The Last Jar

Shedletskys started with a jar of kimchi. It was December 2014 and we had just been given David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook. I don't know why the kimchi recipe jumped out but it did and we were hooked. A couple of kilos of chopped cabbage, a few bits of carrot and some spices and that as they say was that.

Fast forward six months and we found ourselves running our first Shedletskys Kimchi Club event in our tiny Dalston flat. We invited a group of people into our home to make some kimchi, eat some dinner and have a jolly good time. Demand for our kimchi even after we moved to Leyton was what made me decide to quit my job in marketing and really follow that fermentation dream.

Since that fateful day more than a decade ago I reckon we’ve made maybe 25,000kg of the pungent stuff.

We upgraded from tiny 5 and 10 litre containers to bigger and bigger drums. We chopped, salted, stirred and fermented. We had jars explode and won awards.

It has been stressful, infuriating and rewarding. Kimchi made us improve our packaging and drove Shedletskys forward.

In fact there hasn’t been a single month in the last 8 years where there’s not been a barrel of cabbage at one stage or another of controlled fermentation sitting in the corner of our kitchen gently bubbling away.

It has been a wild ride but everything comes to an end. As we start thinking about what the next phase of the Shedletsky's journey looks like a sad truth needs to be faced. It is impossible to make high-quality naturally fermenting kimchi at scale to a level we’re happy to put our name to.

Believe us we’ve tried. We looked at building capacity ourselves. We talked to consultants and we even considered working with huge industrial operations in Europe.

The logistics and practicalities of moving vast quantities of bubbling kimchi around when it needs to be kept at a specific temperature and carefully monitored just isn’t practical for a small artisan business like ours. Sure we could make something kimchi-like that is shelf stable and easier to mass produce. That is not what we love about fermentation and it’s not what we want from our business.

So it looks like this is the end of kimchi for Shedletskys.

As we upgrade our production to be able to make more pickles, sauces and seasonings we have had to make the decision to drop the dish that started it all from our plans.

But not yet. If this is how our kimchi world ends let's do it with a bang not a whimper.

As we planned our summer pause and shuttered our factory we made one final batch of kimchi. A last 20kg to honour and celebrate the funky mother that kicked off the Shedletskys story.

That batch has been fermenting away for the last 2 months. It developed a deep funk and flavour sometimes missing from our more mass produced batches. We cared for it through the heatwave while monitoring the temperature and pH levels it bubbled and developed.

Last week we tasted it and decided it was ready. We wanted to make sure this was a truly epic batch to honour such a core part of the Shedletskys DNA.

We tasted it again and thought a lot about what it was lacking. The funk was there and the heat. But could it be richer? Could it be deeper? The recipe we originally developed stripped away many of the extras kimchi recipes often call for in favour of a simple purity that let the fermentation shine.

Maybe it was time to add some complexity back into this kimchi to round it off.

After a few rounds of testing we hit upon a combo we liked. Black garlic brought a sweetness and fermented depth that helped mellow the Gochugaru heat. An incredible aged shoyu soy sauce then brought another level of umami depth without making the whole thing too salty.

We created a paste from these and the funky liquid that had gathered at the bottom of the kimchi barrel. We blended them together and stirred this back through the new super soft and ultra fermented vegetable.

The result is amazing and probably the best kimchi we’ve ever produced.

We are giving this kimchi a couple of days for the second level of flavours to really mellow and mix.

Then we will package it up in some proper reusable Kilner jars we found in a back corner of the factory when we cleaned it down.

There is not a lot of this absolutely amazing kimchi and there is not going to be any more. So if you want to bag a jar of our first limited drop pre-order it now on the website.