Crossposting something I posted at the Fabulous Fermentation tribe:

For years I"ve been making kimchee, and I think it's a bit easier than kraut. Kimchee is fairly fool-proof because it relies on making a brine of known salt proportions to protect the cabbage (or whatever vegetable) from the wrong microbes, and it's easier to get the amount of salt right even if you don't know how much (by weight) cabbage you're really working with- you just pour brine over it till it's covered. YOu generally dont get molds or other undesirable things growing in or on kimchee during the processing, unlike kraut (I think), because the kimchee is easier to keep submerged in brine.

you can kimchee lots of different vegetables. Cabbage is a nice crunchy texture of course. In traditional kimchee the dominant spices are ginger and garlic and very hot peppers. I've done very untraditional kimchees red cabbage, a little bit of turmeric, and a beet thrown in for good color. Eye candy!

Besides Korean kimchee, other cultures made ferments using brine to easily preserve vegetables- for example, Russians and Ukrainians brined many different vegetables (those Jewish refrigerator cuke dill pickles are brined rather than heat-processed like American canned pickles are) and Russians even brine-preserved fruits like watermelon and apples.

step 1:
-small head of cabbage
-half a large daikon

slice cabbage into small pieces (I just put it through the food processor) and cut the daikon into half-moons: slice it in half lengthwise and then slice the halves.
soak for 24 hours in a brine with the following proportions of salt/water:
5 cups water
2 1/2 Tb salt
if you need more than 5 cups water then make sure your brine retains the same proportion of water/salt.

Krauting 101: you need the salt to inhibit the wrong bacteria (think compost bacteria) and to encourage the salt-loving lactobacillus and other sauerkraut/kimchee bacteria.
If you don't like salt you can always rinse the kraut before eating, though it wont' resemble Korean kimchee anymore if you do this because the spices will rinse off also.
If you use too little salt it'll compost. Yeck.
if you use too much salt then it'll be inedible and no amount of rinsing will save it (ask me how I know)

soak the cabbage and daikon for 24 hours in the brine, in a bowl with a tight-fitting plate on top to weigh it down. That'll make it shrink a little so you can squeeze it into jars more easily.

Step 2:
Then:
Drain most of the brine off into another bowl
mix the following condiments into the cabbage:

several Tb of grated ginger
several cloves of garlic
several scallions cut into little bits
1 Tb cayenne pepper or several hot peppers minced
1 Tb sugar

For some reason I believe the hot pepper gets less hot after fermenting, but I could be wrong.

Mix all this with the cabbage and pack some big glass jars with it.

The cabbage wants to float to the top after a while and that's where the evil compost bacteria will get it.
I weigh the cabbage down by stuffing a ziplock bag into the jar, and filling it with brine (rather than water, in case it leaks!). Sometimes I stick a pint beer glass down on top of the ziplock bag to keep it all in the jar.

Let ferment for 3-7 days, it'll have a slightly off flavor earlier on and should stabilise to a nice sauerkraut tang a few days later.