Authentic Polish Cabbage Rolls by my Grandma's Recipe | Polish Gołąbki | Cooking Polish Food

hello my hungry friends today we're making polish cabbage rolls [Applause] [Music] hi friends welcome back to my channel my name is anna and i'm with post your kitchen today we're going to be eating capusta as you can see and i'll be making a wompki uh gawamki are a polish dish called cabbage rolls and i'm using a cabbage a young cabbage as we are in season and as you can see uh the young cabbage looks a little bit different from [Music] cabbage from last season because it's got nice big leaves and it's dark green and it's fresh and crunchy and delicious so we are going to be making baked go on today and i know there's somewhat of a feud going on between whether you're supposed to bake them or boil them and in my family we it split actually half and half my dead side of the family always baked them and my mom's side of the family always boiled them so whether it's right or wrong i wouldn't say either way the right way to do them is to make them and eat them whether you bake them or boil them who cares right they have to get cooked so as i said i'm going to bake mine today and we're going to start by preparing our cabbage to prepare our cabbage we're going to cut the core out of our cabbage to let the leaves kind of separate a little bit and we're going to blanch the leaves in hot water uh to make them a little bit softer and pliable to put our filling in so get yourself a good sharp knife and be careful so it doesn't slip some of these outer leaves are a little damaged as you can see which we don't mind because we're going to be using those also we're going to use them to cover our gawamki our cabbage rolls while they're baking so we want to keep those so i'm going to go and what you want to do is actually to make this little easier we can cut away some of these stems that are just sticking out and the core on the younger cabbage is a little bit smaller it seems so i'm going to cut away this big leaf oh and see it's dirty still got to wash them which we can do as we go along and then we are going to go in deep probably smaller knife just outside the car and we don't have to go all the way through the cabbage just enough to make the outer leaves a little bit looser because those are the ones we're going to be using so i'm just puncturing kind of making punctures around the core to loosen it up and if i can i will remove it there we go and here's our gump if you've seen our latest video about cabbage fried cabbage capostosa i talked about what this thing is called in polish and if you care to find out search for that video and you will know too so i'm going to give this a rinse just to get some of the sand out and we'll continue before we continue let's talk about ingredients we're going to be using ground meat and i most of the time i use pork and beef and that's what was normally traditionally used uh half and half uh i like to sometimes use turkey so you can do a half beef and half turkey or you can do turkey 100 turkey so i'm using turkey today and i have one pound and we're using about two and a half cups of cooked rice and i've prepared that ahead of time and we have one head of cabbage we have some coffee but that's not going in into the dish i'm just drinking it and when we have salt and pepper and we're going to use two onions that have been sauteed in butter and to for baking or for if you were to boil you would also need that some broth you can do beef you can do vegetable you can do chicken i actually have some chicken stock from soup i made yesterday so i'm gonna be using that it's nice and flavorful it's gonna add a little bit of flavor to our dish so if you if you have that use that you can easily also use water but the more flavor you you in ingest no in inject into your dish the more flavor it's going to deliver so food is flavor let's make it taste wonderful so my cabbage is clean and i have water heating on my stove i'm gonna bring it up to boil to blanch our cabbage i've brought my water to boil and i have this big seven and a half liter pot so that's about seven quarts and i have it filled halfway because when i drop the cabbage in i don't want the water to go over and get burnt so be careful when doing this uh the water came up to boil i turned it down halfway and i'm gonna put it in now core down just be very very careful so the water doesn't come up and burn you and there we go so that's in and the leaves are gonna uh get a little bit softer as the water comes up to boil again and i uh like i said before the idea is to uh soften the leaves so we're able to make the rolls in in a little while and make the filling if you want to come and take a look at it the water came up to about three quarters and these outer leaves are already getting a little softer so i'm just gonna give them a little bath for a couple minutes and maybe turn it up a little bit and then as the leaves on the head soften i'm going to pull them one by one that's why we cut out the core so we can pull the leaves one by one as they cook and then use them for rolling otherwise if you just put the whole head in there the outer leaves would be cooked and mushy or really soft and it would never get uh the water would never get to the inside of the cabbage so this