma: Allium & chili aromas mixed with funky fermentation notes

Texture: Crunchy when fresh, softer and jammy as it ferments

Physical: Spicy

Human: A foundational Korean ingredient, served with nearly every meal as side dish (banchan), or incorporated as a key flavoring

Why should you buy some?

Kimchi is a potent flavor booster. A spoonful can turn plain rice, noodles, or eggs into something bold and complex.

It lasts a long time in the fridge and evolves in flavor instead of “going bad.”
Brings acid, salt, umami, and heat in one ingredient.
Works both raw (for brightness and crunch) and cooked.

It’s one of the easiest ways to add personality to simple food.

What else can you make with it?

Kimchi fried rice
Kimchi grilled cheese (or quesadillas!)
Kimchi pancakes (kimchijeon)
Stirred into ramen, stews, or soups
Chopped into rice bowls, scrambled eggs, or dumpling fillings

Once you keep kimchi in your fridge, you’ll start reaching for it anytime food tastes a little too plain.

RESOURCE RECOMMENDATIONS ✅

Experiment with kimchi at home

A couple years back, we covered the kimchi framework on this newsletter, which explained the above illustration in detail.

We’ve also loaded a kimchi framework in our app if you want to experiment with it there, along with interactive recipes for fried rice, soups, rice bowls, and savory pancakes that would all work great with kimchi (on the app, you can “remix” and document any additions you make).

Check out the app

READER Q&A 🧠

Canned vs dried beans

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Question: “Are dried beans worth the effort of cooking from scratch when you can buy canned beans?” - Eliot H.

Answer: Dried beans can yield better texture and flavor, but they are a labor of love (and time).

Truthfully, canned beans are more convenient and what we use 90% of the time. Here’s why:

They’re fully cooked, shelf-stable, inexpensive, and usually pretty good.
If you’re making a weeknight chili, tossing beans into a salad, bulking up a soup, or refrying them, canned beans are ready to go and you won’t notice much of a flavor difference.

But if you’re making a bean specific dish — cassoulet, feijoada, frijoles de olla, charro beans, a braised bean soup, then you might want to reach for the dried beans to celebrate their full potential.

They will take a few hours to cook through, but everything will infuse deep into the bean, and you can dial the final texture to be perfectly creamy instead of mushy or grainy (like canned beans might be).

Note: If you’re taking the time to make one of these bean-forward dishes, make sure your dried beans are high quality and fresh — old beans that have spent over 6 months in the back of a pantry could be stale and might never fully soften.

TLDR: Canned beans for 90% of weeknight cooking, dried beans for special, bean forward recipes.