Butter Lettuce Kimchi: The Preservation of Supple
We can view our work through a number of different lenses, but chief among them is that we are Preservers, and as perservers our job is to preserve flavor, to preserve color, and to preserve texture. As preservers, our work is far more likely to highlight issues with the source produce than it is to mask, resolve, or compensate for them.
Over the last year, Alex has been making kimchi with Baby Romaine lettuce or Little Gems, with great success. If you think about it, it makes total sense. Romaine Lettuce has a very similar structure to Napa Cabbage, a thinner leafier exterior, and a denser core. Because of the delicate nature of lettuce, this seems counterintuitive to people; they assume that it would lose its structural integrity through the fermentation process and become mush, and they are often surprised by the Romaine Kimchi.
A few weeks ago, our Rice & Pickles bowl featured the Baby Romaine Kimchi, and a guest at the bar expressed their surprise at the fact that we successfully created such a product. I explained that Baby Romaine is far less delicate than one imagines and made my usual comparison to Napa Cabbage, conceding that it may not work so well with a more supple green like, say, Butter Lettuce. Alex perked up and said, “Oh no, I disagree entirely.” She pointed out that, really, when it comes to fermenting leafy greens, it is much more of an issue if the greens are tough than if they are supple. Indeed, we have rejected batches of Baby Romaine because, in her estimation, the leaves were too tough to yield a choice product. Remember, we are preservers of texture, and if we have tough greens, then we preserve the tough, and if we have supple greens, we preserve the supple. “ I can make a Butter Lettuce Kimchi,” she said. And she did.
As usual, she was right, and the results are delicious.
Butter Lettuce
We Brine the Butter Lettuce for two days.
We drain the Butter Lettuce without rinsing.
We Ferment the kimchi in our microbatch Mashiko ware crocks.
We ferment the kimchi for just over a week.
Butter Lettuce Kimchi. The supple texture of the lettuce is beautifuylly preserved without becoming mushy.