Say the word "kimchi" to most people outside Korea, and one image comes to mind: spicy red fermented cabbage. That's baechu kimchi (배추김치), and it's fair enough that it's the one everyone knows. But in Korea, kimchi was never really just one dish. There are hundreds of varieties, and while most families don't eat all of them, they grow up with a rotating handful that keep showing up, season after season, tied to a particular time of year and a particular memory. Kimchi isn't just something Koreans eat. It's something they move through, one season at a time.
Spring, after Korea's long winter, is when young vegetables start coming back, and the kimchi made from them reflects that — lighter, brighter, closer to what a fresh vegetable actually tastes like before it's had time to deepen. Yeolmu kimchi (열무김치), made from young radish greens, is the one most people reach for as the weather warms toward summer, until it becomes something close to a daily staple. Summer brings its own kimchi entirely — oi sobagi (오이소박이), stuffed cucumber kimchi, and chonggak kimchi (총각김치), made from small young radishes and their leaves. Where winter kimchi builds its flavor slowly over weeks, these are built for the opposite: eaten fresh, eaten fast, meant to cut through the heat rather than sit through it. I still remember the crunch of oi sobagi on a day when the humidity had made everything else feel unappetizing — garlic, green onion, and chili sharp enough to bring a little life back to the table.
By autumn, the radishes and cabbages have turned sweeter with the cold, and Korean households start thinking ahead. This is when kimjang (김장) begins — the yearly ritual of making enough kimchi to carry a family through the winter — days of washing and salting cabbage, mixing garlic, red pepper powder, and salted seafood into the seasoning, packing it carefully into every leaf. If you ask me to name the two best-tasting kimchi I know, both of them come out of that one ritual, from opposite ends of its life. The first is the kimchi at its very beginning — the moment right after kimjang, when someone tears off a single leaf from a freshly made head, lays it over a bowl of warm rice, and hands it to you. Every ache from the days of standing and salting and mixing disappears in that one bite. It's less a taste than a small, private this is why we did all of that.
Winter kimchi wasn't only the red and spicy kind, though. There was also dongchimi (동치미) — made from autumn radishes in a clear, fermented broth, with none of the heat or color of the rest. I associate it with something specific from those winters: many homes back then were heated with ondol floors warmed by coal briquettes called yeontan (연탄), and when something went wrong with the heating, people could end up feeling dizzy from the fumes. Cold dongchimi broth was what people reached for afterward, believed to help clear the head. What stays with me from those memories isn't really the taste. It's the whole scene — a warm floor, a cold bowl of dongchimi, a family getting through winter together, one way or another.
And then there's the other end of kimjang's life, the second of those two best-tasting kimchi — the kind nobody plans for, the kind you only get once the jars are nearly empty. By the time winter is winding down, whatever kimchi is left has fermented past ripe into something fully sour, soft, almost translucent at the edges. That's exactly the kimchi you want for kimchi jjigae. Something happens when that overripe kimchi hits a hot pot with pork and tofu — the cold outside stops registering, and somewhere around the second or third spoonful you find yourself thinking, half out loud, this, this right here, is kimchi jjigae. Same cabbage that started the season as a fresh, crisp leaf on warm rice ends it as something completely different, completely sour, completely its own kind of good. The taste of kimchi was never really one thing. It just kept becoming something else, one season and one jar at a time.
So how many kinds of kimchi do Koreans actually eat? The honest answer was never really a number. It changes with the season and with what a family happens to be going through at the time — freshness in spring, relief in summer, patience in fall, and in winter, somehow, both endings of the very same cabbage.
O DosiRock: Korean Food Stories
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