Sarma

Sarma is a popular Balkan entree which is made by stuffing, rolling, and cooking sour cabbage leaves. It’s a traditional meal served during winter festival holidays, such as Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. Sarma is also a traditional meal served at weddings.

Kemal and I don’t wait for special occasions to fix sarma. We love eating it anytime, but later today when our friends arrive for Christmas dinner, we will be serving sarma as our main dish, accompanied by homemade garlic mashed potatoes.

Last night on Christmas Eve after we got off work, we spent five hours cooking. Kemal made the sarma and mashed potatoes while I made the Rokada cake which we’ll be having for dessert. This morning I will make two loaves of Challah bread. The cooking we do at home is so enjoyable and fun, in contrast to the frenzied and chaotic cooking we have to do at work.

When we’re cooking at home, we’re singing, humming, laughing, chatting, and enjoying ourselves. Kemal once told me, “When I’m cooking, I talk a lot. I’m a chatterbox because I’m in my element.” I’m the same way.

I’m hardly waiting for this wonderful dinner with our friends which we’ll enjoy around 11 p.m. tonight. Sarma is one of our favorite meals, and the leftovers are actually even better because all the juices soak into the cabbage, making it even tastier.

Anyway, before you make sarma, you need some sour cabbage leaves. You might be able to find a jar of it at an Eastern European grocery store, but if you can’t purchase it, you’ll need to make it. Making sour cabbage (sauerkraut) does take some time. It takes about about 4 to 6 weeks to make it, and it needs to be made during cold weather. Kemal and I have made our own sour cabbage in the winter, and we really love how it tastes.

If you really want to try the recipe though and don’t want to have to wait on souring your own cabbage and can’t find a jar of it in a middle Eastern grocery store, then there is an alternative method to sour your cabbage. It’s not exactly authentic sour cabbage, but perhaps it’ll be close enough. You can find that alternative way to sour cabbage on the link I posted in the previous paragraph.

Sarma

Ingredients:

• 14 sour cabbage leaves (about 32 ounces)
• 1 lb. ground meat (we used ground beef, but you can use ground buffalo, lamb, or veal)
• 20 baby carrots, diced finely
• 2 onions, diced
• 7 or 8 cloves garlic, diced
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2/3 cup rice (uncooked)
• Vegeta
• black pepper
• dried red pepper flakes
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2/3 cup tomato paste
• 1 tbsp. parsley
• Optional: panko bread crumbs
• Optional: mint

Note: If you don’t want to use these particular seasonings, you can substitute with whatever seasonings you like. I didn’t put amounts on most of the seasonings because we normally don’t measure them. If you’re not sure, use less seasonings and then add more salt and pepper later. Sometimes Kemal makes sarma with mint but he didn’t this time. We did, however, garnish the top of the sarma with some dried mint that we sprinkled on top.

Instructions:

• Dice all the vegetables.
• Grease your baking dish with olive oil. We used a dutch oven.
• Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
• In a large mixing bowl, mix together all the vegetables with the raw meat, egg, uncooked rice, Vegeta, black pepper, and dried red pepper flakes.
• If your mix is too runny, add some Panko bread crumbs or mashed potato flakes. You want the mixture to be the consistency of a meat mixture that can be used for meat balls or meatloaf.
• When you get the filling to the right consistency, take some of it and stuff it into a cabbage leaf. Then roll it up so the cabbage leaf will hold all of the filling.
• Do this until you’ve either rolled all the cabbage leaves or until you run out of filling. If you have leftover filling like we did, you can freeze it and use it the next time you make it.
• Place all the stuffed and rolled cabbage leaves in your baking dish.
• Now you will make the sauce for the sarma. That’s easy to do. Just mix the tomato paste, water, and parsley together and then pour it over all the little stuffed cabbage leaves. If you want your sauce to be “saucier,” you can open up a can of petite diced tomatoes and pour that over the outside of the sarma in addition to the sauce you just made.
• Cover and bake for about 2 hours. The meat and rice will cook in the oven.