This is a Bosnian dish, properly made with pickled cabbage that has been salted as for sauerkraut. You can pickle your own cabbage, ask your Bosnian friends for one or even acquire one ready-pickled from various places in the Uxbridge Road. Best of all, you can use your own cabbages, blanch the leaves and give it a go. It’s fiddly but worth the effort.
Ingredients:
1 cabbage
1 lb (500g) minced raw lamb
3 oz (100g) of rice
1 large onion peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoonful paprika
Salt and pepper
Method:
Peel the cabbage leaves off individually, cut the stalk out if it is hefty and halve the leaves if large. Blanch the leaves in boiling water – 1 minutes for Savoy leaves, less for less robust leaves. I find that Chinese cabbage works well.
My friend Igbala gave me this as the basic recipe and it works. You can use your imagination and add all sorts of other things like chopped bacon bits, any herbs that take your fancy, lots more spicy things, more onion, more garlic; it doesn’t really matter and it’s up to you. All you have to do is mix all the raw ingredients up together and then stuff your cabbage leaves.
To stuff a cabbage leaf – you’re going to have to use your hands here. Take the individual cabbage leaf (or half a leaf if you’ve cut it up) and place a small spoonful of the stuffing in the middle at the thick end. Now fold one side of the leaf over the stuffing and then roll up the leaf with the stuffing inside. When you’ve completed your roll, tuck in the spare leaf capacity (on the side that didn’t fold over) into the roll that you’ve just made. You stick your finger in to the end of the roll; it really is very simple and it does work. If you have a wobbly leaf – and you may well as you get nearer the centre – you can secure your sarma with a cocktail stick. With Chinese cabbage leaves I folded both sides over, rolled them up and used a cocktail stick.
Place your sarmas in a saucepan and cover them with boiling water and about 100ml of vegetable oil – olive or sunflower. Bring back to the boil and then reduce the heat until the pan is just simmering and cook for two hours.
Serve your sarmas however you like. Sprinkle them with finely chopped parsley and put them on the table. Tomato sauce would be fine, crème fraiche or Greek yoghurt is good, pesto works as well – or any combination of any of these. And you can make lots of sarmas while you’re at it and freeze them. They still taste great.
With thanks to Julia Langdon