Can overly salty raddish kimchi (kkaktugi) be saved??! Here's what I'm trying
Backstory: I made a batch of kkaktugi following a recipe on IG from esyfilms (I tried pasting the link but it doesn't work) called 'Yakult in raddish kimchi'. It's fairly easy and came out SO GOOD (Korean mother in law approved!). I'm pretty good at making kimchi and to me, the recipe seemed like it would be way too salty as written. So I reduced the salted shrimp from 6 Tbsp to 4, and didn't add the 1 Tbsp of salt to the sauce.
So I decided to make a second batch and doubled the recipe so I could give some away. I did the same salt reduction on the second batch (only used 8 Tbsp of salted shrimp and didn't add the salt to the sauce), but sadly this came out super salty.
A quick search said the tried and true fix is to add more mu. But I decided to try a few things. I separated all the raddish cubes from the sauce then did the following:
Bottom right - Added new mu to the existing sauce (I wrote 'old' sauce)
Bottom Left - Salted new mu for 1 hour, then discarded the brine. Added to existing sauce
Top Left - soaked existing mu in water for 1-2 hours until they no longer tasted salty. Then added to existing sauce
Top middle - briefly rinsed the existing mu and then put in some leftover sauce from the first batch (the good sauce...this is 10 days old)
Top Right - briefly rinsed the existing mu. Sliced up 1 whole Korean pear and put on bottom of the jar. Added existing sauce (the sauce covers the pear, but not all the mu) Will take out the pear in a couple days and mix it all up
I plan on tasting these over the next 2 days and will report what I find. Hopefully, one or more of these will work.
If anyone has any other tried and true suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Posted Feb 25, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC