Kimchi Recipe Scaler

This calculator scales every kimchi ingredient off a single anchor: the weight of your napa cabbage. Salt, gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes), fish sauce, garlic, and ginger are each computed as a straight percentage of that cabbage weight, so the seasoning ratios stay consistent whether you're making a single head's worth or a 20kg batch for the whole family. Two additional ingredients — green onion and sugar — are included as fixed percentages (5% and 1% of cabbage weight respectively) that aren't exposed as adjustable inputs; they're calculated as reasonable defaults for a traditional recipe rather than user-tunable ratios. Salt percentage matters most for both safety and texture: 2.5–3.5% is the standard range because it's enough to draw water out of the cabbage during the initial salting/draining stage (which firms the leaves and prevents mushiness) while still permitting the lactic acid fermentation that defines kimchi's flavor.

Fish sauce can be set to 0% for a vegan version without breaking any other calculation, since it's treated as fully independent of the other ratios. Total weight sums all seasoned ingredients plus the cabbage itself, giving you the actual finished-batch weight for jar-sizing purposes — not just the cabbage weight you started with. The most common oversight is forgetting that these are pre-fermentation seasoning weights: the mixture will lose some volume as it ferments and the cabbage continues to release liquid over the following days.