KC 249 – Meat-Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, the site where we fight food blight, and our rhymes are tight because we aren’t too bright. I’m your lyrical loser, Jon O’Guin, and today’s dish is a frustrating mix of easy and complicated, just like my nonsense flow to start this show. So if you want to skip the facts, jack, and get straight to bakin’, follow this link. Everybody else, let’s dig in.

Mr Worldwide

So, in case you didn’t know, the basic format of the dish we’re making today is a global cuisine standard. Like, they serve this in Korea, Kiev, Colombia, and Columbus Ohio. The only two continents that don’t have some variation of the dish are Australia and Antarctica, and I’d be willing to bet at SOME point someone served it in both places. There are over 40 acknowledge varieties of it.  My problem is, I don’t know which one we’re supposedly making.

This doesn’t feel correct.

That’s not entirely true, as I have a fair number of context clues to guide me, but let’s first discuss what exactly we’re making. Cabbage rolls have a variety of names and implementations, but the basic summary can be boiled down to: when you cook cabbage leaves, they get soft, and can be wrapped around stuff. People noticed this, and did it, often around meat, grains, or a mixture of both, essentially forming a kind of impromptu sausage: meat, spices, filler, fat, wrapped in a (cabbage) casing. In Europe, it’s often associated with Winter, because cabbage is a fairly hearty plant that can still be fairly fresh…and if NOT, it also pickles well. So you can incorporate vitamins and minerals you might otherwise be lacking during the winter months into your diet. We’ve touched on this at least once before, but this is part of the reason sauerkraut is so popular in Central and Eastern Europe, and why Germans are called “krauts”: Cabbage (particularly fermented cabbage) was their go-to source of vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

The dish is also made in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas, etc etc. Different meats and spices are used, the shape can be different, but the theme is the same.

It’s functionally impossible to know who invented the idea first, though I would PERSONALLY wager it’s connected with the Eastern Mediterranean, due to a variety of little details:

The ancient Greeks had a dish called thrion, which was a fig leaf wrapped around sweetened cheese. Modern Greek and Turkish homes often serve dolma, grape or fig leaves stuffed with all manner of things, such as rice, meat, vegetables, or a mixture thereof, which have been made for centuries. Indeed, stuffed cabbage rolls are, by some food taxonomies (which are their own pit of vipers), a TYPE of dolma, with the idea being that a dolma is any stuffed leaf.

It’s like a taco, but with leaf instead of wheat.

Now, no one is academically 100% sure who in the region of the Levant, Balkans, Greece or Turkey came up with the idea, hence my designation of “Eastern Mediterranean”. But I suspect from there, the idea spread outward, with variants and local flourishes being added. For instance, a lot of Eastern and Central European countries serve their cabbage rolls with an acidic tomato sauce, while in Greece, dolmades are typically served in a lemon sauce.

One interesting variation is Kaldolma, Swedish cabbage rolls, which are explicitly named FOR Dolma, because in the 1700’s the King of Sweden, wounded in a battle against Peter the Great, had to retreat to the Ottoman Empire for several years, where he racked up a LOT of debt, so when he came back to Sweden, the people who loaned him money came too, to make sure he paid them, once his country was out of war. (Spoilers: he died during the war, his sister took the throne but lost most of her power, and I can’t find evidence that they ever got paid. They DID, however, create a regional form of dolma while there, leaving a mark on Sweden for centuries to come.

Their pale, sticky mark.

Sorry if that was a weird tangent, I just fell down the rabbit hole of that story, and the following changes in Swedish royal politics, and wanted to vaguely justify the time spent.

Anyway, the version I’m making today I believe to be more of an American version, because it performs that quintessentially American culinary flourish: adding more meat to it. While the flavors suggest this is based off of an originally Polish style of cabbage roll (tomato sauce spiced with warming spices like nutmeg and cinnamon), but removing some of the filler for more meat.

So, let’s talk about how this is pretty easy, AND pretty hard, and how it turned out.

There Must Be Something About the Number 3

It’s called Cultural Context, Sherlock. It’s not hard.

Sorry, long-running minor complaint about a line from a now-ended British TV series. What the title is meant to explain to you is that this is a recipe that consists of 3 components, all of which are fairly direct and easy on their own, but are a little much to do by oneself all at once. The three components are, in order of easiest to most complicated:

-The Cabbage

-The Meat filling

-The Sauce

Though I will note that a bit of the sauce component goes INTO the meat, so that’s a tricky one to break down in terms of true difficulty.

The cabbage is the easiest to start with, but can quickly turn on you: see, as I mentioned, to get soft, pliable leaves, you need to cook the cabbage. Normally this would be done by boiling or steaming the cabbage, but you can get the same effect by just microwaving it in a  tightly covered bowl in the microwave. Just be certain you properly core it, or it’ll get a lot more frustrating.

This is incorrect. A fact I learned SEVERAL times.

Once cored and blasted, you can peel off the outermost leaves, which should be wilted and soft, blast it again, and peel off a couple more. At least, I THINK that’s what the instructions were telling me to do. It might have meant “one good blast at the start will let you peel off all the leaves”. I personally found that after about 3 blasts, the whole head was good to be peeled.

It WILL be quite hot, so be careful, but otherwise, peeling the cabbage is very easy, as long as you peel enough. (insert dramatic underscore to let you know this is an important line.)

With the cabbage cobbled, it’s time to sauce things up. The sauce is a fairly simple tomato sauce that’s going to start by dicing an onion, and mincing a couple cloves of garlic. Sweat the onion down for a couple minutes in a saucepan with some vegetable oil, and then toss in some aromatics of the minced garlic, ground ginger, cinnamon,  and nutmeg, stirring everything together for about 30 seconds to get the spices ‘activated’. (meaning “the heat will activate their volatile oils, making them smell and taste better.”) I personally added a little garlic powder, and smoked paprika, in order to bring a little more savory elements to the sauce. Then, take half of the mixture, and set it aside to mix into the meat.

