This is not Gołąbki

Gołąbki is a Polish word that is pronounced galumpki, and it means stuffed cabbage. My grandmother used to make galumpki – it’s been a long time since she passed away, but I can still remember how it tasted.

Since then I have been on a personal quest to re-create that taste sensation I remember so well. I try, and I try, and I try – and I always fail.

This is the storyboard of my latest failure.

Ground beef, contained sauteed onions and garlic, various spices, and uncooked long-grain rice. The idea is that the rice is a filler, and as the meat slowly cooks so does the rice, by soaking up all the meat juices:

Then you roll each one into a blanched cabbage leaf, like a little burrito:

The rolled, stuffed cabbage leaves are then layered into an oven-compatible pot, sitting on top of a layer of cabbage leaves:

Forgot to take a snap, but I then covered the cabbage rolls with a jar of speghetti sauce, and I topped it with enough chicken broth so that each cabbage roll was under about 1 centimeter of liquid. Then I covered it, and cooked it at 175 C for around 90 minutes:

Here’s what it looked like after the cooking. Note that I had a little extra meat that I felt was insufficient for an entire role, so I added it to the mix in hamburger form. Turned out to be a great idea, since it fell apart and helped flavor the sauce:

And here’s the finished product. well minus the sauce which I left in the pot. In fact I did not eat any of them, but rather placed them in bags, covered them with their own portion of the sauce, and froze them:

Lessons learned:

1) Another failure. Tastes great, but not like my grandmother used to make

2) Even after blanching the cabbage leaves were very thick. Next time I intend to blanch, separate the leaves, then cook them until they are softer

3) Adding some meat to the sauce was very effective

I failed, again, but I will keep on trying!  I think my grandmother would expect no less of me.