The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 27, Steppe, Forest and the Reclaimed Kitchen
Holubtsi
Ukraine
Illustration
- Time
- 3 hours 30
- Researched
- Researched from 89 sources in the brief
Cabbage leaves, softened whole in boiling water or, in the regional variant followed here, fermented as sauerkraut leaves rather than fresh, stuffed with minced pork and rice or buckwheat, rolled, and baked at 180°C for around two hours in a tomato-and-stock sauce until the cabbage is fully tender.
As tradition built it
Makes 12. About 2 hours; 1½ hours in the oven at 180°C.
Ingredients
The rolls
- 1 head (800 g) fermented cabbage
- 200 g round short-grain rice
- 300 ml water, for the rice
- 500 g minced pork, or mixed mince
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 1 medium carrot, coarsely grated
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
- to taste salt
The sauce
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp sour cream (20 per cent)
- 500 ml water
- to taste salt
To serve
- optional sour cream
Method
- Core the cabbage and separate the leaves, trimming the hard rib from each.
- Rinse the rice and cook it in the 300 ml of water until half done, about 15 minutes. Cover and cool. Heat the oven to 180°C.
- Soften the onion in the oil, add the carrot and salt, and cook together 10 minutes. Mix the mince, rice and vegetables into the filling.
- Line a 22cm baking dish with cabbage leaves. Roll a tablespoon of filling in each leaf and pack the rolls tightly in the dish.
- Cover with more leaves, or foil.
- Whisk the tomato paste, sour cream and water smooth with salt, and pour it over until the rolls are almost covered.
- Bake 1½ hours and serve hot with sour cream.
Notes
The recipe is Ievgen Klopotenko's holubtsi of fermented cabbage; the page does not write out the mixing of the filling as its own sentence. It uses water, not stock, and rice, not buckwheat.
What a modern chef changes
A confit filling and a lacquered finish
Method
- Use the fermented-leaf version throughout, since its sourness is the more distinctive and less commonly seen variant outside Ukraine.
- Confit the pork filling separately at a controlled low sous vide temperature before rolling, rendering it more evenly than raw mince cooked only as fast as the parcel around it allows.
- Reduce the baking sauce separately into a concentrated glaze, finished with a little of the sauerkraut's own brine for sharpness.
- Lacquer the rolls under a hot grill for colour rather than serving them simply submerged in sauce.