Cabbage rolls, stuffed cabbage, or simply cabbage rolls - this is the name of the same dish, which will be discussed in the article, in different countries of Eastern Europe. It has several varieties. As a rule, minced meat or vegetables with the addition of rice or other cereals is wrapped in cabbage leaves, after which such semi-finished products are put in a pan or cauldron and stewed in tomato sauce. Sometimes, to simplify the time-consuming process, these same ingredients are simply finely chopped and mixed, forming large patties. Detailed recipes for the preparation of stuffed cabbage with meat in the traditional and "lazy" version will be presented below. And in fact, and in another case, the dish will turn out equally tasty.
The technology of preparation of stuffed cabbage with meat and rice
Analogues of this dish can be found in almost every kitchen in the world. In the Caucasus, minced meat is traditionally wrapped in grape leaves, which are even preserved for the winter, so that cabbage rolls can be made at any time of the year. But in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the dish is prepared exclusively from leaves of white cabbage. To make it easier to wrap the filling, they are pre-boiled and, if necessary, beat off with a kitchen hammer.
In general, the technology for making stuffed cabbage with meat is as follows:
- Preparation of cabbage leaves. They need to be removed from the head and boiled in boiling water for several minutes, so that they become softer. The rough part of the sheet can be carefully cut with a knife or beat off with a wooden hammer.
- Cooking minced meat. It can be meat, mushroom or vegetable, but with the obligatory addition of cereals, most often rice (less often buckwheat or pearl barley). Raw or fried onion in vegetable oil is placed in the minced meat.
- The formation of products. Raw minced meat is wrapped in cooled cabbage leaves. Many housewives call this step one of the most difficult in cooking stuffed cabbage with meat. So that the products do not fall apart during the extinguishing process, they need to learn how to wrap correctly.
- Cooking the sauce. Cabbage rolls are usually stewed in tomato or sour cream sauce. The larger the sauce will be in the pan, the juicier the finished dish will turn out.
- Stew on the stove or bake in the oven. Cabbage rolls should languish in a double-bottom pan or cauldron over low heat until they become soft enough. Cooking time depends on several factors.
No less tasty are lazy cabbage rolls, during the preparation of which minced meat and half-cooked rice are not wrapped in leaves, but mixed with finely chopped cabbage. Further, the products formed from minced meat are stewed in the same way in sauce and served with sour cream.
List of ingredients
In the preparation of cabbage rolls with meat and rice, the following products are used:
- cabbage - 2 pcs.;
- meat (beef, pork, poultry) - 1 kg;
- rice - ¾ st .;
- carrots - 3 pcs.;
- onion - 2 pcs.;
- vegetable oil - 70 ml;
- tomato paste - 3 tsp;
- sour cream - 3 tbsp. l .;
- black pepper - ½ tsp;
- salt to taste.
The amount of rice in the filling depends on what result the hostess wants. In this recipe, the rice will be slightly smaller than the minced meat, but it can be taken even more, for example 1 cup. Then there will be more cabbage rolls themselves.
How to choose cabbage for cabbage rolls?
Not every head of cabbage can be easily dismantled into leaves without tearing or damaging them. First you need to learn how to choose the right cabbage.
An ideal head is taut, dense and flattened on top, almost white. The stalk of such a cabbage is usually small, but there are a lot of leaves, on the contrary, they are even, juicy and large. A medium-sized head of cabbage weighing 2 kg is best. Too large leaves will make huge bast-like cabbage rolls. On the table, such a dish does not look very good.
Some housewives can spend hours searching the market for cabbage suitable for making cabbage rolls with meat. But the result is worth it. Cabbage rolls from such cabbage will be just perfect.
Preparation of cabbage leaves
The most time-consuming part of the process of making cabbage rolls with meat and rice is to divide a whole head of cabbage into leaves. There are several ways to do this:
- Boil water in a large saucepan. Rinse the cabbage under running water and remove the dirty and coarse upper leaves, then chop the stalk with a large fork. Dip the cabbage in boiling water for 5 minutes. During this time, the top sheets should become soft. Now you need to get the cabbage out of the pan and put it on a plate. With a knife, cut 3-4 upper leaves, then return the head of cabbage to boiling water for the next 5 minutes. Leaves should be flat and medium in size.
