Steemit Iron Chef 2018 Act 01 Round 03 : Oi Sobagi (Cucumber Kimchi)

Here it is, another week and time to enter the Steemit Iron-Chef challenge! This week, our theme ingredient is cucumber!

(As an aside, man do I love cucumbers -- Check out what I was doing last summer with cukes! That was one of my very first posts to Steemit.)

I do a lot of live-pickling, so a variation on Oi Sobagi seemed like a natural. I used: five lbs. of cucumbers, a bulb of garlic, a large onion, a couple of Anaheim chiles, a bunch of green onions, a few large fennel leaves, a heaping cup of gochugaru, half a cup of sugar, and some vegan fish sauce substitute. Most of the ingredients:

I started by cutting the cukes down into eighths and salting them pretty heavily to draw out water and get them crispy:

While that set, I chopped all the other ingredients pretty finely and combined them in a bowl:

I added a little water to help them homogenize as I mixed the ingredients up thoroughly. Once mixed, I drained the cukes and rinsed them to get rid of the salt, and mixed them up with all the other ingredients:

No, look closer -- isn't it pretty?!

And then I packed it in a jar that'll let gasses out but not in. (As the mixture ferments, it'll produce CO2 (and other minority gasses) and the pressure in the jar will increase, causing the gasses to hiss out through the gasket.)

Once allowed to ferment, the jar filled with brine (expressed from the produce) and I was able to pack some more into it for better, safer fermentation. I only gave it one day before plating some up, but it'll be better in two weeks -- more sour, but also crisper and savory and the flavors mix and melange.

To serve, I formed a circular cake of brown rice, laid two cucumber sections across the rice and another along-side, and spooned on a little of the non-cuke filler from the jar. Then I added a couple of chopped tomatoes, sprinkled on some diced chiles, and topped with mung-bean sprouts.