The Korean fermented vegetable dish that is a staple of Korean cuisine is kimchi.
Kimchi is a broad family of salted and fermented vegetable dishes, most commonly made with napa cabbage or Korean radish. Seasonings often include gochugaru, garlic, ginger, scallions, and jeotgal, or salted seafood. Lactic-acid fermentation gives kimchi its characteristic tang and helps preserve vegetables.
Kimchi is usually served as banchan, the Korean category of side dishes, but it also appears in soups, stews, fried rice, pancakes, and dumplings. It is not one single recipe: regional traditions and seasonal ingredients have produced hundreds of recognized varieties, including baechu-kimchi, kkakdugi, and dongchimi.
The dish has a long history. Fermented vegetables were already part of Korean food culture in the Three Kingdoms period, and winter kimchi-making became a communal tradition known as gimjang. Early kimchi was not necessarily spicy; chili peppers, now strongly associated with it, reached Korea only after their introduction from the Americas in the early seventeenth century.