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Vegetables from Korea, especially Gyeongsang

Mumallaengi kimchi (dried-radish kimchi)무말랭이김치

Autumn radish is cut into strips or flat pieces and dried hard, then soaked briefly, squeezed and seasoned with glutinous-rice paste, chilli powder, anchovy jeot, garlic, ginger and grain syrup. It is made at kimjang and kept in onggi jars into the next year.

Fully documentedVegetables28 days – 39 days

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedHousehold kimjang practice with no fixed amounts in the sources read.
Autumn radish with no hollow core, cut flat or in strips and dried until chewy[nfm-mumal]
Glutinous-rice paste with fine chilli powder soaked in it[nfm-mumal]
Anchovy jeot or fish sauce, or soy sauce instead[nfm-mumal]
Minced garlic, ginger, spring onion and salt[nfm-mumal]
Grain syrup (jocheong), in plenty[nfm-mumal]
Dried cabbage hearts, chilli leaves or squid (optional)Also dried, then soaked briefly before seasoning[nfm-mumal]

Total time across the recorded steps: 28 days – 39 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: Radish strips shrink and turn chewy as they dry

Step 1 of 4
Dry the radish strips
Time
4 h – 4.3 days
Measured
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Leuconostoc
Lactobacillus

In the 2006 trial, cold air at 10 °C kept the most vitamin C and the best texture. Output: dried radish (mumallaengi).

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
chewy
Colour
white to pale; hot-air drying browns it most and summer radish browns

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Autumn radish is cut into strips or flat pieces and dried hard, then soaked briefly, squeezed and seasoned with glutinous-rice paste, chilli powder, anchovy jeot, garlic, ginger and grain syrup. It is made at kimjang and kept in onggi jars into the next year. Made in 4 steps over 28 days – 39 days. The longest step, ripen in an onggi jar, takes 28–35 days (Jang M.-S 2014) and runs at 20 °C (Kim M.-L 2006). Leuconostoc and Lactobacillus, which peaked at day 14 of storage in the flying-fish-roe variant does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step28–35 daysReported[jang2014][kim2006]Ripen in an onggi jar
Temperature20 °CReported[kim2006]Ripen in an onggi jar

What makes this one different

The radish is dried before it is seasoned, so the kimchi is chewy and keeps well. Older Joseon and early 20th-century recipes pickled the dried radish in soy sauce, like jangajji; the thick chilli coating came later.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Mumallaengi jangajji and mumallaengi-jjanji (old recipes)Dried radish soaked in soy sauce, sometimes boiled down three or four times, eaten in spring and summer.

Safety

Kimchi can pick up pathogenic or spoilage bacteria if it is contaminated during preparation. South Korea's food-safety ministry sets limits for kimchi. Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Vibrio parahaemolyticus must be absent from 25 g samples, and Bacillus cereus is capped at 10,000 CFU/g in fermented foods such as kimchi. This is general kimchi guidance; the sources for this page give no safety figures for it.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Imwon gyeongje-ji (about 1835) quotes a Chinese text on salting radish pieces overnight and sun-drying them. Siui jeonseo (late 1800s) and Banchan deungsok (early 1900s) pickle dried radish in soy sauce.

Starter
The sources we found do not say how its fermentation begins.
  1. [nfm-mumal] National Folk Museum of Korea, Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, Korean Food, Clothing and Housing (한국의식주생활사전), 무말랭이김치; KOGL type 2, facts only; read 2026-10book
  2. [lee2006] Lee W.-Y., Cha W.-S., Oh S.-L., Cho Y.-J., Lee H.-Y., Lee B.-S., Park J.-S., Park J.-H. 2006, Quality characteristics of dried radish (Raphanus sativus) by drying methods, Food Science and Preservation 13(1):37–42 (abstract)paper
  3. [kim2006] Kim M.-L., Park C.-S. 2006, Functional properties of Angelica gigas Nakai leave extracts and quality characteristics of Mumalangi kimchi added AGL, Korean Journal of Food and Cookery Science 22(5):728–735 (abstract)paper
  4. [jang2014] Jang M.-S., Park H.-Y., Nam K.-H., Kim M.J. 2014, Physicochemical composition and fermentation conditions of sliced, dried radish kimchi with flying fish roe, Korean Journal of Food Science and Technology 46(5):566–574 (abstract)paper
  5. [shim2024] Shim Y., Lee J.Y., Jung J. 2024, Effects of kimchi-derived lactic acid bacteria on reducing biological hazards in kimchi, Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology 34(12):2586-2595 (introduction cites the Korean ministry's microbial limits for kimchi)paper