Here’s my tried and true cabbage rolls recipe that is a must have for every Christmas. First of all, the big difference between Romanian cabbage rolls and others are that we make them with sour cabbage. You can find sour cabbage at pretty much all grocery stores, here in Calgary, we always find them at Safeway or any Polish store. With sour cabbage you have to be careful because it is pretty salty, so what I usually do is a few hours before actually assembling the rolls, I put the cabbage in a big pot with water, so some of the salt gets out of it.
This is how I learned to make cabbage rolls from my mother and they are my favorite. The other thing that we do with cabbage rolls, is we add some kind of smoked meat. This time I used smoked bacon. The idea of adding smoked meat is to add some smoked flavor. It really makes the cabbage rolls taste great. Now, although, we always make cabbage rolls at every Christmas and Easter, we do make them other times as well. They are so delicious, you can’t stop eating just a couple rolls.
Cabbage rolls are easy to make, it’s just time consuming to make the rolls. That’s why when we make cabbage rolls we make lots. The good thing about cabbage rolls is that you can freeze them.
First of all, chop the onion and saute it with the oil, just enough until the onion is translucent. I also like to add the rice to the onion and cook it together for a minute or so. In a large bowl, add the ground pork, dill, onion, rice, and salt and pepper.
Use your hands to mix all the ingredients together. Make sure you mix it well.
For these cabbage rolls, I used 2 smaller sour cabbages because we couldn’t find a large one. After you’ve soaked the cabbage in water, remove the leaves off the cabbage one by one, and cut each leaf in two, if the leaf is too big. I also cut the core piece off. Place them on a plate so they are ready for you when you start rolling.
Get your bacon ready as well or whatever smoked meat you use, just cut it up in smaller pieces.
With the remaining sour cabbage, usually I leave some leaves on the core and I chop it up and place at the bottom of my big baking dish. Depends on how many cabbage rolls you’re making but you’ll need a fairly big dish, that’s deep enough to hold at least 2 rows of cabbage rolls.
Start rolling the cabbage rolls. I like mine a bit smaller, but I know some people make them really large. I usually use about 1 to 2 tablespoons of the meat mixture in each rolls. Roll them up and line them up in your dish. After the first row add the bacon in between the rolls. Continue until done with meat mixture.
Pour the liter of tomato juice all over the cabbage rolls. If the cabbage rolls are not completely covered, add water. Cover them up with the lid, or aluminum foil and bake in a preheat 375 F degree oven for 2 hours. After two hours, you’ll notice most of the juice has evaporated so you might need to add more water, you don’t necessarily have to fill it up to the top this time. Bake for another 2 hours without the lid on. Your house will smell wonderful.
They are just wonderful, truly one of my favorite dishes ever.
Printable recipe:
Ingredients:
- 2 – 3 lbs ground pork (or whatever meat you prefer)
- 1/2 cup long grain rice (I prefer basmati)
- 1-2 onions chopped
- parsley
- dill
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 L tomato juice
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 large sour cabbage
- 15 slices of bacon
Instructions:
- Chop the onions and fry them in the oil until tender. Add rice and cook for another minute. Add onion and rice mixture to ground pork and add salt, pepper, dill and parsley and mix well with your hands. Now it’s time to assemble the rolls.
- Remove all the cabbage leaves and cut each leaf in half. Romanian cabbage rolls are traditionally smaller than the Polish cabbage rolls, so that’s why I recommend cutting each leaf in half, otherwise you can use the entire leave for one roll.
- Fill each half leaf with a big tbsp of the meat mixture and roll. Put all the rolls in a big pot and add the liter of tomato juice over the rolls. Add more water if needed, the juice should cover the rolls entirely. Cover the pot with aluminum foil and bake at 375 degrees for about 4 hours.
- After 2 hours remove the foil and put back in the oven. Serve hot with a bit of sour cream on top.
Enjoy!
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An easy way to soften cabbage, if you can’t find sour cabbage, is to freeze the whole head overnight. My mom taught me this & it works like a charm. (I use brown rice in my cabbage rolls & that works great too. You recipe is delicious & I am making it for company again this week.
You’re absolutely right, my mom used to do that too and it does work. You know brown rice is a great idea. Glad you like the recipe.