is a little process that you have to go through and just give it a couple minutes to to soften and these outer leaves are already getting soft see they're becoming nice and dark green beautiful color we're gonna try to keep the leaves undamaged if possible so our filling so the hose the holes so the leaves don't have holes in them and the filling goes in it doesn't just spill out and you're gonna go one by one and just judge each leaf as it comes away from your cabbage just be super super careful my water is bubbling more and more and leaves are coming away on their own so i'm just as they do i'm just going to take them off you want to take a look closer and as you can see the core is still a little bit hard but we're going to cut this away but these are kind of limp that's what we want so as as i said as they come away i'm just taking them out and putting them on my tray here and then next one comes off i'm gonna give it a little bit of time be really super careful with your hands there we go next one they're super big too we're gonna make our gown delish delicious and fresh and i'm going to give this a little bit more look at our gorgeous huge leaves my water is boiling now so it's going to be easier and easier for the leaves to come apart and do we want to use the whole cabbage it's probably not going to happen because as we go deeper into the head the leaves are a little bit more crinkled and crunched up in there so it's not gonna we're not gonna be able to but we're gonna try to take off all the leaves uh in as many as possible so we can use some for the um the outside of the for covering the gompi while they're boiling or whatever baking and use as many to make rolls [Music] do we have our mountain of cabbage ready so we're gonna prepare the filling now i have as mentioned before i'm using ground meat today and i have a pound in here i have two onions that have been sauteed in bunch of butter so i'm adding that down into my bowl and you can find my recipe at polishyourkitchen.com and i'll also post a link underneath this uh video in the description so you can just click on it and check it out so here goes the onion and now i'm gonna add two and a half cups of rice you can do uh any rice that you want you can do white or what white or brown rice if you'd like that's one cup i have to count one and a half two and two and a half so that don't lose track uh just boil your rice half the time um of the instructions on the package because they're gonna be baked in the oven for a while yet so the rice will have time to to cook some more um and then we have about half a teaspoon of salt uh pepper i like mine freshly ground and i like mine a little bit more spicy so if you like yours a little bit more spice you can add a little bit more too and i'm going to add a teaspoon of salt and that goes in and now we just have to mix this all together and someone asked me recently if i use cooked meat for gowonky and i don't because that's not how you make gowonky they are made from raw meat so i don't know why anyone want to do that this recipe is kind of rich in rice you can adjust it if you'd like uh two and a half cups once i mix this i'll show you how this looks like um but the idea in polish cooking is to kind of stretch your food and by adding bunch of rice it makes a lot more filling and it takes your meat further if you would because then you don't need as much and as we know meat is more expensive than rice so feel free to adjust as as you see fit um but to me this is pretty good combo it's got rice and it's got meat and it's not one is not over powering the other it seems a like a good balance to me and now the name gowonky if you know polish means pigeons so if we're making roasted gowonky in polish piercona gowonky we're making roasted pigeons they're not pigeons they're just cabbage rolls but that's that's what the name comes from or not not not where it comes from that's what the name means i thought that was kind of funny okay so my our filling is ready our mountain of cabbage is ready we are gonna get to rolling now so for our bottom layer i'm gonna use the leaves the holy leaves like this one and we're gonna just lay them out on the bottom and our cabbage rolls are gonna sit on top this one is a little holy so this one's gonna go in and these are kind of big so i won't need a whole lot just like this if you're using a metal pan i suggest you do this also this will protect our gowonky from burning to the bottom and there'll be more food because you can obviously eat those i like these big giant green guys and i think i'm going to cut this guy a little bit like just this part down here because i need a smaller guy and there we go our bottom is ready so now we go to shopping and i'm going to start with these little a little smaller guys but it doesn't really matter so uh every leaf is going to have this this uh spine i guess you call it that may be a little bit harder and if yours is a little too tough you can kind of gently try not to damage the leaves around it just cut away a portion of it just so it becomes softer and thinner for rolling and we're gonna put the leaf with the spine to you and depending kind of on the size of your uh of your leaf we're gonna place a little bit of meat and rice mixture in in your leaf and also kind of