Making daikon kimchi is an excellent way to spread out a harvest. My daikon (white radish, mooli) crop did very well, but after a few weeks of picking, the final half dozen plants needed to be pulled to make way for the next planting. So with the fridge already loaded with daikon roots, I decided to try a fermentation.
Making daikon kimchi
The recipe for making daikon kimchi is very like the simple wombok kimchi recipe I have posted. Peel the daikon and cut into roughly cm cubes, salt, and leave overnight. Drain and rinse, then leave to soak in fresh water while you prepare the other vegetables. Mince garlic, ginger and chilli (I used fresh birds eye chillis from the garden, but dried flaked Korean chilli is traditional and gives the traditional red colour), and roughly chop some green (spring) onions. Mix the drained daikon with the aromatics and pack tightly into a large glass jar. Top up with fresh water to cover the vegetables and leave on the bench for a few days until fermented to your taste, then refrigerate.
The flavour is strong, much more than wombok kimchi, but I find it a good side dish for rich meats like grilled pork.
Daikon is one of the high-yield vegetables, good for a quick turnover of beds. It’s not as quick as red radishes, but in good conditions it will produce a lot of leaf and then very quickly produce a thick root. My Autumn crop grew from seed to harvest in a couple of months, allowing the bed to go to a lettuce crop for Winter.