In this post, I’ll walk you through my process for foraging for nasturtium, incorporating nasturtium into kimchi recipes, and using knowledge of lacto-ferments to keep your fermented nasturtium kimchi safe. Let’s do it.

All about nasturtium

Nasturtium is a flowering plant that is abundant in certain locales. Here in San Francisco, I can’t walk three blocks in my neighborhood without stumbling upon a patch. In fact, when I forage for nasturtium in SF, it feels more like foraging for a location hidden from humans and dogs.

Any area with moist, well-drained soil can be a happy home for nasturtium as long as the area gets full sun. In somewhere like San Francisco or other temperate coastal zones, you can find nasturtium all year long. Elsewhere, the plant is more typically an annual (or it might not exist at all).

You can identify nasturtium by its rounded green leaf and 5-petal yellow or red flower. There’s really no other plant that looks exactly like it, so when you find something that looks like a nasturtium, go for it! If you doubt that nasturtium grows in your area, try your hand at growing them (and you can buy seeds here). They grow fast!

Nasturtiums are quite peppery. In fact, the name comes from the Latin for nas (nose) and tortum (twist)! They’re often used in gourmet cooking for the pop of color. But with this recipe, we’re going to do something a little more approachable.

Nasturtium kimchi recipe

Few flavors hold up to kimchi like nasturtium does. It mingles with the other ingredients in a subtle way — enhancing the kimchi’s spice while adding a vegetal note that the kimchi otherwise lacks.

If you have a kimchi recipe that you like, there’s no need to deviate from it here. That’s because this recipe can apply to basically any kimchi recipe. (So if you’re looking for a kimchi recipe, here’s an easy one).

Just replace 10% of the cabbage weight in your kimchi recipe with nasturtium flowers. You don’t need to salt the nasturtium in advance like you would cabbage; just soak the nasturtium on its own to clean it and then mix it in with the other ingredients.

Oh, and here is the gochugaru I use. For my last kimchi, I also used my homemade shrimp garum instead of fish sauce or shrimp paste.

Fermenting your kimchi safely

For whatever reason, all the kimchi recipes I find online seemingly ignore lacto-fermentation safety. I love to lacto-ferment, so I figured I’d share a few tips to help you ferment your kimchi without issue.

1. Your kimchi should not be exposed to air. Lacto-fermentation should happen in an anaerobic environment. The way we do this with kimchi is by ensuring all the ingredients are fully submerged under the kimchi’s liquids/pastes. A few hours after making my kimchi (when more liquids have been extracted from the ingredients), I always push the ingredients down into the liquids and keep them submerged with a fermentation weight.

2. You need enough salt. Salt serves to inhibit bad bacteria growth while good bacteria (which can withstand salt) takes hold. Most ferments are performed with at least 1.5% of the food’s weight in salt. But, due to the steps in kimchi where the cabbage is salted then washed, it is difficult to get an accurate read of the salt percentages when making kimchi.

Recipes compensate by using more salt than is actually needed. Sometimes they use so much salt that you might be tempted to adjust the recipe. My simple advice is to follow their tested recipe exactly — don’t reduce salt for taste purposes! And don’t sub a salty fish sauce or shrimp paste with something that has no salt.

3. Your kimchi can explode! As the lacto-fermentation takes place, the kimchi is going to let out gas. If you have a closed mason jar, you risk pressure build-up. If you have a loose or open mason jar, you risk exposing the ferment to air (see #1). For these reasons, I use a fermentation lid for the first couple weeks of my kimchi ferment.

I finished this batch way too quickly and can’t wait to make another one. Next round might be a redwood tip nasturtium :)