Jang is a family of Korean fermented pastes and sauces.

The Meaning of Kimchi

This post is an ongoing project. Additional information will be added.

There over 300 types of kimchi. The majority of them are made with cabbage or radish. Kimchi made with aliums, cucumbers, sturdy greens, stalks, shoots, or herbs are very common.

Kimchi is also made with sturdy vegetables like old pumpkin or turnips. It’s made with sea vegetables. It’s made with fruit like firm persimmons. There’s seafood and meat kimchi. There are categories of kimchi like jjanji 짠지 (brine preserved with minimal seasoning). Then there’s a whole other style of preserving vegetables called jangajji 장아찌, which means pickles. This is commonly translated into English as soy sauce pickles. But it’s also made without any soy sauce.

Another Korean method for preserving vegetables is drying.

Finally, vegetables are also preserved in fermented soybean paste.

Kimchi as a food that is eaten is defined as a fermented food made of salted vegetables, then mixing the salted vegetables with seasonings. Kimchi is not made with every kind of vegetable. You can salt and season any vegetable like kimchi. But will it taste good and how long will it last? Are you going to get a fermented food? goes into a blog post?