Making Lachanodolmades – stuffed cabbage leaves
There are recipes from Greece that you could say they can be cooked really fast and easily but there are also others that may take a lit bit more from your time, the following falls to the second category… The dish that I tried to do the couple of weeks ago was lahanodolmades which essentially means stuffed cabbage leaves.
Its not easy and it needs a lot of preparation and basically I wouldn’t say it is one of those that you can make it in a hurry but the result is always satisfying. As always the egg lemon sauce makes a real difference…
Obviously there are a lot of variations for that food and you may have realized up to know that Greeks really like to have stuffed vegetables for food.
Ingredients for Lahanodolmades
- 1 Cabbage with soft leaves (the bigger the size the more you will eat…)
- 1 Red Onion grated
- 300gr-500gr of Beef Minced meat
- 1 cup of rice
- Bunch of Parsley finely chopped
- Salt and Pepper
- Olive oil
Ideally what you want to do is with a really pointed knife cut the center of the cabbage , remove it and discard it. The in a big pot, put the cabbage inside with the hole which you created, pointing down.
Fill it with water and bring it to a boil for 10-15 minutes. That will soften the leaves of the cabbage. After 10-15 minutes, remove the cabbage and let it cold a bit. Remove the leaves one by one and place them on a large dish. Be careful removing them not to make to pull them quickly and make too many holes on the leaves. They need to be soaked but firm in the same time.
For the stuffing now, in a big bowl add the minced meat, the rice, the grated onions and the chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper as you wish and a bit of olive oil. Use your hands and mix all the ingredients together, add more olive oil if it is needed, the idea is to make a big firm ball of all of the ingredients
Method
- Well ideally what you want to do is to put the leaves down and place a large quantity of your meat mixture on the harder side. Thenslowly you roll it up creating the lachanodolmades. Repeat the procedure until all the leaves are done.
- Before you do that, you should keep couple of leaves to place on the bottom of the pot as a cover and then place the lachanodolmades on top. The leaves on the bottom will be as a shield in order to protect them from burning.
- Place them one next to each other and fill them with water until the top and bring them to a boil. Slow cook them for about an hour, but be careful not to over boil them and they start to spill.
- After 1 hour you can get out one of them and try it to be sure they are fully cooked inside, if they are make the egg lemon sauce and serve it immediately.
