A simple pasta salad can definitely hit the spot, but sometimes you want to switch things up. One of the best and most unexpected ways to do that is to simply add some kimchi; by doing so, you'll give the pasta salad a burst of unexpected flavor, as well as a pop of color with kimchi's bright red hue. For the uninitiated, kimchi is a fermented vegetable dish from Korea.
To learn more about adding kimchi to pasta salad, Daily Meal spoke with expert Ji Hye Kim , a renowned chef and the owner of the restaurant Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "At the end of the day, kimchi is preserved vegetables, just like pickles and sauerkraut," Kim says. "If your favorite pasta salad recipe calls for pickled cucumbers, that would be a fun place to try out a bit of kimchi instead of pickled cucumbers.
" If you're going to make this switch, Kim notes that it's important to chop up the kimchi into small pieces so that it fits well into the rest of the pasta salad. If you've never done this before, you may be worried that the kimchi's strong flavor will overpower the dish — but Kim has a solution for this. "Rinse out the kimchi with water to get rid of the chili flakes and kimchi juice, and just gently squeeze the extra water off the kimchi," she explains.
"This will add complexity and good kimchi flavor without having it overwhelm your pasta salad." Do you need to make any changes to the pasta salad when adding kimchi? Do to kimchi's strong flavor, you may need to make some adjustments to your.