There is a long a rich history documenting the relationship of Korea’s national dish of fermented cabbage and chilies to human flatulence. Although delicious and extraordinarily versatile, a dish made of fermented cabbage and chili flakes is admittedly low-hanging comedic fruit, but in the end I don't find the ends justifies the means.
First, they are juvenile in their obviousness. I won’t say that jokes of this nature are categorically un-funny, because much like a phoenix rising out of a cloud of brown ashes, even the most uptight people still crack a smile if the wind is blowing the right direction. However, they also suffer from the chronic defect of being unoriginal. That right there caps their value on the open comedy market, and explains the pitiful diminishing returns. I have heard precisely one original kimchi fart joke, and it was only original insofar as I’d never heard one before:
Korean Friend: You don’t know what kimchi is?
9-Year-Old Me: Nope.
Korean Friend: It’s cabbage.
9-Year-Old Me: OK.
Korean Friend: I ate some.
9-Year-Old Me: So, why are you telling…
Korean Friend: *farts on my thigh*
9-Year-Old Me: Ah! Dick!
I stand by my assessment about the joke to this day: he was a dick then, and he’s probably still a dick now. Unless he’s dead. Which I hope he is. Besides, it’s an incredibly feeble joke. The entire premise is “white person has never heard a kimchi fart joke before”, there is no feed line and the punch line is the fart. Me calling him a dick is funnier than the entire joke, if two dots in a circle can be said to be a smiley face in the first place.
All that aside kimchi is not unjustifiably targeted in this way. The indispensable ingredients in a standard kimchi are salt-wilted cabbage, Korean radish, green onions, carrots, garlic, ginger, onion, water and flour porridge with a little brown sugar and a shit-ton of red chili flakes. Most of those are pig fodder for parody. Also, for anyone making it, it is important to get the finely-milled Korean red chili flakes that have no seeds. They look like small fish flakes (back off, it’s true. I didn’t say they tasted like them) and give kimchi its impossible-to-fake bright red color, flavor and texture. White people pizza parlor chili flakes just won’t get the job done.
And then there are some odd additions that are truly peculiar to Southeast Asian cuisine...
It is said that there are five tastes the human can experience: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. The first four exist in basically every Korean dish there is, and Korean recipes seem to favor a slightly sweeter profile than other regional cuisines. Umami is the bourgeoisie food intellectual’s favorite taste, and it’s not surprising that it was discovered by a Japanese scientist while he was eating some seaweed soup. As the story goes, he was staring into his bowl of kelp and dried fish flakes trying to conceive of why the fuck he kept shoveling it into his face, given that there was no known logical construction that could explain why it didn’t taste as shitty as an objective analysis of the constituent parts implied it should. Then it occurred to him. What if there is a fifth alchemical element called the quintessence that binds the other four elements together to create the Philosopher’s Stone, thus allowing mankind to turn base metals into gold?
Turns out it was just the thinly-shaved remains of a mummified fish. When you dry fillets of the Skipjack Tuna, smoke and then ferment them for about a year, you end up with a beautifully preserved flavoring agent with a cross-section the color of wine rubies and the hardness of cured Roman concrete. Known casually as Bonito flakes—Bonito being a much cheaper fish—Katsuobushi can be shaved down and added to the top of a volcano roll where the rising heat causes them to twitch eerily on the plate. “Umai”, the root of “umami”, means “delicious”, and it was a great marketing choice for the new flavor considering the traditional advertisement for the centuries-old products Asians had been using to contribute umami involved words like “1000-year-old” and “seriously?".
There are two products in kimchi made from fermented raw seafood that go into this cabbage dish. Both are responsible for Europeans and Americans being squeamish, one unjustly, the other justly. The first is fish sauce, which is colloquially known as “crotch sauce” because of its characteristic odor resembling unwashed underwear. The interesting part about the fish sauce is that once it’s in a dish and melds with the other flavors, it contributes a hearty sweetness that white people couldn’t do without in their Asian cuisine. In truth, white people have a long history with fermented fish products. The Romans were well known for using a condiment called garum which was probably not dissimilar to fish sauce in production and flavor, but it must also be remembered that the Romans had been burning their taste buds out of their heads by drinking water from unsealed lead pipes. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Asian sauces such as fish sauce and soy sauce, while contributing a hefty amount of salt and umami, also have varying degrees of savory and sweet, and thus are extremely complex ingredients that can season and perfume dishes in all sorts of interesting ways.
The other is salt-cured seafood, which can take the form of raw squid, tiny shrimp, or various other things. I do not put this in. Because it’s gross. Sorry.
If we’re thorough in our pescatarian analysis, there is one more sly, optional ingredient that adds a unique note of fish. Minari is a kind of Asian parsley with thicker stems. It doesn’t contribute much, but what can be said about it without question is that its natural flavor resembles the inside of a freshwater aquarium tank during cleaning. Again, just calling it like I see it.
The final steps involve making a thin paste of rice flour and water so everything sticks to the cabbage, and then combine it in a gigantic tub. Traditionally, the kimchi sat around at room temperature and fermented to preserve it, and a chemical analysis of kimchi bacterial cultures indicates they are not dissimilar to those in your own gut. Personally, I would not say it was out of order to think of a kimchi pot as a kind of small stomach that slowly digests the cabbage part of the way like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi, except that instead of waiting 1000 years for the end product you pull it out of the pit beast’s intestines and finish the job off with your own tummy. That’s not meant as a turn-off either. The process of making kimchi is extremely rewarding from a cooking perspective, whether it be the sound of crisp vegetables being sliced, slathering the cabbage in chili paste, or tasting a little every day as this constantly evolving staple ferments.
Of course, when made well the results are delicious, not overly-spicy, and have characteristic hints of savory and sour that define Korean pickles. The reason it is the national dish of Korea is because you can literally add it to anything and it tastes good. Ramen? Throw in kimchi. Ice cream? No idea, but how bad can it be? Korean food is characterized by having a higher sugar proportion than most other Asian cuisine—including meat marinades—so I’m sure it could be made to work. Best of all, when it’s made well you don’t even have to ferment it before you start consuming. Fresh kimchi really brings forward the fresh ginger and sweetness of the supporting vegetables, and you can easily put it on brats. At the end of the day, if you go through the Korean cookbook, kimchi can or does go in just about everything for one simple reason: it’s hard to get tired of it.