Making your own kimchi

One of the things that constantly bug me is whether we are using our time productively. This is easy to define in a work setting, but when it comes to private life productivity is harder to define. Are you productive when you are sitting in the sofa watching TV all day? If you watch the wonderful animated film "On Poppy Hill" (kokorilizaka kara) and you are my age, you can probably make a case for the value, although you will not produce much other than emotions. Which is fine.
Productive can, of course, mean stocking up through a visit to Costco, which means the added time it takes to buy a bale of toilet paper should correspond to price lower than what it would cost to buy the toilet paper in the drugstore across the street. It does, but not if you only buy toilet paper.
But while Costco does sell kimchi, it typically lasts about a couple of weeks with us. About 2 kilos. If you buy the same thing from the Korean restaurant down the street, it costa a little more but tastes even better. 800 yen per kilo, to be exact. I would be glad to pay more but I do not have to. That sets a standard for comparison.
Kimchi is actually very simåle to make. Take leaves of Chinese cabbage, put in a large bin, alternate with ground Korean red peppe and salt. Mash the leaves a little before you put them in. That lets the fluid out and it makes the fermentation easier. Traditionally, kimchi was made in wooden or ceramic vats, so the fermentation bacteria were present on the inside of the vat. Nowadays, you might want to add a few leaves from last years batch.
The hard work is the trimming of the leaves and packing them into a vat. That takes time. It also can be really bad for the skin, so you have to wear rubber gloves. Now, I have no real idea how much time it takes to trim a couple of hundred kilos of chinese cabbage leaves, but let us assume it takes about ten hours. It should be doable in a day, or over the weekend.
If you pay yourself 1200 yen per hour, this comes down to 12000 yen. Add 100 yen per kilo cabbage, and about 1000 yen for the red pepper. 2000 yen for plastic containers. And 800 yen for a kilo of the great kimchi from our nearby restaurant to use as starter.
Adding all of these together gives us a cost of 25800 yen for 200 kg of kchi - the lactobacterial fermentation is free. That is 129 yen per kilogram of kimchi - which means restaurants can make a good margin. And that you save more than 130000 yen per year. Not a bad investment. I think we will make our own kimchee this year.