They have more than 200 years of combined kimchi experience, but ask any one of South Korea’s most esteemed kimchi makers the secret to a good one and you will get a different answer.
“Delicious kimchi begins with good ingredients,” said Lee Hayeon, 65, one of five people designated as a “Korean Food Grand Master” by South Korea’s agriculture department, which gives the title to makers across various categories, including liquor, tea and jang.
The Times spoke to all five current kimchi masters to learn what their kimchi journeys might teach a lover of this foundational Korean dish. All of the masters expressed concern about changes in how kimchi is made and consumed. Each of them waxed lyrical about the health benefits of traditional kimchi, but they worry about the rise of mass-produced, exported kimchi.
Ms. Lee’s signature kimchi bears little resemblance to the spicy red cabbage kimchi found at Korean restaurants the world over. The stars of her kimchi are five different types of seafood — abalone, conch, octopus, oysters and raw shrimp — along with cabbage, garlic and gochugaru (Korean red pepper powder).
Haemul-seokbakji directly translates to “seafood mix,” and was one of three types of kimchi served to royals during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1894). Ms. Lee’s grand master application was over 200 pages long and took into consideration her culinary résumé, along with the fact that her paternal grandmother had passed down the recipe to her mother.
Ms. Lee’s mother grew cabbages on her small family farm, dried and ground the red chile flakes in the sun and even salted her own fish for jeotgal (salted fish sauce), teaching Ms. Lee the importance of ingredients.
Ms. Lee sold dumplings from a street stall in the ’80s to support her family and opened a restaurant called Bongwoori in 1997. She is the president of the Kimchi Association of Korea, and a YouTuber who runs a channel devoted to the dish.
Name any fruit, vegetable or type of meat, and Ms. Lee will tell you, it’s possible to kimchify it. “If you make it a kimchi, it can be kimchi,” she said.
Baek-Kimchi
Kang Sooneui, Master of White Kimchi
Kang Sooneui, 76, a master of baek-kimchi (white kimchi), learned it and most of her other recipes the way most women of her generation did — from her mother-in-law. When she was 24 years old, she married the first son of the 25th generation of the Naju Na clan.
Her husband had a responsibility to hold ancestral memorial rites, or jesa; as his wife, it was Ms. Kang’s duty to learn his family’s recipes and cook for these occasions and to cook five meals a day for the household of 30. “If you’re a woman who married into a family with elders” she said, “you could never get a proper night’s rest because you never knew when they might wake you for a meal.”
As was common practice at the time, Ms. Kang reserved the best ingredients for the elders and used the leftovers to prepare meals for herself and the household servants.
Baek-kimchi, made with cabbage and typically seasoned with jujubes, pears and chestnuts, has a milder flavor because it lacks gochugaru. Brainstorming ideas for the kimchi served to younger family members, Ms. Kang remembered that her grandmother-in-law once said red pepper seeds were as effective as gochugaru to achieve flavor. Over time, this recipe became her signature — winning awards and landing her media attention.
She advises kimchi makers not to take shortcuts. “You have to make kimchi honestly,” Ms. Kang said. Too often, she said, people try to achieve the superficial look and taste of a kimchi without going through the labor — adding sugar to quicken fermentation, opting for cheap and easy-to-find salt, using processed jeotgal — instead of juicing up fruit to add natural sugar, and taking the time to make or find good ingredients. “You can never make authentic kimchi without being true to quality.”
Pogi Kimchi
Yoo Jung-im, Master of Cabbage Kimchi
Yoo Jung-im, 68, holds the title for pogi kimchi — the well-known variety of napa cabbage seasoned with red pepper paste — and is a pioneer in the world of commercial kimchi. She is the chief executive of Pungmi Foods, a company that has made kimchi since 1986.
Most of her recipes are from her mother, who went to work making banchan after Ms. Yoo’s father passed away when she was 11. Ms. Yoo developed a reputation after bringing in family lunches for the poultry farm where she worked. Encouraged by the farm’s owner, she set up a kimchi business in Suwon, a suburb just south of Seoul.
In the early days, she developed recipes and established relationships with cafeterias. She said businessmen tore up her business card at the suggestion they purchase mass quantities of kimchi. “Everyone took kimchi for granted because it was everywhere,” she said.
It’s rare for a kimchi business to have had the same leadership for as long her company. Part of the difficulty, she said, is that it’s hard to keep the prices and quality consistent when one kimchi recipe calls for many different ingredients and the price of ingredients, especially cabbage, can fluctuate wildly.
She credits her broth for her company’s success. Her recipe uses glutinous flour, instead of the more common rice flour, to thicken her broth, which is made with dried shrimp, dried mussels and dried shiitake mushrooms. Protein adds flavor and nutritional value to the kimchi, she said.
Soongchimchae
Yun Mi-wol, Master of Whole Cabbage Kimchi
Yun Mi-wol, 66, a former pop singer, is often credited with popularizing kimchi — and Korean food more broadly — in Japan.
Throughout the ’80s, she occasionally flew to Japan for concerts, but moved there after a divorce left her with two children and limited finances. She now owns Yunke, a restaurant in Tokyo with two Michelin stars.
Her specialty is soongchimchae, a whole cabbage kimchi recorded in “Siuijeonseo,” a 19th-century cookbook for noble families. While similar in look to pogi kimchi, soongchimchae is fermented with abalone, octopus and jeotgal of yellow stonefish for a more refreshing flavor.
She often tells her students that good kimchi — or any good Korean food for that matter — requires patience. “Only when you give kimchi the right time it needs to age does it have just the right amount of sourness,” she said.
A typical kimchi is at its height of delicious, she said, between 15 days to a month after it’s made, but soongchimchae is best between 100 days to six months after. “The smell of kimchi when it’s ready, I call it the ‘flower scent,’” she said, referring to the slightly sour aroma the dish gives off when ripe.
Banji
Oh Suk-ja, Master of Stuffed White Kimchi
Oh Suk-ja, 83, is a master of banji, a white kimchi stuffed with over a dozen ingredients, tied together with straw and soaked in beef broth. This labor-intensive kimchi, with a shorter shelf life, is lesser known even among Korean food devotees.
Ms. Oh realized only later in life that her name — and her family’s banji — were indicative of a higher social status. As a child, she sampled the dish only on the rare occasion that her grandfather would give her a bite. In her early 20s, her grandmother taught her to make the dish, but she found the process long and tedious.
