Hungarian · Main
Töltött káposzta
- Advanced
- 50 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, wood-smoke running underneath, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg whole soured cabbage head, leaves separated
- 700 g savanyú káposzta (drained sauerkraut)
- 700 g coarsely minced pork shoulder, about a quarter fat
- 120 g long grain rice, raw
- 1 egg
- 200 g onions, finely chopped
- 60 g lard
- 25 g édesnemes paprika (noble sweet, ground)
- 600 g smoked pork ribs
- 5 g caraway seed
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 500 ml water
- 200 g tejföl (20 percent sour cream), to serve
- fine salt and black pepper
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: 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
- Sweat half the onion in half the lard until soft, take it off the heat, stir in a third of the paprika and let it go completely cold.
- Mix that cold paprika onion into the pork with the raw rice, egg, garlic, caraway, salt and pepper and beat until the mass turns tacky and holds together.
- Pare the thick rib from each soured leaf, roll a heaped spoonful of filling into a loose parcel and tuck the ends in so the rice has room to swell.
- Spread half the sauerkraut in a heavy pot, lay the parcels and the smoked ribs on it, cover with the rest of the kraut and pour in water until it just shows at the sides.
- Cook the remaining onion in the rest of the lard, stir the last paprika in off the heat, pour it over the pot and hold everything at a whisper for two hours without stirring.
- Spoon cold sour cream over each portion at the table rather than into the pot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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