Zachary Sarver

Stuffed Cabbage

My friends have been bugging me for a while now for my recipe for Hungarian stuffed cabbage (toltott kaposzta, with some umlauts and accents,) so I figured I might as well just post it online. I came up with this recipe largely by experimenting with some other recipes and incorporating some techniques I learned by observing my grandfather, an honest-to-god Hungarian, cook.

Ingredients

1 large or 2 small head of green cabbage
Optionally sauerkraut
3-4 slices of bacon
6 cups of beef broth
6-8 ounces of tomato paste
Salt and pepper to taste
A ton of paprika. At least 4 tablespoons. I go for hot paprika, but sweet paprika is fine if you can't handle the heat.
Lots of sour cream.
1 pound of ground pork
1 pound of ground beef
1/2 cup of cooked rice
1 large onion, diced
5 cloves of garlic, minced

Procedure

Cook the rice well in advance and cool it to room temperature or lower. (We're going to mix this with the raw meat, and we don't want the rice to cook it.)
Core the cabbage(s) and boil for 5 minutes in lightly salted water. Allow to cool until easily handled, or run under a cold tap.
While the cabbage is cooling, cook the bacon until crispy. Set it aside for later. Saute the onions and garlic in the bacon grease. Allow the bacon, onions, and garlic to cool.
Crumble the bacon, and mix the following in large bowl:
- Pork
- Crumbled bacon
- Beef
- Rice
- Onions
- Garlic
- Salt
- Pepper
- Paprika
Try not to overmix, or the texture gets a little weird.
Once the cabbage is cool enough to handle, peel off leaves, gently so as to avoid rips. You want about 12 leaves. More is fine, maybe even preferable. Chop the rest of the cabbage and place it in a large pot. Using a sharp knife, remove the thick part of the stem from each leaf so that the leaves lay flat. Put the stems in with the rest of the chopped cabbage.
Roll 1-3 tablespoons of the meat mixture into each cabbage leaf. Try to tuck and fold as you go so that the rolls hold themselves together more or less on their own. Put any leftover meat mixture in the large pot on top of the chopped cabbage.
Add the tomato paste to the pot. No need to mix it in with the chopped cabbage, the heat will do that. Add the sauerkraut if you want to, but I don't think it's necessary. Salt to taste.
Place the cabbage rolls in the pot on top of the chopped cabbage and tomato paste. Cover with beef broth. If you don't have enough beef broth you can top it off with water.
Bring the pot to a boil, and them simmer for 1 hour.
Serve each roll with some of the cooked chopped cabbage and a generous helping of sour cream.

Page 1 / 1

blogroll

social