When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2024, in one comment.
20072026
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Beksul Natural Premium Coarse Brining
Amazon's catalog no longer lists this product (checked 2026-11-02). The name comes from the link HN users posted.
tl;dr You can use table salt if you wish, but you need to use less. This article might help [1] as might this one [5]
Not Korea, but my wife is native born. Her family recipe is a little different than the ones I've seen online, but the result is still kimchi. There's also literally hundreds of different kinds of kimchi, so there's definitely flexibility built into the concept.
It's not really Kosher salt that Koreans use, but very coarse sea salt. It's usually sold in stores in Korea (or Asian food stores elsewhere) either in big bags by the kg [2][3], or often in a big bin near the produce in a grocery and you just scoop up as much as you need into a container and pay by the kg.
The problem you are having is not the ingredients in the salt, it's the coarseness of it. With sea salt, or kosher salt, the grains are very large and so you get less salt per unit volume. I'm 100% certain you can track down some kind of large grained coarse salt as it's used in all kinds of cooking settings, often as a late-in-recipe seasoning on breads and meats. It's likely to either be coarse grained sea salt, unground salt, or even a coarse grained mined salt like Himalayan pink salt. I believe there's a well known French coarse grained grey sea salt called Moulin & Cuisson or Le Guerandais or something that would be a good substitute.
Most major European cities have a large enough Asian population these days that there is probably an Asian grocery where you can also check also. (I'm only aware of this because when we travel in Europe my wife almost always seeks out a few things so we can cook at home instead of going out to save some money).
You might also be curious to know that the world's largest commercial Kimchi maker has a factory in Europe (Poland). [4]
1 - https://kimchimari.com/best-salt-kimchi-12-salts/
2 - https://www.hmart.com/natural-premium-sea-salt-for-kimchi-2-...
3 - https://www.amazon.com/Beksul-Natural-Premium-Coarse-Brining...
4 - https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/11/08/poland-to-become-euro...
5 - https://www.souschef.co.uk/blogs/the-bureau-of-taste/recipe-...