Hi Jo, I have never made cabbage rolls before but have always enjoyed them from family and friends. I have just used your recipe and have made them in advance for tomorrows dinner but the only thing im a little nervous about is i used cooked rice. I wasnt sure if i was suppose to use cooked or uncooked so i went with cooked. Will these still turn out ok and will they still need to be cooked for 4 hours considering the rice is pre cooked? Thanks for sharing your great recipes.
Hi Brian, normally I don’t cook the rice, but I will saute it in a little bit of butter together with the onions just for a minute or two. Since you cooked the rice, I don’t think you need to bake them for 4 hours, I think 2 hours should be enough. What you can do is after 2 hours take one out, the cabbage also needs to be cooked so if you can break it with a fork easily then it’s cooked. Good luck and let me know how they turn out, all we really care about is that they taste great. Just curious, did you use sour cabbage?
By the way, I’m now craving cabbage rolls. Lol!
This may sound silly but do I cook the rice before adding it with the onions? Thanks
Hi Jen,
No you don’t, you just cook the rice with the onions for a minute then add it to the meat. Remember you add tomato juice and water enough to cover the rolls completely, and they will bake for a couple hours, enough time for the rice to cook.
Good luck and let me know how they turn out.
Hi Jo, I make cabbage rolls that are very similar to yours. I have never heard of sour cabbage, but I put sauerkraut in between the layers of rolls. I put strips of bacon on top of the cabbage on the bottom of the pan and use tomato soup instead of tomato juice. I do use ground beef and sometimes half ground pork if I have it. I don’t cook the onions and also add minced garlic. I be ours taste very similar. Mine are Polish from my Mother. You have great recipes. I just found you on Foodgawker and will be trying lots of your recipes. Thanks Joy!
Hi Linda,
Thank you so much! I’m sure they are very similar, I’ve had Polish cabbage rolls before and they are pretty close to the Romanian ones. In Calgary here we find sour cabbage at Safeway all year round, same thing as sauerkraut, except it’s not chopped up.
Let me know how it goes with the recipes you try.
Hi Jo -
I made these yesterday and they came out delicious! The only problem I had was that I did not find sour cabbage, so I bought regular one, but wasn’t sure how to soften the leaves enough so I could roll them. Do you use hot/boling water to accomplish this, and for how long do you soak the cabbage in the water?
No worries, I had a Plan B – and rolled my sarmale in grape leaves, but I’d live to try cabbage next time.
Hi Amalia,
I never made them myself with regular cabbage, but my mom did, and if I remember correctly she placed the cabbage in boiling water for a few minutes, so the leaves would soften out. I made them with grape leaves before too, and I love them both ways.
Thank you, Jo! I’ll try your Mom’s method next time. The cabbage makes them “heartier”, I think. Besides, that’s how my own Mom used to make them – yumm, and great memories
Great memories, indeed! Good luck.
You can also make them with pepper. Just cut out the top part of the pepper, get all the seeds out and the stuff the mix inside the pepper. Afterwards just boil them like nomal sarmale
Enjoy
Found Sarmale on Pinterest…yupy !!! You filled with joy my Romanian heart
Didn’ t make them this year but had them in every house I was, for Christmas.
As you said: a MUST. La Multi Ani!
La Multi Ani, Florentina!
Buna! I’m so glad I found your blog! I spent a few months in Romania (Iasi) during college and have been looking for some good Romanian recipes ever since! I think the only one I’m missing a recipe for now is gogosi! Thank you thank you thank you! I cannot wait to try out this recipe and eat some lovely sarmale again.
Buna!! Oh don’t remind me, I love gogosi! I don’t have a recipe for them, but I’ll have to see if my mother in law has one. I miss those too.
I’ll have to add the dill next time. I’ve never used rice in my German recipe. This sounds good! Minor correction: “after you’ve soaked the cabbage in flour? I think you meant to type ‘water’. Thanks!
Haha, good catch, thanks. Merry Christmas.
How much parsley and dill did you use and about how many slices of bacon?
Normally I’ll use 1/4 cup of parsley and 1/4 cup of dill, but this time I didn’t have any fresh parsley so I just used extra dill, so about 1/2 cup of chopped dill. I used about 15 slices of smoked bacon, but it’s really up to you. Trust me though when I say, those are the best part, those little pieces of bacon.
Ty.
I have made lots of cabbage rolls but Hungarian or German style. These sound very nice with the addition of dill and bacon.