Herby Beef Roulades & Spiced Tomato Sauce

Herby roulades - stuffed cabbage rolls - with spiced tomato sauce are a perfect winter warmer on a frosty day or light supper dish in autumn. When I was a child, I would spend the afternoons charging around the countryside on my little dilapidated bike with reckless abandon and come home with bruised knees and torn clothes from the brambles in the forests, through which I had been running with my flame-haired friend, Lorna.

These roulades are easy to make and taste incredible

Elated and exhausted I would return home, where my mother would serve the herbal, meaty stuffing wrapped in the lightly blanched, crinkly green leaves of an almost black (savoy) cabbage, which had been sitting on the counter, bursting with life, before I left to go and play outside. Sometimes she would use a white cabbage that was equally proud, but in truth it never mattered because it always came out well.

I remember many Sundays, where we would come back from the freezing church, having fasted before the service in true Catholic style, and be ravenous for something filling. We would spill into our sunset orange dining room with its large oval Danish-style teak table and chairs in cinnamon velvets – now historic icons of the 1960s – overlooking the patio, and devour several roulades each, served with creamy mashed potato in a moat of savoury tomato sauce. In this we were watched by a tame robin who would perch amidst the plethora of delicately fluttering crimson flowers on the 30-year-old rhododendron bush nearby, watching us jealously through the window.

One of the nicest things about this dish is that, even though it may look challenging to make, it’s actually not, and even if you did make a mistake,such as tearing or breaking one of the leaves while you are filling it, you can hide this by turning the leaf under, and the tomato sauce will cover it. You can be worry-free – and there is nothing nicer than stress-free cooking!

If you still have doubts, think of it this way: if you can make a basic burger with some minced meat, and also a basic tomato sauce, you can easily make this because the mince is identical to what is put in burgers and the tomato sauce only differs from passata in that one adds a dash of balsamic vinegar, the same of sugar, and some warming spices, to create the famous sweet, sour and umami flavours that really make this worth eating.

If time is tight, do not skip the step of cooking the cabbage leaves. It will only take 10mins to do, and because the leaves are already partially cooked, the entire dish will only need about 45mins in the oven to cook. Paradoxically, it you skip the step of blanching the leaves properly, this greatly extends the cooking time and you will find the roulades will take a full 1.5 hours to become tender enough to cut with a knife for eating. Trust me on this, I’ve tried it. Being unable to cut through the leaves, and eating them raw amidst the jus, was not a good eating experience.

Prep time: 1 hour Cook time: 90mins

Ingredients

For the sauce

1 finely chopped onion

3 cloves finely chopped garlic

3 tbsp olive oil

4 large, chopped tomatoes

1 pint orange juice or red wine or stock

1 small tin of tomato paste

Dash balsamic vinegar and 3 tbsp brown sugar to taste

Salt, chilli pepper powder, oregano, Italian seasoning, paprika, cumin.

For the filling

250g minced pork or beef

1 finely chopped onion

3 cloves crushed garlic

1 egg

1 teacup plain flour

Salt, pepper, nutmeg, oregano, thyme,

For the cabbage leaves

8 large cabbage leaves

You will also need a deep casserole dish which takes enough stew for 4 people.

Method

To make the sauce

1-Turn the oven on and raise the temp to 200C.

2-While the oven is pre-heating, drizzle some olive oil into a cooking pot and add the onions and garlic to cook until turning translucent, stirring all the while.

3-Once they are translucent, add all the other ingredients and cook until everything is amalgamated, continuing to stir the mixture as it cooks. You can attend to other matters, such as making the stuffing and creating the roulades (rolls).

4-As soon as the sauce is nicely amalgamated, test it for flavour and adjust as necessary, then set it aside.

To prepare the roulades

1-Cut around the hard inner core of the cabbage and remove it.

2-Place the entire cabbage in a large cauldron of boiling salted water and simmer until the leaves have softened, but be careful to remove the cabbage before it turns to mush. The leaves will need to retain their shape for rolling purposes. Keep the water for making soup.

