I recall a roommate from decades ago (son of Korean immigrants) mention that his parents always kept a small side fridge / mini-fridge for the kimchee, so everything else in the standard fridge wouldn't adopt the flavor -- I think a comment of his was "kimchee flavored butter is not pleasant."
Hah, I saw video recipes of kimchi and gochujang-garlic flavored butter last year. Tho probably both were eye-catching online culinary fads rather than practical products.
Woman whose channel I follow uses both plastic and ceramic containers for kimchi - both include a small valve in the lid to allow exchange of air. And of course cabbage lands in that special fridge; she said she uses it also for storing vegetables and rice
Also this is not corroborated by any of the references in the article, which make no such claims about temperature. I am sure there are interesting reasons why one might want such a dedicated fridge, but the wikipedia article doesn't elucidate this mystery. The wikipedia article is basically garbage.
[1] Example here https://www.lge.co.kr/support/product-manuals?title=manual&m..., see table on page 10, it's between -0.7°C and -1.7°C for kimchi.
And in my experience, every kimchi eventually goes sour in regular fridge (or even in a special kimchi fridge, if you keep it long enough), so I don't think fermentation completely stops at those temperatures.
Assuming that’s correct, I’m no Kimchi Engineer.
I like to eat my kimchi at room temperature, so I tend to keep a small amount out of the fridge ready for my next session.
[0] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EA%B9%80%EC%B9%98%EB%83%89%EC... [1] https://namu.wiki/w/%EA%B9%80%EC%B9%98%EB%83%89%EC%9E%A5%EA%... [2] https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-384...
My understanding as a hobbyist brewer and fermenter is that this is not true. Fermentation is greatly slowed at lower temperatures, but you should have things happening above freezing. Lager beers, for example, go from pure sugar to beer at 35F. And kimchi matures at fridge temperatures in ways that I'm pretty sure are caused by fermentation.
They sit outside year round.
A kimchi fridge I've owned had a temperature dial with a little chart next to it, that if I recall advised around 1-4C for halting fermentation for long-term storage and around 11 or above for active fermentation, and encouraged being mindful of the stage in your kimchi's, uh, lifecycle.
Pretty interesting to find a flat-out-wrong Wikipedia article in this day and age!
In practice, you will get a poor result if you ferment at high temperature. Texture goes off first, but you can also get weird alcohols or formaldehyde forming.
From my experience, the lower the temperature (and the slower the fermentation), the more complex the flavor. This rule seems to hold for almost everything, from vegetables, to kombucha, to bread, etc. For beer, it depends what kind of beer you like. You can get very funky beers at high temperatures.
"If a Korean goes to space, kimchi must go there, too"
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/world/asia/22iht-kimchi.1...
Modern fridges can’t handle that unless specifically designed for it. I had a repair person guess that I’d lowered the life of a fridge because I don’t use ac in the summer much and therefore my house had much wider variants in humidity than designed for.
You can’t really blame the manufacturers, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to worry too much about it when the average consumer keeps their fridge in a really small temperature zone.
But the garage fridge is going extinct.
It's one of the three foods that I will eat until it no longer exists in the vicinity. (Jerky and hummus.)
Jokes aside, the kimchi fridge is indeed quite common in Korea, and the household justification is typically that you don't want the kimchi's aroma to interact with all your other refrigerated food supply.
Especially the older generation makes kimchi infrequently in large batches, and it's very common to share the fruits of the labor among the different households in the family (you often leave with it on family visits), so it's routinely well stocked with the remains of various batches.
I'm most familiar with the single or double drawer types, integrated into the more modern kitchen aisles, making it easy to tower above and access the tubs/jars/containers. Since you usually wind up having one anyway, you're also gonna use it.
I might be ignorant but for me the flavour of kimchi is far more complex and varied - sauerkraut is pretty much always the same.
If you make your own sauerkraut, or anything else fermented really, the flavour is much more complex and varied than the store bought stuff.
There's also diced radish kimchis (깍두기), sometimes non-spicy as well.
Beer fermentation is very sensitive to temperature, so a very common mod is to get a digital heat/cool temperature control and splice it into the electrics. The heat output is wired to an incandescent bulb or reptile heat pad or something thats placed inside with the beer fermentor.
Foreign Guy: I heard that there are refrigerators specifically for kimchi in Korea. Is that true? Me: Yeah, not everyone in Korea has one, but I do. Foreign Guy: I've asked this for the 10th time now, and everyone has answered the same way.