keep in mind uh how big you want the serving to be if you're serving for people who just like big portions or they they're just gonna eat one and they're going to be full so that kind of is personal you can decide how you want to do that and then to roll them if you want to come closer and look i'm going to first roll is gonna be just to cover the meat and then we're gonna come in with the sides and this is gonna leave nice and nice nice space to go one more cover and the gownback one go one bag will sit on top of the of the crease and there we go one down and this seems to have a little bit thicker spinal so some cutting away a little bit and we keep rolling in my home we always ate not always but our favorite way to eat those was to eat them with tomato sauce and our tomato sauce was always made separately the gawomky wouldn't cook in the tomato sauce and that is the way i prefer to make them too for a couple of reasons i feel i have a little bit more control over how much sauce goes in them well maybe a little bit too much and and i can just then douse my gawambek in as much sauce as i like and i like them pretty saucy so they will cook in broth and as i mentioned before i have chicken broth here so we will place these in once the our pan is full we will put a little bit of juice in there because the rice is going to require a little bit more juice and the cabbage will also produce a little bit more juice but if we were to put tomato sauce over this it gets too much into the creases i feel and i just like having it separately so once we once this goes in the oven we're gonna make our tomato sauce uh i will also post a link to my tomato sauce in the description of this video so feel free to check it out and see if if that's what you like to do another way of enjoying these is with mushroom sauce and it not necessarily has to be a wild mushroom sauce it could be button mushrooms or whatever mushrooms are available at your store you can i will also post a link to my mushroom sauce in the description and they would cook the same way you would then once our gowonky are cooked you would just put whatever sauce you like on top and we are we would always eat our gawamki with with potatoes just because we're potato potato country so it would be gawamke with sauce and gawomky potatoes and then a bunch of sauce on top of it i just that's my favorite way of enjoying this but this is a meal on its own with the rice and the meat and the you can just eat it with bread or with nothing and it would also be just fine [Music] so my pan fits three rows and some of them are a little bigger some of them a little bit smaller and you can then serve to your friends or your family either bigger ones or smaller ones this this pan is going to fit 12 enough for a party enough for a gathering one one meal you don't have to fuss around just make one serve it and everybody can sit around the table enjoy without spending too much time in the kitchen and they seem to be a lot of work but once you have the cabbage leaves taken off taken off the head it's really not that not that time consuming just make sure your leaves are soft enough because when you roll these now on the board if they're not soft enough they'll break on you so when you're pulling them out of your pot make sure they're nicely blanched you can get your kids in the kitchen they would i'm sure they would like getting dirty this is kind of hands-on nice cooking with family and then they will be most likely to eat it later if they've made it let's see we're almost running out of leaves i have this big one and so i have room for two more and i have meat for about two more so that's gonna work out nicely for us and roll fold and roll perfect 12 even not pierogi see i don't even know what i'm saying anymore let's see i have quite a bit this one's kind of holy but it's big so i know i have enough to fit that in there there we go perfect that one seems okay oh we have an explosion i mean explosion see that's why we don't want to use the holy ones this one's not holy let's cut this spine i was trying to escape i was trying to escape to america there we go i love how this young cabbage how nice and dark it is and look at these colors don't you just want to eat it right away well you can't because it's not ready yet okay i'm just gonna wipe my hands here okay so i have the broth here and as i was saying before you can use a homemade chicken stock or you can do a boxed broth either beef or chicken or vegetable whatever your preference is so we have our chicken stock or beef broth or our vegetable stock here and i'm just gonna pour it over mine is nice and fatty i made it at home yesterday and i'm just gonna it's gonna take about a quart so about a liter and they're not going to be completely submerged but it's going to give them enough flavor or enough moisture to kind of keep them cooking in there and this is how my grandma my dad's mom always did it too she always had stock on hand and if we were just to put these in the oven like this they the cabbage would dry out and we don't want to have that and it could burn on top so key is to take these holy guys and just lay them out evenly on top enough to cover all of your friends in there we don't want them burning we don't want all this work to go to waste and then