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We found an entire category in the Yahoo! Directory that listed web sites about kimchi. The first sentence on the first web site we visited, titled Life in Korea: Kimchi Spotlight, declares that "Kimchi represents Korea's best known food." In fact, kimchi is a generic name for a multitude of seasonal and regional varieties of pickled or fermented vegetable side dishes flavored with seafood and spices, and high in vitamins, minerals, and lactic acid. The world of kimchi can be divided into kimjang kimchi, produced in late autumn for long-term storage over the chilly Korean winter,
and the more perishable kimchis, produced from market-fresh vegetables in season. Baechu, or whole cabbage kimchi, is a familiar Korean classic. Whole cabbages are cleaned, sectioned, and soaked for several hours in a salt-water brine. As the cabbage softens, the companion ingredients are assembled: ground red pepper powder, garlic, and ginger are the usual spices. Pickled baby shrimp or other pickled seafood may be added according to taste and availability. In some variations, the cabbage is cut into bite-sized pieces, but in tongbaechu kimchi whole cabbage leaves are stuffed with the seafood and seasoning to form solid bundles, stored in brine in a covered crock. Cabbage kimchi recipes run the gamut from simply spicy to five-alarm hot. The Recipe Source, a mammoth
site that is the new home of SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, offers instructions for making 11 kinds of kimchi. From the straightforward Korean cabbage relish to the complex and exotic Northern cabbage kimchi to the light, summery cucumber kimchi, there's a kimchi dish here for every palate. On a web page called The History of Kimchi, we discovered that the cultural and historical
significance of kimchi in Korea goes well beyond a passion for pickles.
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