@mgreenspan ,
Are your stuffed cabbage in a sweet or savory sauce?
These turned out savory. If you follow parts of these recipes you can see the points or additions that would turn them from savory to more sweet.
E.g adding the raisins, going all the way to 3/4 cup of brown sugar, making the broth and brown sugar sauce vs a red sauce.
willing to share any of said recipes?
Sure. For the ones in the photos above I followed the “baked stuffed cabbage leaves” card for the filling. For the sauce I used the golumpka tomato sauce recipe. This recipe my mom added sometime since I’d had these last. Changes were we cut everything in half because we only made 8 instead of 16. Used the finely diced onion from the filling so slightly less than a medium onion, added in a handful of chopped cherry tomatoes that were sitting around, only put 1.5 really large cabbage leaves chopped up, used 3 Tablespoons of brown sugar, one Tablespoon of apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice and did not add raisins. I only added pepper to the sauce to taste.
Cooked for 1:15 on 350 covered. Longer makes the thickest part of leaf stems super soft. 1:15 was fine. Uncovering and cooking will thicken you’re sauce. I think the 3 hours at 300 is the ideal, but depending on time you can always just deal with it and adjust. It’s just beef in an oven so it’ll cook in less than an hour just may not be as enjoyable.
There are tons of techniques for getting the cabbage leaves off the head in a whole leaf. Cutting out the bottom of the cabbage helps or dipping it into boiling water for a few seconds to help the leaves spread out. I prefer the slow wiggle as it’s the most frustrating and sadistic method.
