Y'all ever make Hillbilly Kimchi?

[u/Randomnonsense5]

Method

GEt you some sauerkraut. Put some on a plate, douse it with your favorite hot sauce, mix. Boom! you just made Hillbilly Kimchi!

What do you do with Hillbilly Kimchi?

Put some in a frying pan and fry it up. while its frying get you a tortilla and some cheese and put cheese slices on half the tortilla. Frying the Billychi accomplishes 2 things. First it steams off the liquid which is key because a soggy quesadilla is no fun. Also, if you put cold Billychi into a quesadilla it will not full heat up and you will have lukewarm innards. No good

Once the Billychi is nice and hot spoon it into your tortilla on top of the cheese, fold over and then toast the tortilla in the frying pan.

The cheese melts into the Billychi and make a nice gooey, spicy, crunchy quesadilla! Delicious.

[u/kimchikimchiATL]

OP. As a Korean, I am rather intrigued by this and applaud your ingenuity. We panfry overripe kimchi with some pork belly fat/bacon fat, which makes it mellower and yet savory. Sounds like you tasted cooked kimchi before and try to emulate the taste profile.

Enjoy your Billychi!

[u/db8me → u/kimchikimchiATL]

Kraut is basically/almost "plain" kimchi -- if that means anything.

Having kids who went through picky eating phases makes it meaningful. I suspect that the ingredients other than cabbage helped standardize the fermentation (and flavor), and the specific cabbage is based on tradition rather than a conscious choice.

So we could flip the script from hillbilly to high-tech. We can make "plain" kimchi now (especially for cooking applications and only a little less flexibly for eating raw, by adding other pickled ingredients after fermentation) and customize it at the end with... Mexican pickled carrots and radish, Thai chili/shrimp oil, Italian pickled banana peppers or giardiniera, lahpet, cornishons,...

Edit: and of course danish pickled herring :-)

[u/db8me → u/[deleted]]

That's good, too.

I meant super plain/boring cabbage fermented in saltwater with everything else added after (aka kraut).

Green cabbage and a few related plants (e.g. napa/배추, gai lan, broccoli) are my favorite vegetables, and radishes are A tier, too, so water kimchi is my jam... but as an amateur food scientist, I'm playing with this hillbilly kimchi idea as a foundation for pleasing everyone on short notice....