Kimchi Salt and Ingredient Calculator

Traditional kimchi ratios:

Kimchi is a Korean lacto-fermented vegetable dish, most commonly made from napa cabbage (baechu-kimchi). The ratios below are based on traditional recipes where salt draws water from the cabbage before fermentation, and the paste creates the flavor profile.

Salting phase (drawing water):

There are two honest ways to do this, and most recipes muddle them together.

The traditional way is to salt heavily and rinse it off. The cabbage is quartered and either soaked in a 10% brine (100g of salt per litre of water) or packed with coarse salt between the leaves at roughly 5% of the cabbage weight. It sits 2 to 6 hours until a leaf bends without snapping, then gets rinsed two or three times. Most of that salt goes down the drain. What stays behind is around 2% of the cabbage weight, which is where the finished kimchi lands.

The shortcut is to salt at 2.5% and not rinse at all. Less washing up, one fewer thing to get wrong, and the result is close. It is what most English-language recipes describe even when they call it traditional.

The number that matters either way is the finished salt level: about 2 to 2.5% of the cabbage weight. The 10% brine is a soaking concentration, not a recipe ratio, and confusing the two is how people end up with kimchi they cannot eat.

Paste ingredients (per 1 kg of cabbage):

Worked example:

2 kg napa cabbage batch, using the no-rinse method:

• Salt: 2,000g × 2.5% = 50g (about 3½ tablespoons of Morton kosher, or 10 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal)
• Gochugaru: 50g × 2 = 100–160g (adjust to your heat preference)
• Fish sauce: 40ml × 2 = 80ml (about 5.5 tablespoons)
• Garlic: 40g × 2 = 80g (about 12–16 medium cloves)
• Ginger: 15g × 2 = 30g (about 3 tablespoons grated)

Fermentation timeline:

• Room temperature (68–72°F): 1–5 days until tangy, then refrigerate
• Refrigerator only: Ferments slowly over 2–4 weeks — milder flavor
• Traditional (onggi pots, outdoors): Months to years for deep fermentation

Storage:

Kimchi keeps for 3–6 months refrigerated. It becomes more sour and pungent over time. “Overripe” kimchi (mukeunji) is excellent in kimchi jjigae (stew) and fried rice — don’t throw it out.

Vegan kimchi:

Replace fish sauce with soy sauce or doenjang (fermented soybean paste). Omit salted shrimp. Add a tablespoon of miso for umami depth. The result ferments equally well — lactic acid bacteria don’t require fish.