Subject: mold revisited

From: [email-masked] (John Henry Kieschnick)
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 14:42:14 GMT

I now regret not having read recent threads on mold.

Here is my problem: I left my kimchee to sour for four days.
On the fourth day, a few small mold flowers appeared. I
scraped them off and bottled and refrigerated the kimchee.

My questions are:

1) Did a little mold ever hurt anyone?
2) Will the mold stop growing now that the kimchee is bottled
and in the frig?
3) Does the fact that mold appeared mean that I did something
wrong when making the kimchee?

-- 
John Kieschnick (Dept of Asian Languages, Stanford U.) 
"When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You
just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens
with Chinese." -- Umberto Eco   [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Gustavo Arrizabalaga)
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 22:15:38 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]

> wrong when making the kimchee?

  I didn't read the mold thread (hypha?) either, but my parents sometimes
make sauerkraut (Polish kimchee?) and if they get mold, they just scrape it
off, as you did.  It does seem to slightly affect the taste of sauerkraut,
but since kimchee is more highly seasoned, you may not notice anything. 
Also, refrigeration should slow down the mold growth, but it will still
grow somewhat.  My advise is if it tastes good, eat it up!  (Did you make a
whole winter's supply?)
  As to the cause of the mold growth, my parents attributed their problem
to not adaquately cleaning the fermentation crock.  However, none of the
ingredients is sterilized and mold spores are everywhere, so it could just
be bad luck.  Fermentation from wild microbes can be tricky; usually the
good critters outgrow the bad ones, but sometimes the starting population,
or the temperature, or something isn't quite right...
  Don't be discouraged from further fermentation!  As an aside, is there a
cucumber-based kimchee to correspond to the Polish fermented pickles
(ogorki (SP???)) that my parents also make?

                   Jen

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From: [email-masked] (Deborah Britt)
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 1994 21:55:56 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
(Gustavo Arrizabalaga) wrote:

> I don't know anything about kimchee, but I'm a microbiologist so I do know a little about mold.  Some molds do produce toxins that can be harmful, and these may be excreted into the food around the mold colonies.  When I trim mold off of a piece of cheese, I make sure to remove a generous layer of cheese around and under the mold colony.  I would recommend you do the same with your kimchee.
> 
>