Korean Salty Pickle - Oi Jee

I'm posting my first recipe! I cook a lot of different kinds of foods, but being half Korean, I'll be posting lots of my Korean recipes. I also only speak extremely limited Korean and so the Korean word for the dishes I know I will try to put out there pretty much phonetically heh.

This dish creates a very salty pickled cucumber. If you've ever been to a Korean restaurant, you'll notice they puts lots of little dishes on the table. This would be one of those dishes! My favorite way to eat this pickle is with a bowl of rice that has some warm water added to it. The water leeches some of the rice starch making it seem more like a soup and a great backdrop to the saltiness of the pickle.

Ingredients -
1 cup salt
1 tsp minced garlic
Approx 15 Asian cucumbers

Start with some Asian cucumbers. They are easy to find in Asian markets all summer long.

They are shorter than the average cucumber. Here's one up against a chopstick.

You'll need about 15 of them. After washing them, throw them into a gallon glass jar. I used the glass jar from a jar of Costco pickles we had finished. Pour water into the jar so that the level of the water just passes over the top cucumber if you push down on the cucumbers. The key here is you don't want the cucumbers sticking up into the lid. You'll want a couple inches at the top because the water must cover all the cucumbers. You may have to remove a cuc or two.

Pour that water back out into a pot. Add a cup of salt to the water and boil it until the salt is dissolved into the water. Let it cool slightly on the stove and add about a tsp of minced garlic. Pour the salt/garlic solution into the cucumber jar.

If you have a plastic kitchen doo-dad that you can wedge into the jar such that the cucumbers stay under the salty water, perfect! The authentic Korean way is to use river rock to weight the cucumbers down. The reason it must stay under the salt solution is you don't want parts of some cucumbers not brining because they float up out of the water. I use a plastic measuring cup that has no handle.

Leave the jar out in the sun or on a sunny kitchen counter for 3 days. You will notice over that time that the cucumbers become wrinkly and smaller. As they shrink, you may need to adjust your plastic doo-dad. After the 3rd day, move them to the fridge. They are ready to consume the next day, though tastier if you can give it a few more days. You can slice one to serve it or take a whole pickle and just bite off a piece at a time with each bite of water rice.

Here's what it looks like when it's done.

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