Brandenburg Stuffed Cabbage / Brandenburger Kohlrouladen

I wasn't impressed. I knew it would be a lot of work - blanch the cabbage and carefully remove the leaves, make a filling, stuff the cabbage leaves, then braise the whole thing - it took me three hours from start to end. Unfortunately, though, the result wasn't as comforting as I hoped it would be - actually, I didn't even find it tasting nice, let alone delicious.

It was partly my mistake, too - instead of 2 tbsp of coarse rye bread croutons, I used one whole slice (about 4 tbsp), and I found that taste to be surprisingly strong (too strong). I also also used crumbs instead of croutons, which was probably a good idea.

But I also had a few problems with the recipe instructions. First, they tell you nowhere how to remove the cabbage stalk. Do you need to halve the cabbage first? Probably not. Should you perhaps remove the cabbage leaves one by one? I tried that and had a success rate of 1:3, meaning small vs large tears - not good. Finally, I just used a small knife and poked around so long until the stalk came out bit by bit in pieces the size of a finely chopped onion. If you have a melon ball spoon, try that, it'll probably help. I also blanched the cabbage for 40 min, as after 20 min it still seemed quite difficult to remove the leaves. My guess is that you really need to remove the whole stalk, as the boiling/simmering water can then penetrate in between the leaves and soften them up.

Then, the bacon cubes. Judging from where they appear in the list of ingredents, you'd expect them to be part of the stuffing, but they're not mentioned in the instructions at all. I just left them out (I only realized once I had neatly parceled my cabbage leaves anyway). I also only used half the bacon slices, as that already completely covered the bottom of my pan.

Finally, when the dish was done braising, the sauce was way more liquid than I had expected. I reduced it quite a bit, then added the sour cream expecting that would additionally thicken the sauce, but it did not. It also looked like the sauce and the sour cream had separated, which of course didn't help either. I omitted the paprika, I thought that was superfluous. Also, although the parcels had been braised in the sauce for an whole hour, I was surprised to find that the stuffing hadn't taken on any flavours of the sauce at all.

Edited two days later: This dish serves about 5-6 (I always had one parcel, DH had two, if possible, and you'll be making eight of them).

Looking back, using more bacon would have been a good idea; we had the leftovers yesterday and tonight, and both times I fried a few bacon cubes before adding the cabbage and sauce to the pan. To my surprise, DH said he hadn't noticed the rye bread flavour until I told him, and once he paid attention to it, he actually quite liked it.

I was also thinking whether using less stock and adding another can of tomatoes instead might be a good idea - it looked like too little sauce, but in the end it was just enough. We served it with rice, although potatoes would have been the more traditional choice.