Delicious Cabbage Rolls
January 02, 2008

True story; I was browsing the cooking board on 4ch and somebody posted a picture of some delicious looking cabbage rolls. This picture inspired a week long quest to figure out how to make these damnable things and ended in me falling back to my precious and incredibly informative joy of cooking. Before we begin, I have taken pictures of my endeavor and posted them to my flickr account. They are all tagged and place here.

Ingredients

• 1 head of cabbage (outer leaves washed, of course)
• 1 lb of ground pork
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 or two small onions
• 1/2 cup cooked rice

Procedure for the Mixture

The rice is the easiest part of this entire process. Go ahead and mix the usual 1 cup of dry rice and 1.5 cups of water into a pot. Let it come to a boil that starts to shift the lovely little kernels around in the pot. Reduce this newly boiling rice to the absolute lowest point your stove will go, cover and leave it the hell alone for 20 minutes. Set a timer and keep your hands off the pot or more specifically the lid.

While the rice is cooking, you can go ahead and begin prepping the rest of your ingredients. You’ll need to;

Mince your garlic - Mince if relatively finely. You can press down hard with the flat of your blade to squish this lovely vegetable out of its skin to make the whole process easier.

Cut your onions - You could mince, dice or simply cut your onions depending on how much you like onion. I like onion and I find cooked onions a delicious surprise when biting into things so I cut mine on the bigger side. Reduce the size according to your dislike of onion.

If your rice isn’t near completion by this point (based on the time! Don’t touch that lid!) then you probably haven’t been cleaning up after yourself. Naughty. Go clean up so that the rest of the process is as painless and stress free as possible.

Start mixing it up! - With your rice coming to completion you can begin mixing your ingredients together. You should only mix half of your ingredients at first, just to make sure that you don’t end up with too much mix left-over at the end. So, mix a couple pinches of the garlic with a couple handfuls of the onions and 1/2 of the pork. Keep adding and futzing until it looks about right for what you like (less garlic, more garlic, less onion, more onion)

Add the rice - Add a couple tablespoons of rice to the mixture and keep adding until there is about a 4:1 pork:rice ratio. You can obviously increase or decrease this depending on your starchy desires.

Procedure for the Cabbage

This is the time consuming and labor intensive part. Put your mixture into the fridge to let it sit for awhile while you wrangle your way into this cabbage head.

You’ll notice in my pictures that there is a whole in the middle of the cabbage. Several recipes told me to “core” the cabbage - but I had no clue what they meant and went about trying to hack into the core with a knife. I am told that you can slam the cabbage (core side down) onto a table and the core should pop out. I really have no idea if this would work or not given cabbage’s density. Incidentally, the hole that I carved out while trying to core the cabbage ended up being quite useful while wrangling the cabbage in the pot.

Get a pot of water boiling - You’ll be sticking the cabbage into this, so it needs to be enough to cover about the bottom half to third (depending on your bravery) of the cabbage head. Go ahead and test this before boiling the water, the cabbage won’t mind getting wet.

Stick the cabbage in for about 10 seconds - After about ten seconds, start turning the cabbage so that the whole surface gets heat for about ten seconds. This should start turning the outer leaves to a darker color and you should notice them getting softer.

Pull your cabbage out - You should notice that the outer leaves / leaf and fairly easy to pull off without any difficulty now. If you don’t, then you need to heat it longer. It’s rather crucial that you don’t demolish the leaves while peeling them off.

Place the leaves on a large platter - Let them cool, but you don’t really need to rinse them under cold water or anything.

Repeat until you have about 3 more leaves than you want rolls - Because you will probably break some while working. Now, sit back and contemplate how you just spent thirty minutes peeling a head of cabbage.

Assembling the Rolls

Cut the spiney part out - of each leaf of cabbage while you’re working with it. Don’t cut out the whole spine, only the biggest and toughest part of it lest you will be left with no cabbage to work with.

Spoon in about two to three tablespoons of pork mixture - and begin folding up the roll like a burrito. Each roll will end up having a slightly different shape so you’ll have to improvise your folding method from time to time.

Place each roll folded side down - on a big platter and let them rest.

Marvel - at how you just spent 20 minutes folding beautiful little cabbage packages.

Cooking the Rolls

Sort of Fill a big frying pan with chicken broth - or you could water it down some depending on your economic desires. Make sure that there’s enough to cover about the bottom 1/4 of the rolls. You can put a roll in there to judge the size, if you like.

Place the rolls in the pan - folded side down. Try to fit them all in there, it’s OK if they crowd a bit since they’ll end up getting steamed a bit.

Pour a bit more broth over the tops of the rolls - just to moisten them up a bit.

Turn your burner up to medium, get the broth simmering and cover

The brother should just be at a low simmer, if it’s more than that lower the burner a bit. Keep checking on the rolls from time to see how they’re doing.

They should take about 20 - 30 minutes to complete - You should be able to tell just how close they are because the cabbage will be slightly transparent giving you a nice view of the meat. I would also nominate a roll to stab with a kitchen thermometer from time to time.

Delicious!

Enjoy your delicious cabbage rolls! Remember, if you want to see pictures of this process they're all posted on my flickr page tagged as Cabbage Rolls. This is a very time consuming process, so don't expect to make them quickly for dinner one night. As you can tell by the clock on my stove in the cooking photos it ended up taking me about 1.5 hours a good chunk of which was prep time. Unfortunately, they are so delicious that I will be forced to make them again. Seriously, a little tabasco sauce and these were some of the most delicious packages I've eaten in awhile.