Fixing kimchi with too much garlic: 6 ways

You taste the batch and it is aggressive. Hot, raw, garlicky, the kind of burn that stays with you for an hour. Maybe you misread the recipe, maybe the cloves were enormous, maybe you simply like garlic more than the recipe does. Either way it is fixable, and in a lot of cases time alone does most of it.

Ferment it longer. The easiest fix and the one people skip. Raw garlic's harsh bite mellows as kimchi ferments, and fresh kimchi tastes far more garlicky than the same jar does after a week or two. Leave it at room temperature another day or two, pressing it down under the brine, then into the fridge and taste every few days. The change is bigger than you expect.

Dilute the batch. If it is genuinely overpowering, add more of everything except garlic. Salt and add more napa cabbage, or add Korean radish in cubes or matchsticks, briefly salted, or some spring onion or carrot. Then adjust the chilli flakes, fish sauce and a little sugar to match the larger volume. Mix it through what you have so the new vegetables pick up the seasoning and ferment along with it.

Balance it with sweetness. A spoon of sugar, or better, a little grated Asian pear or apple blended into some of the paste. Mix in and let it rest. Sweetness takes the edge off harsh garlic in a way that more salt does not.

Cook with it. Heat turns garlic from sharp to sweet, so an aggressive batch is better raw material than a mild one. Kimchi fried rice, kimchi jjigae, kimchijeon, fried noodles, grilled cheese. Well-fermented garlicky kimchi makes better stew than polite kimchi does.

Serve it against rich or plain food. Rice, eggs, tofu, fatty pork, noodles. The garlic becomes an accent instead of the headline, which is a serving decision rather than a repair.

Use it as a seasoning. Chop it fine and use small amounts: dumpling filling, mixed into mayonnaise, in a dressing or a marinade. A jar you cannot eat as a side dish is still a jar of flavour.

One thing that looks alarming and is not: garlic in kimchi sometimes turns blue or green. It is a harmless reaction between compounds in the garlic and the acidic environment, and it does not mean the batch has gone wrong.

For next time, weigh the garlic rather than counting cloves, because cloves vary enormously. Start with less, since adding more to a finished batch is easy and removing it is not. And blending the garlic with ginger, pear and onion into the paste gives a rounder result than garlic on its own.