Pickles

In cooking school, students are taught there are five cooking techniques: sautéing, frying, dry methods like roasting, wet methods like steaming or boiling and combination methods like braising. At least that’s the French perspective on things. I consider pickling to be a sixth technique that anyone who spends any time in the kitchen should be comfortable with. Seriously. At Momofuku, we serve pickles as a course on their own and use them as garnishes or as ingredients in many of our dishes.

Pickling is practical and doesn’t need to be complicated. Lots of cooks equate pickling with canning (which is simple but time-consuming), but pickling can be as easy as making a brine, pouring it over chopped vegetables packed into a container and waiting the right amount of time to eat them. You can do that, right? Sometimes it’s even easier: the salt pickles barely require a recipe. And although kimchi is one of the more involved pickling processes, if you reduce it to its basic steps—salt the vegetable, mix up a spicy marinade to soak it in and wait a week or two—it’s not difficult.