- While water is boiling in a large pan, cut a cob from a whole head with a sharp knife. After that, send the cabbage into boiling water for 3-4 minutes. After the specified time, take the cabbage out of the pan, put on a plate, cool a little and take it apart on the leaves, if necessary, helping yourself with a knife.
- Take a head of cabbage, clean it from the top of bad leaves and completely send it to the freezer for 12 hours. After a while, put the cabbage on a refrigerator shelf and completely defrost it. Sheets are very easy to pull off. This method of preparing cabbage is one of the easiest and most convenient.
- No less easily, you can make a head out of the leaves with a microwave. To do this, first send the cabbage into it for 1 minute, then for the same time and another 60 seconds. Next, you need to look at the head of the head and, if possible, separate several of the upper leaves. After that, put the forks in the microwave for another 1 minute, and then again remove several new leaves. Thus, in about 10 minutes you can make out the whole head of cabbage.
From the prepared cabbage leaves, cut off the coarse part at the base of the leaf. In this case, some housewives prefer not to use a knife, but a kitchen wooden mallet.
Stuffing for classic cabbage rolls
The taste of the finished dish largely depends not on the variety of cabbage and the size of the cabbage leaf, but on the filling. Depending on the ratio of rice to minced meat, cabbage rolls will be different each time. If desired, raw and fried vegetables, fresh herbs, suitable spices can be added to the filling. All this will improve the taste of stuffed cabbage with meat.
The step-by-step preparation of minced meat for this dish is as follows:
- While the cabbage leaves are cooling, it's time to do the filling.
- For cabbage rolls, pork-beef or pork-chicken minced meat is ideal. If you use only pork, cabbage rolls will turn out to be greasy, and they often come out of beef or chicken dry. Before cooking minced meat with meat, cut off all the films, veins and excess fat, then rinse it and pass through a meat grinder.
- Boil rice until half cooked. To do this, pour ¾ cup of cereal into a small saucepan, pour it with 1 cup of water and put the dishes on a small fire. Cook until water is absorbed into rice. Cool before half-cooked porridge.
- In addition to rice and meat, it is recommended to put stuffed vegetables in the filling: carrots and onions. With them, the mince will turn out more juicy. To do this, grate the carrots on a medium grater and fry until tender in vegetable oil. Separate onions. Cool vegetables and add to minced meat and rice.
- Mix the ingredients together. Add salt (1 tsp. Or to taste) and pepper. Stuffing for cabbage rolls is ready.
Stuffing Cabbage with Meat Filling
The next stage in the preparation of this dish is the most difficult for many people. And even if you managed to easily take out the head of cabbage for leaves and make good stuffing, this does not mean that cabbage rolls will not turn around during cooking. Therefore, you need to be able to not only choose the right ingredients and prepare the constituent dishes, but also shape the products so that they do not lose their appearance during the heat treatment.
At this stage, step-by-step preparation of cabbage rolls with rice and meat can be represented as follows:
- Put the cabbage leaf on a cutting board. Cut the hard part with a knife, which will interfere with the folding of cabbage.
- Closer to the base of the sheet put 1-2 tablespoons of minced meat.
- Wrap the filling in an leaf of cabbage with an envelope.
- Similarly form the remaining cabbage rolls. Put them in the pan with the seam down, placing them as tightly as possible to each other.
Other methods of forming cabbage rolls are known:
- Lay out the cabbage leaf on a flat surface. Closer to its base lay out the filling. Roll cabbage leaf. Bend the free edges inward, first on one side and then on the other side. This method of wrapping the filling in the cabbage leaf is considered the most reliable. Even with a strong boil, cabbage rolls will not turn around.
- Cut a large leaf of cabbage with a knife into 3-4 small triangles. Collapse each small bag (as before for seeds). Put a little stuffing inside the bag. Bend the edges inward, as described in the previous method. From cabbage triangles you will get very small cabbage rolls, about two bites.
