Mixing the paste with gochugaru
Okay. Last lesson your cabbage sat in salt water for a few hours, got heavy and floppy, and you rinsed it three times to get the salt off. If you did that, it's sitting in a colander right now, draining, and you're ready for the part people actually picture when they think "kimchi." The red paste.
This is the fun part. It's also the part where people either add too little gochugaru because they're scared of it, or dump in the whole bag because they figure more heat means more flavor. Neither is right. Write this down.
What you need
- Gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes) — the coarse kind, not the fine chili powder from the regular grocery aisle. If you didn't grab this on your Asian market trip, it's the one ingredient in this whole class I won't let you substitute your way around. Regular chili powder is a different flavor entirely and it'll taste like a mistake.
- 3-4 tablespoons of it, to start, for a medium head of cabbage. My mom's answer was "until it looks right." I made her stand at the counter and measure it once. It came out to two tablespoons for her, but she was making a smaller batch and going lighter than most people like. Start at three and adjust from there.
- Fish sauce, a couple tablespoons. Or salted shrimp (saeujeot) if you have it and want to go traditional — it adds something fish sauce alone doesn't, but it's not required.
- Sugar, a teaspoon, just to round out the salt and heat.
- Grated garlic, a few cloves.
- Grated ginger, about a teaspoon. Go easy here — ginger is the ingredient people accidentally let take over.
- Grated Korean pear or apple, a few tablespoons. This adds sweetness and helps the fermentation along. If you don't have either, a little extra sugar is fine for a weeknight batch, that's not the hill I die on.
- Rice flour paste — a couple tablespoons of rice flour cooked with a half cup of water until it thickens slightly, then cooled. This is what makes the paste stick to the cabbage instead of sliding off. Don't skip this one, it's doing real work.
Mixing it
Combine everything except the cabbage in a big bowl. I mean big — bigger than you think, because once you add the radish and green onion next lesson, this paste needs somewhere to go. Stir it into a paste the color of brick, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Taste it. Yes, before it goes near the cabbage. Dab a tiny bit on your finger. It should hit salty first, then a slow building heat, then a little sweetness underneath. If it's flat, it usually needs more fish sauce, not more gochugaru. People reach for the pepper flakes to fix everything and it's usually not the pepper flakes that are wrong.
Here's the thing — this paste is supposed to be intense on its own. It mellows once it's coating a whole head of cabbage and sitting in the fridge fermenting for days. If you taste it now and think "that's too much," you're probably right where you need to be. Don't panic and water it down.
One real caution: wear gloves for this if you have sensitive skin, and for the love of all that's holy don't touch your eyes or anything else while you're working the paste into the cabbage next lesson. Gochugaru oil sits on your hands for hours no matter how much you wash. I learned this one the annoying way, not the dangerous way, but it's a bad afternoon either way.
A note on getting the amount right
I'm someone who measures everything, so gochugaru by feel bugged me for years before I made peace with it. Here's roughly how I think about it now: three tablespoons per head of cabbage gets you a mild-medium kimchi that's a good starting point if you've never made it before. Once you know your own taste, you adjust. My mom's "until it looks right" wasn't her being cagey — she genuinely didn't need the measurement anymore. You will, for a while. That's fine.
This is also, honestly, a logistics problem more than a cooking problem. You're not making a decision every ten seconds, you're combining a list of ingredients in a bowl and tasting once. Don't overthink it.
Little aside — this is around the same time in the process my rice cooker died on me mid-dinner one night, a whole spread planned around it, and I ended up finishing a batch of rice on the stovetop from memory, no machine, and it came out fine. I bring it up because kimchi paste is the same kind of thing. It feels like it needs precision equipment and a special touch. It doesn't. It needs a bowl, a spoon, and you tasting it and trusting what you taste.
Once your paste is mixed and it tastes right to you — salty, hot, a little sweet underneath — set it aside. Next lesson we work it into the cabbage along with the radish and green onion, and that's when it starts looking like actual kimchi instead of a bowl of red paste sitting on your counter.
Before next time: if you haven't already, grate your radish and slice your green onion so they're ready to go. It's a five-minute job now that saves you standing at the cutting board with sticky red hands later.