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In part one we covered the foundation: the two percent salt rule, the submerge rule, and a Highveld sauerkraut that teaches your hands what a healthy ferment looks and smells like. Everything from here is a variation on that same theme. What changes is the vegetable, the seasoning, and how you use the result.
This is where fermenting stops being a preservation chore and starts being a genuine kitchen upgrade. The condiments below are the ones you currently pay a premium for at the supermarket, in small jars, with ingredient lists you did not write. Made at home from garden produce, they cost almost nothing and taste considerably better.
Garden Kimchi Without Imported Ingredients
Kimchi has a reputation for being difficult, which is mostly a myth built on ingredient anxiety. People assume they need napa cabbage, Korean radish, gochugaru, and fish sauce, all of which are either expensive or hard to find in most South African towns. None of them are strictly necessary.
Start with the cabbage. Chinese cabbage is increasingly available at larger produce markets and grows well in Highveld autumn and winter, but ordinary green cabbage from your own garden makes a perfectly good kimchi with a firmer bite. Cut it into rough chunks rather than fine shreds.
For the radish component, a Korean mu is ideal and unnecessary. Use whatever root vegetable your garden actually gives you: turnip, daikon if you grow it, or plain garden radish cut into batons. Carrot works too, adding sweetness that feeds the fermentation.
Gochugaru is the one place where substitution requires a little thought. Korean chilli flakes carry a distinctive combination of moderate heat and natural sweetness, generally sitting somewhere in the 4,000 to 8,000 Scoville range with a smoky, fruity character that ordinary chilli powder does not replicate. The mistake beginners make is reaching for hot chilli flakes alone, which brings harsh heat and none of the sweetness. A blend works far better. A widely recommended approach is combining sweet paprika with a smaller proportion of cayenne, roughly three parts to one, which gives you the colour, the sweetness, and manageable heat. If you grow your own chillies, drying and coarsely grinding a mild variety produces something closer to the real thing than anything on a supermarket shelf.
Fish sauce is optional. A vegetarian kimchi built on garlic, ginger, and a spoon of rice flour porridge to feed the bacteria ferments beautifully.
The Method
Salt the cabbage first. Reference work on kimchi fermentation describes an initial salting at five to seven percent salinity for around twelve hours, followed by rinsing and draining, with the optimum salt concentration during the actual fermentation sitting near three percent. That two-stage approach is what gives kimchi its texture: firm, never limp.
So: salt the chunked cabbage heavily, leave it overnight, rinse it well, and drain it. Meanwhile make your paste from garlic, ginger, your paprika and cayenne blend, a little sugar or grated apple, and enough water or rice porridge to bind it. Mix the paste through the cabbage and your radish batons using gloved hands. Pack it tightly into jars, press it below its own liquid, and leave headspace because kimchi is an enthusiastic bubbler.
The same source notes that cooler fermentation temperatures around ten degrees are preferred over anything above twenty, with the target acidity landing at a pH between roughly 4.2 and 4.5. This is why Highveld winter is the best kimchi season you will ever have. Leave it on the counter for one to three days until it starts bubbling, then move it somewhere cool. In a Centurion winter, an unheated pantry does the work of a Korean kimchi fridge for free.
There is also a decent nutritional argument for keeping a jar going. A large Korean cohort analysis reported by the BMJ, drawing on data from more than 115,000 participants, found an association between moderate kimchi consumption and lower obesity risk, and a separate randomised controlled trial in overweight participants found kimchi consumption reduced body fat and shifted gut microbial composition. Association is not causation, and the salt content is real, but the direction of the evidence is not nothing.
Fermented Chilli Sauce
If you grow chillies, you have almost certainly had the experience of a plant producing far more than you can use and then dropping the lot. Fermented chilli sauce solves this permanently and produces something that makes commercial hot sauce taste flat.
Roughly chop your chillies, stems removed, and add a few cloves of garlic. Cover with a two percent brine, weight everything down, and leave it for one to three weeks. Bubbling starts within a couple of days. When the peppers have gone from bright to a deeper brick red and the brine smells sharply sour, blend the solids with enough brine to reach the consistency you want.
Colour change is a good sign rather than a bad one. Guides on checking a fermented hot sauce for safety note that peppers naturally dull and deepen as the acid interacts with their pigments, and that a successful ferment typically drives the pH down into the 3.2 to 4.0 range, which is comfortably below the 4.6 threshold where Clostridium botulinum can grow. What you watch for instead is fuzzy coloured growth, ropy or slimy brine, or a putrid rather than sour smell.
Bottle it, keep it in the fridge, and it will last for many months while slowly deepening in flavour.
Fermented Garlic Paste
Garlic stores reasonably well, but a fermented garlic paste is a different product entirely: mellower, faintly sweet, spreadable, and endlessly useful. Peel the cloves, cover them in a two percent brine, keep them submerged, and wait one to four weeks depending on your temperature. Taste from week one. When you like it, blend and refrigerate.
Two safety notes matter here and neither is optional. First, keep the cloves under the brine and use a clean jar, because fermented garlic relies entirely on lactic acid reaching a pH below 4.6, with many experienced fermenters targeting 4.2 or lower before long-term storage. Second, and separately, do not confuse this with garlic in oil. Raw garlic suspended in oil creates an oxygen-free, low-acid environment, which is precisely the condition botulism spores prefer, and it should never be left at room temperature. Brine is safe because it becomes acidic. Oil is not, because it does not.
Don’t Throw Away the Brine
The leftover liquid in every jar is a resource, not a waste product. It is live, acidic, and full of bacteria that have already proven they can outcompete everything else.
Use it as a starter to kick off a slow new batch. Splash it into salad dressings in place of vinegar, where the sourness is rounder and more complex. Add it to a marinade for chicken or lamb, where the acid tenderises. Drink a small amount straight if you are so inclined, which is genuinely a thing, or use it to season a bean soup at the end of cooking. Once you stop pouring it down the drain, one cabbage stretches noticeably further.
Building the Rotation
The point of all this is not to make one impressive jar. It is to keep three or four going at once so that fresh produce is always on its way into storage rather than on its way to the compost.
Refrigerated in their own brine, sauerkraut keeps for six to twelve months and continues to ferment slowly, becoming more sour over time, which is a feature rather than a fault. Kimchi behaves the same way, moving from fresh and crunchy through sharply sour into the deeply funky territory that Korean cooks actively prefer for stews. Chilli sauce and garlic paste simply improve.
Match the rotation to what your garden is actually doing. Cabbage and root vegetables in the cooler months, when the slow ferment favours you. Chillies, marrows, and green beans through the summer glut, when speed is on your side and you need to move volume fast. Even pumpkin, which most people never think to ferment, works in a firm two percent brine with garlic and chilli.
The equipment stays the same. The salt stays the same. Only the vegetable changes. That is the whole discipline, and once the two percent brine and the submerge rule are automatic, nothing in your garden ever has to go to waste again.
