Savoy Cabbage with Pasta / Wirsing-Nudeln vom Blech

Pasta dish made complicated.

I was very curious about this dish - it looked like a very nice, simple way to use savoy cabbage, a vegetable I like and think is eaten way too little. Unfortunately, the recipe had several flaws.

Actually, it's just a very simple pasta dish, topped off with a crust of breadcrumbs. What I find bizarre is that to achieve this, the whole dish goes into the oven - I would have just browned the breadcrumbs in a pan while cooking the pasta. Baking the whole dish doesn't actually add anything extra, except for an extra large baking dish to wash. Alternatively, I would have expected the addition of eggs and cream to make it a casserole.

Another issue I had was that the paprika added to the breadcrumbs in combination with savoy cabbage and the pasta was a bit weird. Not something I didn't like at all, but not something I would choose again either. Savoy cabbage in combination with pasta actually worked quite well. Also, though I didn't use a lot of lemon juice, the sauce tasted very lemony, which didn't work well with the rest.

Then, proportions. For four servings, we used slightly less than 500 g savoy cabbage and just 180 g pasta, which is way less than the recommended 340 g, and that was about just right.

Last, salt. You are asked to add salt four times! You use stock to boil the pasta and the savoy cabbage, and re-use it to make the sauce, you add salt to the butter, to the pasta (just before baking), and to the sauce. I skipped most of these instances, and the dish turned out fine.