I’ll say this upfront: this is a shortcut. If you want the full traditional method, whole cabbage leaves hand-salted and hand-seasoned one at a time, our baechu kimchi recipe covers it properly and it’s worth doing at least once. This version exists because most weeks, most people — including me, plenty of Saturdays — don’t have three hours for cabbage. Mak-kimchi (막김치) means roughly “rough-cut kimchi” or “kimchi made simply,” and the entire trick that makes it fast isn’t a different recipe. It’s a different order of operations.
The one idea that makes this quick
Cut the cabbage into bite-size pieces before you salt it, not after. That’s it. That’s the whole shortcut. A whole quartered cabbage leaf is thick at the stem and needs one to two hours of salting for the salt to actually reach the center of that rib. Cut into 3 to 4 cm pieces first, and you’ve multiplied the surface area exposed to salt many times over — the same osmosis that takes two hours on a whole leaf finishes in about thirty minutes on small pieces. Everything downstream gets faster too: seasoning goes by handfuls instead of leaf-by-leaf, and there’s no folding whole quarters into neat bundles for the jar.
What you lose is mostly presentation. Traditional baechu kimchi is served in recognizable leaf-shaped pieces, cut at the table with scissors, which looks good on a plate and has its own appeal. Mak-kimchi comes out already in eating-size pieces — you can serve it straight from the fridge with no cutting board involved, which is a genuine convenience rather than a compromise, but it doesn’t have the same visual presence.
Quick facts
| Time | About 30 minutes of active work, plus a short salting wait |
| Makes | About 1.2 kg / roughly 2.5 lb finished kimchi |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Spice level | 3 / 5, adjustable |
| Vegan? | Yes, with the fish sauce swap noted below |
Easy Mak Kimchi Recipe
Ingredients
Method
- Cut the cabbage into bite-size pieces first — roughly 3 to 4 cm squares — before it touches any salt. Small pieces salt through in a fraction of the time whole leaves need.
- Toss the cut cabbage with the salt in a large bowl, massaging it in lightly, and let it sit 25 to 30 minutes, tossing once halfway through.
- Rinse the salted cabbage twice in cold water and drain well in a colander, pressing gently to remove excess water.
- While it drains, stir together the gochugaru, fish sauce, sugar, garlic, and ginger in a small bowl to make the seasoning paste.
- Combine the drained cabbage, scallions, and carrot in a large bowl. Add the paste and toss by hand — gloved, if you’d rather not smell like chili for the rest of the day — until every piece is coated.
- Pack the seasoned kimchi into a clean container, pressing down so the liquid it releases rises to cover the solids.
- Leave it at room temperature for 6 to 12 hours to start fermenting, then refrigerate. It’s ready to eat within a few hours, and better after a day or two.
What actually happens in 30 minutes
Salting the cut cabbage is the only step with a real wait attached, and even that is short by kimchi standards — 25 to 30 minutes, tossed once partway through so every piece gets even contact with the salt. While that sits, there’s nothing else to do, which is a good moment to mix the seasoning paste so the two finish around the same time. Gochugaru, fish sauce, a little sweetness, garlic, and ginger, stirred together, no cooking involved — unlike the full baechu kimchi method, this version skips the rice-flour porridge that normally gives the paste body, trading a slightly thinner sauce for one less pot to deal with. It still clings fine to cut pieces, since they have so much more surface area than whole leaves.
Rinse, drain, toss everything with the paste by hand, pack it into a jar. From cabbage to fridge, including the wait, this is a genuine half-hour job on a weeknight, not an optimistic recipe-headline half hour that’s actually ninety minutes once you count the parts nobody mentions.
What you’re trading away, honestly
Beyond presentation, the biggest difference is depth over time. Full baechu kimchi, salted whole and packed leaf by leaf, tends to ferment a bit more evenly and develop a rounder sourness over the following weeks, partly because the seasoning paste sits differently against intact leaves than against many small cut surfaces. Mak-kimchi ferments a little faster and can turn sour sooner, which is either an upside or a downside depending on how you plan to eat it — sooner-sour is actually convenient if your goal is having something ready for kimchi jjigae or kimchi fried rice within a couple of weeks rather than waiting out a full traditional ferment.
Neither version is the “correct” one so much as suited to different weeks. I make the full version maybe four times a year, usually with company or when cabbage looks unusually good at the market. This is the one I actually make.
Where it goes wrong
Skipping the salting step, or cutting it too short, is the most common failure — under-salted pieces release too much water into the paste later, and the kimchi comes out thin and diluted instead of clinging and rich. Twenty-five minutes is close to the minimum that actually works; less than that and you’re really making a spicy cabbage salad.
Over-rinsing after salting is the opposite mistake, and it’s easy to do when you’re rushing. One good rinse plus a second quick one is enough; scrubbing it under the tap for a full minute washes out flavor along with the excess salt.
A container packed too loosely is the third one, and it’s specific to cut kimchi. Because the pieces are small, there’s more air trapped between them than in a folded whole-leaf bundle, and trapped air means faster spoilage on the surface layer before the rest has fermented properly. Press down firmly after packing, until the liquid the kimchi releases rises above the solids — a flat plate set on top, or even a smaller jar filled with water, keeps everything submerged if your container is a bit too roomy.
Storage and serving
In the fridge, this keeps well for three to four weeks, tasting different at almost every stage — crisp and mild in the first few days, rounder and more complex after a week, properly sour by the third or fourth. Keep it in a sealed container; an open bowl in the fridge will pick up other smells and also dry out at the edges. A pair of kitchen scissors is the traditional way to trim any pieces that turn out larger than you’d like once it’s plated, rather than pre-cutting everything to a perfectly uniform size.
Straight from the fridge, it’s a side dish like any other kimchi — good with grilled meat, folded into rice, or eaten on its own with nothing else on the plate. Once it’s turned properly sour, treat it exactly the way you’d treat aged baechu kimchi: it’s now an ingredient as much as a side dish, ready for a pot of stew or a hot pan of fried rice.
Frequently asked questions
Is mak-kimchi the same thing as regular kimchi?
It’s the same family and the same seasoning logic, just cut into pieces before salting instead of after, which is what makes it faster. Koreans eat both, often side by side, and neither is considered lesser — mak-kimchi is simply the version made on a weeknight rather than a kimjang weekend.
How soon can I eat it?
Within a few hours of refrigerating, and it’s genuinely good then — mild, crunchy, lightly seasoned. It keeps developing a stronger, tangier flavor over the following one to two weeks, and it’s worth tasting it every few days to see which stage you like best.
Can I make this without fish sauce?
Yes. Two tablespoons of soy sauce plus a teaspoon of salt gives you a lighter, less savory version that’s entirely vegan, assuming you’re not also using salted shrimp. It won’t have quite the same fermented depth, but it’s a real kimchi, not an imitation of one.
Once it’s made
A batch of this is the fastest route to having sour kimchi on hand for cooking, which is the ingredient our kimchi jjigae and kimchi fried rice recipes both depend on — give it a week or two in the fridge before you use it in either. And if this thirty-minute version won you over enough to try the full weekend project at least once, baechu kimchi walks through the traditional leaf-by-leaf method start to finish.