Here we see the great beast of onions, awakening, its blazing eye open.

Take the remaining half, and mix in the rest of the sauce, all off heat, which is some sugar, tomato sauce, salt and pepper, and vinegar. And that’s it. The sauce is also done.

Then, you make the meat mixture. You make a Panade, which is a fancy cooking term for “bread soaked with milk. This is going to be the filler for the meat mixture, which is assembled very easily: You just put everything in a food processor. First the bread and milk goes in and gets pulsed to a paste, then you add the meat, the reserved onion, and some salt and pepper, and pulse the mixture to a paste.

It’s always a good step in a recipe when “meat paste” shows up.

Now, I personally changed the recipe here, because one thing that sometimes frustrates me with Cook’s Country (the source of the original recipe) is that, in their pursuit of creating the ‘best’ version of a dish, that sometimes leads to irritating numbers. For instance, this recipe calls for .75 pounds of ground beef, and .75 pounds bratwurst, but the hell if I’m going to just leave a quarter pound of beef without a purpose. That, and I THOUGHT I didn’t have the right amount of bratwurst, but it turns out my math was off. The THIRD reason I did it is because one review of the recipe stated that there wasn’t enough meat, so I figured “16% increase of  meat” wasn’t going to mess too much up. (another bit of dramatic music)

Once the meat is pasted, it’s time for the messy part: bringing it all together. This is also, technically a simple process: you cut the spine out of the lettuce leaf, and then cut an extra inch up the leaf.

Basically, turn the cabbage leaf into a little pair of pantaloons.

This lets you pull the two halves overlapping, and drop 2 heaping tablespoons  of meat about half an inch from the end of the leaf, and then pull another Chipotle burrito on the sucker: fold in the sides, and roll the whole thing up, then place it in a 9 by 13 pan seam side down. This process REALLY wants either a fair bit of mental discipline and a touch of manual dexterity, or two people, because you either have to trim all your leaves first, and then start the rolling process, or trim with one hand and roll with the other, or do what I did, and just get meat goop on a knife.

With my extra meat, and, I think, undermeasuring my meatballs, I ended up with like, 24 cabbage rolls. Which was a BIT of a problem, because of this:

My pale, sticky legion.

That is my 9 by 13 pan, filled with 16 cabbage rolls. So I needed to get a whole second contained to hold my additional cabbage rolls. Then, you pour the sauce over the assembled rolls, cover with foil, and pop in the oven for 45 minutes, 30 with the foil on, and 15 with the foil off.

The results are…honestly, pretty interesting.

Honestly, it looks about how I espected.

Firstly, I want it noted that my mother claimed that the meat, which had cooked at 375 for 45 minutes, and reached an internal temp of 185, was “still a little pink”, which is utter madness. Nate then TRIED to mock me, by mocking my point about the baking soda from the Lion’s Head Meatballs, which I was RIGHT ABOUT. But, erroneous bully aside, every agreed they were good. Mom said she’d be happy to have them again, Nate said they were fine . Personally, I thought they needed SOMETHING more, but I couldn’t tell you what. The red sauce is a little sweet, the meatballs are nice and tender, the cabbage is a LITTLE tougher than I’d like, but not to any crazy extent. I’d definitely call it a success, and a nice way to get some veggies in your winter diet. In fact, the dish is considered something of a traditional Christmas or New Years option in Hungary, and some other European nations, so it’s the perfect time to try it out!

THURSDAY: BECAUSE I CAN, WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT FOOD TAXONOMIES, SINCE IT FEELS LIKE A TOPIC I CAN GO CRAZY ON.

MONDAY:  I WAS GOING TO GO KOREAN, BUT I THINK ITALIAN WORKS A BIT BETTER FOR ME TO MAKE A JOKE ON THE 28th.

Time for the

Recipe

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

Makes about 16 cabbage rolls

Ingredients

1 medium head green cabbage, cored

                Sauce

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 onion, chopped fine

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/8th tsp garlic powder

1 (28-ounce) can tomato sauce

¼ cup packed light brown sugar

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Salt and pepper

                Meat Filling

2 slices hearty white sandwich bread, torn into pieces

½ cup milk

¾ pound 85 percent lean ground beef

¾ pound bratwurst, uncooked, casings removed

Preparation

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Place cabbage in large bowl, wrap tightly with plastic, and microwave until outer leaves of cabbage are pliable and translucent, 3 to 6 minutes. Using tongs, carefully remove wilted outer leaves; set aside. Replace plastic and repeat until you have 15 to 17 large, intact leaves.

2. Heat oil in Dutch oven over medium-high heat until shimmering. Cook onion until golden, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Transfer half of onion mixture to small bowl and reserve. Off heat, stir tomato sauce, sugar, vinegar, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper into pot with remaining onion mixture until sugar dissolves.

3. Pulse bread and milk in food processor to smooth paste. Add reserved onion mixture, beef, bratwurst, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper and pulse until well combined, about ten 1-second pulses.

4. Trim tough ribs from cabbage leaves (see related Step by Step), roll 2 heaping tablespoons of meat mixture into each leaf, and arrange rolls, seam-side down, in 13- by 9-inch baking dish. Pour sauce over cabbage rolls, cover with foil, and bake until sauce is bubbling and rolls are heated through, about 45 minutes. Remove foil and bake, uncovered, until sauce is slightly thickened and cabbage is tender, about 15 minutes. Serve.