This week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays comes from Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook, Everyday Dorie and wasn’t what I thought it was going to be! Stuffed Cabbage was, in fact, cabbage rolls (I had visions in my head of a whole cabbage hollowed out LOL!).
Dorie’s recipe calls for a whole head of cabbage (but just 18 leaves – the rest is in the sauce) but because there are just two of us, I wanted to make 1/3 of the recipe so I cut the cabbage in half – mistake! This makes for smaller leaves and makes it hard to cover the meat/ rice filling. I needed a few extra (half) leaves to be able to fully wrap/ cover the filling.
I had a tough time getting the leaves off the cabbage and made a big mess of it! But, because they are blanched in boiling water, they soften and so when you wrap them around the meat filling and cover them in sauce, you can’t notice too much. Dorie secures the bundles with a toothpick but I didn’t and they were fine.
The filling is a mixture of pork and beef with rice, spices, and Dorie’s secret ingredients – ketchup (and soy sauce). The sauce for this dish is meant to be tomatoes, apple juice and grated apple the extra cabbage thinly sliced, onion, apple cider vinegar and a few other herbs and spices. To be honest after wrangling the cabbage leaves and making the filling, I didn’t feel much like making the sauce with the long list of ingredients and fiddly jobs so I used a canned fire roasted tomato sauce with herbs and spices only and it was great. A heads up that this is not what I’d call an “everyday” dish as it is pretty labour and ingredient intensive. It also takes three hours (!) to cook! I made this in a baking dish, covered in parchment and then placed a heavy baking tray on top to weight it down (Dorie uses a Dutch oven type dish).
This was SUPER tasty and, per the recipe, was excellent the next day too. Would I make it again? Maybe, but I live in a Polish neighbourhood here in Toronto so excellent cabbage rolls are easy to find! This gives me a great appreciation for the amount of labour that goes into them though!
Get the recipe for Dorie Greenspan’s Stuffed Cabbage on page 154 of Everyday Dorie.
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Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of “Everyday Dorie” for review purposes. I was not asked to write about the book, nor am I being compensated for doing so. All opinions 100% my own.
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I agree, this was super tasty!..and labor intensive for sure. If you ever do make it again, I would encourage you to make the sauce as it was delicious!
Yeah I don’t think I will make this again, so much work!
And nice comfort food on very chilly winter days, as they say!
The sauce is the easy part, just throwing together a few ingredients. The biggest challenge has to be hacking the cabbage and getting enough whole leaves for stuffing. You get a good-looking dish there!
Well my kitchen was in such a mess already it didn’t need “a few ingredients” added to it 😀 The tomato sauce was perfect with this.
Mardi you are funny, half a recipe doesn’t mean half a cabbage leaf. Yes this was quite a project. Savoy cabbage next time. The 3 hour cook time is definitely a weekend meal only. Like you said it was good.
yes, so much work and time–requires a long weekend. haha. love your photo…they look cooked to perfection!
I made it because it looked like a combination of sweet and sour red cabbage covered with some cabbage rolls. there was so much at first I had to use two pans, combining them after an hour when it shrunk to half. at that point I covered with foil and put the lid over as described (I thought) never having used this French braising technique I covered the pan with foil then put the lid on pushing the foil tight. I left it for two more hours i was concerned that raw brown rice would not cook through in that time because my Spanish rice is always crunchy. during the two hours it boiled over and created a pressure cooker effect with the burnt sugar vinegar eating the tin foil and overcooked, coming out dry. the rice is very soft. nobody else has tried it yet. I have pretty relaxed eaters (3) lined up so crossing my fingers. I poured 12 ounces of tomato juice over to cover the grey look of the cabbage, it is mostly cabbage at this point. onward!
Sounds like you had an interesting time making these!