Green Onion Kimchi Recipe - How to Make Pa Kimchi | Hank Shaw (2024)

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Korean green onion kimchi might be my favorite variety of this powerfully flavored condiment/vegetable.

And for a wild foods guy like myself, making green onion kimchi couldn’t be easier considering how many wild onions grow all over the country.

I’d always been a little nervous about making kimchi, which is to Korea what sauerkraut is to Germany. Kimchi, if you’ve never eaten it, is essentially the national dish of Korea, is eaten with everything and comes in myriad forms.

Every Korean I’ve ever met is a self-described authority on kimchi, much the way Italians are with pasta or the way New Jerseyans and New Yorkers are with pizza and bagels.

So it was with great trepidation that I served my friend Helen Lee some of my homemade green onion kimchi some months ago. When she ate it, her eyes widened. “Wow! This is really good! It actually has the kimchi aftertaste!”

Helen explained that good kimchi is fermented for quite a long time, and it develops a particular aftertaste, as well as a slight fizziness from the ferment. This is what separates “real” kimchi from kimchi-flavored crap, she said.

Buoyed by Helen’s vote of confidence, I made more kimchi. What is it, you ask? Well, it is a vegetable of some sort — usually cabbage, daikon or green onions — fermented with salt, soy or fish sauce, garlic, ginger and LOTS of chiles. It sits around for anything from a few days to a year, melding flavors and generally doing its microbial thing.

When you eat it, kimchi is a nuclear bomb of flavor. Pungent, picante and powerful all at once. A little goes a long way. Unless you are Korean, in which case you can eat tubs of the stuff.

I like green onion kimchi next to bland foods like steamed rice, simply cooked meat and fish — especially bass and catfish — and in kimchi dumplings. It’s really good with bulgogi, that other national dish of Korea, too.

Koreans use scallions or other green onions, which you can of course use, but I prefer to use wild onions like ramps, the Sierra wild onions we get at high elevations, or three-cornered leeks, which are an invasive species around these parts.

Everyone reading this has some sort of wild onion living near you, so give this recipe a go this spring. It will be ready right when you break out the grill.