Yesterday's lunch was cabbage rolls made with the outer leaves of a Savoy cabbage (un chou vert frisé) that I bought and cooked back at the end of January. The rest of the cabbage — the tender, pale-green head — went into a pot au feu, which is a boiled dinner of beef and winter vegetables.
The Savoy cabbage is also called chou de Milan (for the Italian city) or chou de Savoie in French. Some of the outer-most leaves are too tough, but the leaves just under them cook up tender but keep a certain crunchy texture that is pleasant. They are sturdy enough to stand up to long cooking and hold together when rolled up with a stuffing inside.
I saved those leaves and blanched them for three or four minutes in boiling water. Then I packed them, without rolling or folding them, in a zip-top plastic bags and put them in the freezer. Then I made a stuffing with ground pork, cooked rice, onions, garlic, herbs, and spices.
About 100 grams (3 oz.) of the raw ground-pork filling got wrapped up in each cabbage leaf. Walt did that part. He packed the cabbage rolls tightly into a baking dish so that they would hold together as they cooked in the oven. I poured a good pint of tomato sauce over them and baked them for 45 minutes, covered.
I can't give you a more precise recipe for the stuffing because I just kind of made it up as I went. I used ground pork, but ground beef or turkey would be good too. The pork was very lean. The rice was some we had cooked to have with a stir-fry a day or two earlier. We ate the cabbage rolls with the tomato sauce and some grated Parmesan cheese.
How delicious this sounds....We never see savoy cabbage such a deep dark green. I bet it has more flavor than our pale green savoy, though I prefer even that to plain green cabbage, which I also love. My daughter and I have bought an organic pig together and I was just wondering how I would cook the first ground meat from it. I think it is slightly seasoned like a sausage. I have only plain cabbage....Lots of ideas.
ReplyDeleteHa! Great minds -- I just bought some chair a farci (sorry can't be bothered with accents today on the laptop) to use up the several batches of blanched cabbage outer leaves I have in the freezer.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if this dish was different from chou farci, which I thought involved removing the heart of the cabbage and replacing it with the stuffing. The recipe I found on the Net is exactly like yours. So it should be called feuilles de chou farcies to be exact. This is a perfect example of a synecdoche!
ReplyDeleteI see these called roulades ou roulés de chou farci(e)s on various web sites. To be exact.
ReplyDeleteYes, roulades de chou farcies is much more explicit than chou farci where comes my impression that was the whole chou that was farci !
DeleteI'm not sure where you saw the term stuffed cabbage. I don't think I ever used the term. In English, I used the name "cabbage rolls."
DeleteWhen I wrote chou farci in my comment, I didn't mean you said it, but that I heard it when I was living in France. When I Googled chou farci, what I got was recipes like yours. I just Googled chou farci again and found this recipe. Let's see if this time Blogger will let me post the link with the html codes. Here it goes.
DeleteHere the recipe for the whole cabbage stuffed.
Well, doesn't that look FABULOUS! Now, I'm remembering a post long ago, with this dark, savoy cabbage.
ReplyDeleteThis looks delicious. That cabbage is quite attractive and, except for the color, looks like the model for ceramic cabbage ware.
ReplyDeleteThat looks very much like the Polish galumpki, or golumpke, or various other spellings. Not just Polish, I think, but also central and eastern European. Versatile, that cabbage. Tasty, too.
ReplyDelete