Written by people who eat it daily

What this is

Kimchius is a reference and a journal about Korean fermentation. Recipes tell you how to make kimchi. We are more interested in what happens after — how a jar changes week by week, why two jars four hours apart on the same peninsula are not the same food, and what to do with the one at the back of your fridge that has gone further than you meant it to.

The domain has been ours since 2007, when it sold kimchi refrigerators. That business ended when the manufacturers went direct. The subject stayed interesting.

Where the material comes from

Most serious writing about kimchi is in Korean, and most of it has never been carried into English. That is the gap this site exists to close.

We read Korean-language sources — the World Institute of Kimchi, agricultural and food-science research, regional food records, and the household accounts that show what people actually do rather than what the textbook says — and we write in English from what we learn. We do not translate other people's articles and republish them. Facts travel; sentences belong to whoever wrote them.

Where a claim comes from a specific piece of research, we say so in the piece rather than presenting a number as folk knowledge.

How translation works here

The permanent guides — varieties, fermentation, regions — are published in English, Spanish and French. The journal is published in English first, and individual pieces are translated when they earn it.

Nothing is machine-translated and published unread. A page that has not been translated yet says so at the top and shows you the English original, which we think is more honest than an unreviewed translation that reads fluently and is quietly wrong.

What we do not do

No sponsored recipes. No affiliate links dressed as recommendations. No jarred paste standing in for the real thing, and no invented interviews — if a piece describes a visit, the visit happened.