Polish · Main
Gołąbki w Sosie Pomidorowym
- Intermediate
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 1 head white cabbage, about 1.6 kg
- 500 g minced pork, or half pork and half beef
- 180 g short grain rice
- 1 large onion, finely diced
- 40 g lard
- 2 tsp dried marjoram
- 1 egg
- 500 ml passata or sieved tinned tomatoes
- 400 ml light stock
- 20 g plain flour
- 20 g butter
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 bay leaves
- Salt and black pepper
The skills inside
Making a rouxSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSalted water & the float test
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cut a cone out of the cabbage core and lower the whole head into boiling salted water, peeling leaves away as they slacken, roughly one a minute, until you have sixteen.
- Boil the rice for 8 minutes only, until the grains are still chalky at the centre, and drain. 8 min
- Sweat the onion in the lard until translucent, cool it, then work it into the mince with the rice, egg, marjoram and plenty of salt and pepper.
- Shave the thick rib of each leaf flat with a knife, sit a spoonful of filling at the stem end, fold the sides in and roll tight.
- Pack the rolls seam down in a heavy pot, add stock and bay to come halfway up, weight them with a plate, cover and cook at 160C (320F) for 75 minutes until a leaf gives to a spoon. 75 min
- Make a pale roux with the butter and flour, whisk in the pot juices and the passata, season with the sugar and salt, and pour it back over the rolls to glaze.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
Salted water & the float test 188 recipes
- The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
- There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
- Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
- Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
- Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.
Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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