Kimchi

[EmWilk]

Evening all...

I absolutely love kimchi and we eat quite a bit in our house. With stirfries, rice bowls even on a cheese toastie

I buy a 500g pack from the Chinese shop and it usually lasts a month or 2.

Today, I went to take some out of the (previously opened) pack and all the pieces looked a bit white-ish round the edges. Not like mould as such, but a bit cream-like almost. Very strange. I have to say I don't normally study inside the pack but it didn't seem right. It smelled quite sour (which it would) but also smelled like the fizzy sort of taste you might get on fruit or veg which is going off, does that even make sense?!

I googled it and saw a lot of things about mould but none of the pics really looked like the one in my fridge. I'm curious.

Also, whilst googling, one of the top "alternative" searches was about whether kimchi causes stomach cancer and I was shocked to see a lot of material on the subject which basically answered yes. Can that really be right?! I was sure kimchi was a "superfood" so I was ready to ignore such material but there was a LOT of it!

Any thoughts on either matter (or kimchi in general!) are much appreciated!

[StokeySue]

Not an expert on microbiology but a quick Google for “which microbes are found in kimchi” confirmed what I thought, which is that kimchi is produced by the action of some bacteria in the lactobacter group, so my best guess is that the white stuff is probably one of those bacteria getting carried away and forming a population big enough to see, rather than mould. So probably safe but best not eaten - I threw away some post mature yogurt today, much the same thing

I may have mentioned before that I don’t believe in superfoods.

I’ll have to look up the cancer thing, but I wouldn’t bother about it from what I know so far

[karadekoolaid]

If it smells ( or tastes) sort of "fizzy", it has probably fermented in the "wrong" way. I´d try just a little bit and,if it tastes odd, ditch it.
As for causing cancer - wow, I think that if roughly 50 million Koreans eat it every day, and haven´t all died of cancer, then it can´t be all that bad, can it? Apart from smoking, I can´t think of anything offhand that has been thoroughly proven to cause cancer. Apart from politicians, of course

[StokeySue]

I checked up a little bit on what I already knew about Japanese stomach cancer and it seems it does also apply to Koreans.

These countries do have the highest rates of gastric cancer in the world, and it’s not genetic but cultural & environmental because American Japanese and Peruvian Japanese populations don’t have the gastric cancer but have the cancers other local ethnic groups have, so for example breast cancer in California, though that’s rare in Japan.

So diet is probably important, and it is believed that the very large amounts of pickled and fermented foods in the diet, which contain N-nitroso compounds that are probably what do the damage

I think many products these days are manufactured to minimise the risk, but in any case adding a bit of kimchi to a mixed diet is hardly likely to increase risk beyond that in the American Japanese and American Korean populations, and they are just fine

Incidentally, the sour smell does suggest lactobacter, as their mission in life is to make lactic acid. If S Clive mentions it goes fizzy, that would mean it had picked up yeast after it was opened