Despite the fact that the stew comes from French cuisine, this dish has a lot of analogues in the cuisines of different countries. One of the most popular types of stew is vegetable: tasty, juicy, fragrant. But if you add meat to it, and especially smoked meat, the dish immediately becomes more satisfying and acquires a unique aroma.
Today I am sharing a simple stew recipe made from a versatile vegetable - cabbage, which is suitable for many dishes in a variety of ways. Stewed cabbage is truly a royal dish. By varying different spices and additional ingredients, truly culinary masterpieces are always obtained.
You can stew not only fresh cabbage, but also sauerkraut. In any case, the dish will fill our body with useful vitamins and minerals, and with a minimum calorie content: 100 grams of stewed cabbage contains 100 kcal. If you decide to cook sauerkraut, it is first sorted out and large pieces are chopped to the same size. Sauerkraut, washed with water, but then a lot of vitamin C will be removed from it along with the water. In this case, it is recommended to use medium acid cabbage to avoid soaking or washing. You can also balance the acid levels by adding a teaspoon of granulated sugar to the saucepan.
Read our article on the benefits of cabbage
Tricks and subtleties of stewing cabbage
- It is better to add salt to cabbage not immediately, but about 15 minutes before it is ready.
- To make the dish have a pleasantly sweet and sour taste, a spoonful of sugar and 9% table vinegar are added 8 minutes before the end of cooking. Only sugar is added to sauerkraut, it perfectly balances the taste and softens the sourness.
- To get a dish with the least amount of calories, cabbage, instead of frying in oil, is immediately stewed with the addition of hot water. To increase the calorie content and satiety of the dish, on the contrary, add meat broth or butter.
- When choosing sunflower oil, it is advisable to give preference to unrefined, then the cabbage will turn out to be tastier.
- For those who cannot stand the smell of stewed cabbage, put a large piece of stale bread in a container in which it is prepared. It will relieve the dish of unpleasant odors. Remove the softened bread with a slotted spoon before finishing cooking.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 100 kcal.
- Servings - 4
- Cooking time - 2 hours
Ingredients:
- Cabbage - 1 kg
- Carrots - 2 pcs. medium size
- Sweet red pepper - 1-2 pcs.
- Smoked chicken leg - 2 pcs.
- Tomato paste - 2-3 tablespoons
- Bay leaf - 3 pcs.
- Dried celery root - 1 tsp
- Allspice peas - 5 pcs.
- Salt to taste
- Ground black pepper - to taste
- Vegetable or other oil - for frying
Cooking smoked vegetable stew
1. Rinse the cabbage under running water, remove the top tough leaves, as they are usually green. If the head is large, cut it into pieces, chop them finely into strips or cubes, and remove the stalk. Which is more correct with straws or cubes? - you choose. It's just that depending on the size of the cabbage slices, there will be different stewing times, and the dish will look different.
2. Heat a frying pan with oil and put the cabbage to fry.
3. Peel, rinse and chop the carrots. Remove seeds from bell peppers, wash and also chop. The method for cutting vegetables should be the same. That is, if the cabbage is chopped into strips, then the carrots with pepper are also cut into strips. Likewise, in the case of choosing the type of cutting - into cubes.
4. Send chopped vegetables to fry with cabbage.
5. Wash the smoked chicken leg, because it is not known where it was lying, and with what hands it was taken. Wipe it off with a paper towel and cut the meat off the bone, cutting it into medium sized pieces. I recommend not to throw away the bone, but to cook the soup in smoked broth.
6. When the vegetables are a little fried, place the pieces of meat on top of them.
7. Season the dish with ground black pepper, add bay leaves, peppercorns, dried celery root. Pour in some hot water and add tomato paste. Mix everything well, cover the pan with a lid, reduce heat to low and leave the dish to simmer for 1 hour. 15 minutes before cooking, adjust the taste of the dish with salt.
8. The finished dish can be served as a side dish, both with boiled potatoes and with cereals, rice or spaghetti. Also stewed cabbage can be used for filling dumplings, pies and pies. At the end of the article, I want to say that the most important secret of cooking this dish is that cabbage should be stewed with pleasure! Then she will certainly be incomparable!
Video recipe for cooking vegetable stew:
