Cabbage Roll

Inspired once again from a recipe I found at Chef John's Food Wishes, I tried out this technique of wrapping some filling with cabbage and  simmering it in stock and tomatoes. I would often do a lot of these cooking experiments but not all of them makes it to this blog or onto video, specially those that turned out to suck.

This however, this turned out fantastic!

We had some left over lumpiang shanghai filling from lunch earlier today and I thought I could use that filling for this dish. Now you can come up with a filling of your own and use whatever you like. You can use chicken or pork or fish... it's really up to you.  This recipe is more of the technique of doing the cabbage roll itself.

These were the ingredients I used:

1/4 kilo filling. (I used lumpiang shanghai filling which included chicken, carrots, onion and spring onions)
3/4 cup washed uncooked rice
1/2 can Capri Whole Peeled Tomatoes (I like this brand because the tomatoes are really nice and red)
1 medium sized cabbage
1 medium sized onion, chopped
2-1/2 cups chicken stock
salt and pepper
2 bay leaves
kinchay

First you need to prepare your ingredients. First up is the tomato. Take half of the canned whole peeled tomatoes, put them in a bowl and crush them until they form kind of a rough sauce. Now you can always buy canned tomatoes that are already crushed of course, and you can choose any brand you like, and of course, you can just get regular tomatoes for this, it doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to me actually because as I said, I really love these canned tomatoes. Buy one and see for yourself. It's amazing.

Second, take out the core of the cabbage and place the cabbage in a deep pan of boiling water. Within a few seconds, those cabbage leaves are going to peel off. Using tongs, carefully remove each one as they detach. Do this until the entire cabbage is deconstructed.

Third, take your meat filling and add the rice and around 2 tablespoons chopped kinchay. Mix that all together very well.

In a medium sized casserole dish (with a lid!), line the bottom with the smallest cabbage leaves.

You are now going to build your cabbage rolls. Take one of the biggest leaves, remove bits of hard stem towards the bottom with a knife. Take around 2 tablespoons of meat/rice mixture and place it horizontally near the bottom of the leaf. Now carefully wrap the leaf around the meat, folding the sides and then folding the whole thing. Do as many as would fit in your casserole dish.

Carefully place the rolls inside the dish. Sprinkle some salt and pepper over the rolls. Now pour your tomato sauce over this, add the bay leaves and pour as much stock as would cover the rolls completely.

With regards to stock. You can always boil some chicken with a few vegetables like carrots and celery and use the liquid for stock. I didn't have that so I simply used a chicken cube dissolved in 2-1/2 cups of water. Now if you're using a cube, be careful not to add to much salt in the previous step. Not too much would just be right.  The cube comes with quite a bit of sodium already.

Place your chopped onion over the rolls and then cover everything with a layer of the remaining cabbage leaves.

Close the lid, place the dish inside an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees C. You will bake this for at least one and a half hours.

After one and a half hours, leave the casserole dish inside the cooling oven for 30 minutes more before serving.

And there you go!