these the cabbage pieces are also edible later edible later so they will protect their their our insurance policy for a gowonky so even if they burn we don't really care this is poland's aluminum foil original there we go they are ready to go i'm going to pop this in the oven at 180 and we want them to go for about 45 minutes to an hour at 45 minutes i'm just gonna stick a fork in there and see if the cabbage rolls are nice and soft meat will be cooked by then for sure but if the cabbage rolls are not cooked yet then you can cook them for a little bit longer do you have a question a question what's 180 in imperial american dog a 180 good question is 360 american fahrenheit not american fan height 180 celsius 360 uh fahrenheit good question i've switched to polish measurements since we moved here to poland so good question thank you for pointing that out all right this will be in the oven uh and once that's while that's cooking we'll made our we'll make our tomato sauce uh and the recipe that i'm posting the link to below this video is you're gonna have to double that to match this the size of our of our dish today so i have two 14 and a half ounce cans of stewed tomatoes whole or diced or whatever you have at home in my blender and to it i'm gonna add one teaspoon of salt and i'm gonna add a little bit of pepper but kind of think about if kids are eating this if you want to make it too spicy or not i like mine pretty spicy and then i'm gonna do almost just a little bit shy of half a cup of tomato paste i'm gonna pop that in we're gonna use our blender today to make it easier for us and make this nice and smooth and then our polish spice trinity is going no not to this what am i doing that is it for our blender i've almost put that in there and we're going to blend this for just 5 seconds [Applause] 10 seconds we just want the tomatoes to not be chunky and we're going to put this in our pot these are nice and smooth we don't have any lumps and this will simmer on our stove until it reduces a little bit um our gowonky have another 20 minutes or so so that's probably a good time to to make this and they'll both be done at the same time and to this i'm gonna add three cups of chicken vegetable or beef broth your preference whatever you have on hand that's two and as i mentioned before i like a lot of sauce on my galumpki so i'm making a double batch and so there's enough for 12 of gowonky that i have in the oven and to this we're gonna add our spice trinity i have bay leaves dried i want to pop pretty three in here but it's enough i have allspice berries whole just kind of whatever you grab i have three six eight in here and uh pepper ground pepper also whole i have i don't know probably close to ten this will give nice flavor to our uh sauce so i think this is it uh once i'm gonna put this on it on the stove i'm gonna bring this uh to boil then i'll turn it down and have it just slightly simmering uncovered because i want the liquid to evaporate a little bit and make the sauce a little bit more potent what's the word we want our sausage and then we'll finish it off with some butter and cream so i'll meet you back in about 20 minutes our tomato sauce is done it was on our stove for about 20 minutes at the end i added butter and heavy cream and again uh link to my recipes post in the description so you can go ahead and check that out i doubled the recipe for to match the amount of argon key those were baking for 45 minutes the cabbage on top did its job it's it protected our our rolls from being burnt and our cabbage rolls are nice and done you can save these if you'd like or you can just discard them and i like to serve it separately i would put this on my on my table and then put the sauce separately so whoever is being served can take as much as you want i need to get a searing plate so we are going to take a look at argo wookie what's happening on the inside i'm gonna take one and there's still a lot of moisture in them they're deliciously soft i'm gonna pour a little bit of sauce on top you could do a little bit of potatoes on the side if you wanted to or just eat them like this our sauce is a little bit watery it could have gone a little bit longer i think just be the judge be the cook at home like you are be the chef and pass judgments cut these in half my cabbage is really soft as you can see the meat is cooked on the inside oh the smell [Music] this is taking me to my grandma's kitchen be super careful these are lava lava they smell gorgeous um i'm in heaven the cabbage is soft it's got tiny bit of crunch in it but not to a point where it's not done but this this recipe is just perfect for this amount of calories this amount of meat prepare this for your family check out publisherkitchen.com um enjoy gowonky share this polish heritage with your family and come back cook with us again thanks for watching thanks for tasting thanks for being here and your support smart lego enjoy and see you next time you

Channel: Polish Your Kitchen

Views: 16,348

Rating: 4.9222798 out of 5

Keywords: Cabbage rolls, Cabbage, gołąbki, stuffed cabbage, Polish, Polish food, Polish cooking, Polish recipe, Cooking, cook, recipe, Authentic, REal, Polish kitchen

Id: DAwdqj9-mME

Length: 33min 1sec (1981 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021