Which way to choose from depends on personal preferences.
Tomato dressing
After the cabbage rolls are formed, they can be further fried in a pan with preheated vegetable oil. This will brown them and give a more appetizing appearance. The only drawback is that the dish will turn out to be bold, so you can safely skip this step.
Traditionally, cabbage rolls are stewed in a tomato dressing. Cooking it is very simple. It is enough to dissolve the tomato paste (3 tbsp. L.) In 2-3 glasses of warm boiled water. Pour cabbage rolls in a saucepan with the resulting solution so that the water level is 2 cm below the top edge.
Another cooking method is also possible. Stuffed cabbage with meat and rice in a tomato and sour cream dressing will turn out even softer than usual. That is why, so that the cabbage does not spill at all, they can be stewed for 10 minutes less. To prepare a tomato and sour cream dressing, you need to combine 300 g of sour cream and tomato sauce ("Krasnodar" is ideal) and add 1-2 cloves of garlic squeezed through a press. The resulting dressing must be diluted with water and fill it with cabbage rolls in a pan so that they are completely covered.
Order and time of preparation of stuffed cabbage
The dish can be stewed in a pan on the stove and baked in the oven. In the latter case, the sauce will turn out to be thicker, and the cabbage rolls themselves will definitely not fall apart, as when boiling on a stove. But far from always they turn out to be as juicy as when stewed under a lid in a saucepan.
In general, cabbage rolls after boiling in a saucepan should simmer over low heat for about 50 minutes, that is, until the cabbage is soft. It is important to ensure that the dressing does not boil too much, otherwise cabbage leaves will unfold.
But on the preparation of stuffed cabbage with meat in the oven it will take about 45 minutes at a temperature of 180 ° C, and the sauce should be much, about 1 cm higher than the products themselves, since it boils off a lot.
The finished dish is served with sour cream sauce.
Features and cooking secrets
To make the dish tasty, it is recommended to consider the following points when preparing it:
- Only half-cooked rice should be added to the stuffing for the filling. If you cook it completely, then during the preparation of cabbage rolls with meat, it will turn into a mess. If rice is, on the contrary, raw, then it will absorb all the meat juice. As a result, cabbage rolls will be dry inside.
- The filling will turn out even tastier if the minced meat is previously beaten off, as in the preparation of cutlets.
- If there is too much refueling, stuffed cabbage will boil upwards (like dumplings) when boiling, and then the likelihood that they will unfold during braising will be very high. To avoid this, immediately after adding the sauce, the contents of the pan should be covered with a flat plate.
Cooking lazy cabbage rolls with meat and rice
There is not always time to take cabbage into leaves, and then properly wrap them so that the products do not fall apart during cooking. To facilitate the whole laborious process, another way was invented for the preparation of stuffed cabbage with meat, which can be called "lazy." In this case, cabbage is simply finely chopped, and then mixed with minced meat, from which subsequently products similar to cutlets are formed.
The process of preparing "lazy" stuffed cabbage with meat consists of the following steps:
- Finely chop the cabbage (400 g), put in a deep bowl and pour boiling water over it. Leave as it is for 5-10 minutes.
- Chop the onion (150 g) in any convenient way.
- Boil round rice (100 g) until half cooked.
- Grind 500 g of beef, pork or poultry.
- Drain the water from the cabbage, throwing it into a colander, and then squeeze it out with your hands.
- Combine the cabbage with chopped onion, cooled rice and minced meat. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- Hands to form large meatballs. Roll them in flour on all sides.
- Fry the formed patties in vegetable oil. Put them on a baking sheet.
- Prepare a sauce of 250 g of sour cream, tomato paste (3 tbsp. L.) And garlic (2-3 pcs.). Dilute it with water (2 tbsp.).
- Pour the lazy cabbage rolls with the sauce until the middle of the mold.
- Bake the dish in a preheated oven (180 ° C) for 45 minutes. Sprinkle ready-made lazy cabbage rolls with herbs.