Kohlrouladen or Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

There is European deli in downtown Minneapolis called Kramarczuk's that sells a vast array of sausages and also serves Eastern European lunch fare in its adjacent restaurant. Almost every Saturday at around 2 p.m. when I pick up Emily at the opera center, I will inevitably hear her ask me if we can eat there. So sometimes we do. Some of our favorite foods at the restaurant are the pirogies and the stuffed cabbage rolls. To me, the cabbage rolls simply taste like my mother's.

Since we've had a couple of cold, rainy days and the grocery stores are still filled with cabbages because they're in season and we just had St. Patrick's Day, I decided it would be fun to try cooking stuffed cabbage rolls, a dish my mom regularly made in the cold weather season, but that I have never tried. The tricky part was to find a recipe that would bring back the exact taste and texture of my mom's Kohlrouladen. Since I don't have her recipe–she never wrote it down, but just made it–my memories had to serve me as a guide to the ingredients and for quantities, techniques and cooking times I consulted other people's recipes.

Frankly, it took me a great deal of time today to make stuffed cabbage rolls because I haven't eaten my mother's dish for a very, very long time, and this was my first-ever attempt at making them. But as I started preparing the cabbage leaves, the memories kept coming forth and soon I had all the information I needed for a recipe. In the end, I had a very tasty dish that was authentic and put me right back into my mom's kitchen. The following recipe is enough to make 4-6 servings and can easily be doubled.

Kohlrouladen or Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

Ingredients:

For the cabbage rolls:

1 large cabbage (white, green or Savoy)

1/2 pound ground beef

1/2 pound ground pork

1 cup diced onion, sautéed in a little olive oil until translucent

1 egg

1/2 cup cooked rice

1 tsp. kosher salt

freshly ground pepper

For the sauce:

1/2-1 cup diced onion

remaining cabbage (after leaves are removed), chopped

kosher salt

olive oil

1/2 cup of dry white wine

1-28 oz. can crushed tomatoes

1 cup water

2 Tbsp. brown sugar

Preparation:

To prepare the cabbage, bring a large pot of water to a boil and cut the core out of the cabbage. Place the whole head into the water and cook for about 5 minutes, just long enough to soften the leaves and make peeling them off easier. Remove the cabbage from the boiling water and gently peel away its leaves. Set the peeled off leaves aside and let dry for stuffing. There should be at least 12 to 18 cabbage leaves. Per cabbage roll I like to take 2-3 leaves, depending on size.

Chop the remaining part of the head of cabbage into small pieces and set aside.

Sauté a cup of finely diced onion in about 2 tsp. olive oil just until the onions become translucent and set aside to cool off a little.

Mix the ground meats, egg, rice, sautéed onion, salt and pepper well until the mixture is nice and homogeneous.

Take 2 or 3 dried cabbage leaves, cut out the tough core stems and layer them on top of each other, so that there are no visible holes. Spoon 2 Tbsp. of the meat mixture onto the bottom part of the cabbage leaves, fold the bottom part over the meat once, then fold in the left and right sides of the leaves and keep rolling upwards. Place the cabbage roll seam-side down on a cookie sheet and continue until all the meat filling and leaves are used up.

For the simmering sauce, heat a little olive oil in a large pot and sauté roughly 1/2 to 1 cup of diced onion and the chopped cabbage until they're translucent and slightly golden and softened. Add the wine, if using, and sauté a bit more. Add the crushed tomatoes, water and brown sugar and mix well. Bring to a boil. Add the stuffed cabbage rolls, seam-side down, turn down the heat and let them simmer on very low heat for about 1 1/2 hours. You may want to check for doneness after about an hour to see if the cabbage is softened enough by pricking it with a fork.

This dish is traditionally served in Germany with boiled salt-water potatoes. At our house, everyone really enjoyed my first attempt at Kohlrouladen. Dan, my husband, thought I had a winner and I think my mom would have approved, too. For my part, I have to say that spending a lot of time in the kitchen today to cook stuffed cabbage rolls made a lot of memories come back, happy and also bittersweet. I should probably tell you more about my mom some other time.