3-Remove the cabbage from the water and drop it into a bowl of iced water for a few minutes, then remove it, pat it dry and slowly peel away 8 or more leaves for making the roulades (stuffed rolls), and set them aside on a dry cloth. Note: you can use the leftover leaves and cooking water for making soup.

To make the stuffing and stuff the cabbage leaves

1-Put the onions, garlic, egg, flour and seasonings into a bowl and mix with your hands until the mixture becomes sticky and holds together well.

2-Lay each cooked cabbage leaf on a wooden board, and flatten it slightly; then form a small oval ball of mince and lay this on the leaf.  Tuck the mince in, all around, and fold the sides of the leaves inwards, and finally roll it up, into a sausage shape. Finish by placing it into your chosen casserole dish and tuck any stray edges under.

You can make the tomato sauce rich or mild –

either is sublime with stuffed roulades!

3-Continue until you have used up all the cabbage leaves and they have all been laid in neat rows in your casserole dish.

4-If any mince is left, you can add it to the leftover leaves and cabbage cooking water for making the soup mentioned earlier, or use them for making little meatballs served with rice on baby gem lettuce leaves and drizzled with a spiced lime dressing.

Here the cabbage rolls have been tied with string, but I always make it without and they still hold together.

To cook and serve

1-After positioning the stuffed cabbage leaves in the casserole dish, turn the sauce out of its pan and pour it all over the stuffed cabbage so that they are all nicely covered.

2-Turn down the oven temperature to 180C and place the casserole dish in the centre of the oven for 90mins. At the halfway mark, the sauce should be bubbling gently around the sides of the dish. Use a sharp knife to check that the cabbage leaves are tender enough to cut through.

3-The flavours of this dish should be deep. The roulades will taste warming, mellow and herbal, falling into true umami. the sauce should be rich, unctuous and deliver a sweet and sour kick to contrast with the roulades. 4-Serve with crusty buttered bread, rice or mash, and a gutsy red.

Notes

1-This dish can be made with any kind of red meat at all, including game and possibly poultry. Even if the latter two ingredients would take the dish outside what is authentically polish or Slavic, it would still make for scrumptious eating, so I would urge you to experiment to find your favourite.

2-You can also vary the cabbage. I have not yet tried to make it with red cabbage, but I can imagine a spiced version of the mince blended with apple, cloves and cinnamon, would be, in its own way, as glorious as the original recipe, so do not hold back. I think it would be spectacular drizzled with sour cream and scattered with parsley and croutons.

You can use different cabbage with this dish - plain white or green will work well. It does not have to be savoy.

You could even use red cabbage – stuffed with apple and pork, and with the sauce topped with sour cream.

2-The sauce can be made as sumptuous or as simple as you like. The first time I made this, I just used tomatoes and orange juice for the sauce, with a dash of balsamic vinegar and white sugar – which produced perfect results – but you could just as easily use home-made stock, or a mixture of that and wine, or even apple juice. The addition of fruit juice balances the acidity of the vinegar and produces a mellow flavour, which will be deepened if you use muscovado sugar. If you use a very sweet apple juice for your sauce, taste it before adding the sugar so that the sauce does not become too sweet. The sugar is just there to bring out the natural caramel of the onions and tomatoes and to counterbalance the balsamic vinegar to form the sweet and sour flavour that we want. It should not dominate.

3-When serving this with mashed potato or rice, for example, we have found that most people comfortably manage two rolls, rarely three, even when they are starving, but it heats up well, so you can keep any leftovers for lunch the day after. Alternatively, you may wish to make more roulades or even a second baking dish full, for your next lunch, or freeze the dish for much later on.

4-This is the kind of dish which gets better with age, so then gentle re-heating is the thing to aim for. This means doing it low and slow in your oven. Set the temp to 140C and place the dish inside, covered in tin foil, for 2 hours. If you have run out of tin foil, place it in the oven uncovered, but pour a coffee mug of water into a shallow dish in the base of the oven, to provide a gentle steaming process. This will stop the dish from becoming dry.

*****bon appetit*****