Cabbage rolls: Not bad, but not sure if they're worth the effort

Today, we are risking an explosion!

Cabbage Rolls 1 large head cabbage 2 pounds lean ground meat 2 (10½-oz each) cans tomato soup 1¼ cup water       Filling: 2 tsp salt ½ tsp pepper other seasonings to taste ¼ cup finely chopped onion 2 cups cooked rice 2 eggs Place the whole cabbage in the freezer. Leave it for a day or two, then thaw. This softens the leaves so you can work with them. Carefully peel off the leaves. Cut off any pieces of the cabbage core that stay on them. Mix the filling ingredients, adding other seasonings if desired. Place a portion of the meat on each cabbage leaf. Roll it up like an eggroll or a burrito. Then put the cabbage rolls on a rack in a pressure cooker. (You can stack them on each other- there's no need to separate them in the pot.) Pour the soup and water over them. Set the cooker to 15 PSI. Cook for 8 minutes, starting the time when the pressure is reached. Then instantly release the pressure (check your cooker's instruction manual to see how). Note 1: If desired, you can assemble the cabbage rolls a day ahead and refrigerate them until you're ready to cook them. Note 2: If desired, you can freeze any unused cabbage leaves for later use. When you use them, be sure to cook them thoroughly since they were in such close contact with raw meat. But really, they will be mushy and bitter after getting frozen and thawed twice. So you might just discreetly let the trash collectors take them away instead unless you have chickens in the yard.Carmella Oszterling

This comes from my ex's Italian grandmother's recipes. I'm not sure if it's actually Italian or if she copied it out of a pressure cooker instruction book. I really love the note at the bottom: "Maybe cut this in half." You know a recipe makes a lot when someone's Italian grandmother writes that perhaps you should make less of it. 

I actually did have these cabbage rolls at my ex's mother's house. I don't remember if I liked them or not. I was too overwhelmed at being presented to the entire extended family to think about the food, even if it was his mother's cooking. But I think that she skipped the pressure cooker and just put them in a Crock Pot. 

However, what should turn up when I was rummaging through the cabinets, but a complete pressure cooker! When I say a complete one, I mean everything. The little rack you're supposed to put in the bottom of it, all the rubber bits, and the weight you're supposed to put on top. And when I flipped it over, I could tell that it had been used a lot.

There were two weights tucked inside it. One of them was worn out.I would love to know how long that took.

I didn't trust the pressure cooker. I've heard too many stories about pressure cookers exploding. Also, I didn't know how the heck to use it. I found the instruction manual online, and also a lot of videos of people. Most of the people showing how to use a pressure cooker talked about canning. It seems like the microwave superseded the pressure cooker (until the Instant Pot arrived) for everything except home canning.

With that in mind, I had to test two things. First, would this thing explode? And if it didn't, would it hold pressure? I don't know how old it is, how worn out it is, or any of that. I decided to take this outside so I wouldn't have to clean the entire kitchen in the event of catastrophic failure.

The grill burner is nearly useless for cooking purposes and leaves horrible soot on every pot, but it came in handy tonight. 

I was afraid to get near the cooker. After all, it could blow at any second. While I paced in the yard at what I hoped was a safe distance, that little weight that's supposed to start wobbling refused to move. The whole apparatus hissed a lot, which might be how it's supposed to work but made me even more afraid to get near it. Was some rubber bit just old enough to lose its grip and leak? Was I supposed to give the weight a starting nudge?

Eventually, the little weight started rocking, which apparently means that this thing still holds pressure. Having proven that the cooker worked, I turned off the burner below it and left it for a few hours. I didn't want to touch it until it got completely cold in case it blew up in my hands.

When I brought it in, I removed the foil from below and was so glad I used it. Look at that horrible soot!

And now, it was time to actually make food-- or so I thought. The instructions begin with "Pour boiling water over leaves. Let stand for 5 minutes." But I couldn't even get to that point.  It turns out that cabbage leaves are nearly impossible to peel off intact. The first ones fell right off, giving me false hope.

But after this early success, the rest of them ripped apart as soon as I tried to get them off the cabbage head. This is one of the more intact ones.

 

Also, our leaves (intact or not) were hopelessly rigid. As the directions say, I poured boiling water over them and waited five minutes. That made no difference. I then decided to turn on the burner under the few leaves, at which point I discovered that boiling cabbage smells awful.The whole house reeked, and the leaves were as unrollable as ever.

We've cooked a fair amount of cabbage here at A Book of Cookrye, but I've never boiled it before. Or at least, not for longer than a few brief minutes. I therefore have never deliberately caused such a horrible stink on the stove. The whole house smelled like "You're not getting up from this table until you eat your vegetables."

I've never flunked out of a recipe at the first sentence, but I couldn't handle any more explosive cookers or foul-smelling and uncooperative cabbage. I almost felt someone gently putting their hand on my shoulder and gently saying "Now is not the time. That's enough for tonight." We had figured out how to get the cooker to pressurize, we had the filling made, and that was enough. We could let all our progress wait in the freezer.

Now, I don't remember where I read this, but apparently you can soften vegetables by freezing them. I think it was some listicle of cooking hacks. It seemed obvious enough-- frozen vegetables are always mushy when you thaw them. So I just dropped the entire cabbage into the chest freezer until I was mentally ready for cabbage rolls.

A while later, I decided the time was right to load the pressure cooker with cabbage. Also, everyone else was away from the house. I wouldn't have to field any complaints about the stink. In utter ignorance of the smell to come, I put the frozen cabbage in a bowl and left it uncovered in the refrigerator. We don't have any cabbage-sized containers anyway. 

The cabbage started to smell overcooked as soon as it thawed. Seriously, my nose thought I had boiled it all day. I thought that cabbage only smelled bad if you cooked it too long, but apparently freezing it releases the stench too. And here I thought it was something that happened as the heat broke everything down.  The refrigerator reeked within a few hours. Shortly thereafter, the cabbage smell crept into the kitchen. By nightfall, a faint yet persistent odor greeted me every time I came in from outside. I began to dread the others getting home a day early.

The next day, the cabbage had finished thawing and the whole house smelled like it. Nevertheless, I could peel the leaves off perfectly intact as long as I was careful about it. Look at this lovely pile of leaf skins, ready to receive the cabbage!

Now, each of these leaves had a big, fibrous vein in the center. I didn't know if it would cook soft or not, but I didn't want to eat extra-fibrous almost-woody cabbage rolls. So I carefully shaved off the excess vein. (Once again, let me remind everyone to keep your kitchen knives sharp!)

And now, it was time to make the cabbage rolls! After all our long preparation, this was almost insultingly fast.

Soon, we had a whole container of cabbage rolls ready for the pressure cooker. This seemed like a lot of fuss, but keep in mind that we have stretched the heck out of our beef. There's only one pound of meat in this whole container. Perhaps the extra effort makes sense when you have to feed a whole family with no budget. 

As suppertime approached, I had to face the pressure cooker. This time I had to do it indoors and with a lot of grocery money in it waiting to blow up. 

The recipe calls for two 10½ ounce cans of tomato soup. I was absolutely astonished to find that tomato soup cans haven't shrunk at all in the decades since this recipe was written down.

Well, this is the moment that took so long to get to!

Reminder: this is only one pound of meat.

Actually, I didn't want to cook a massive pot of cabbage in canned tomato soup. So, I went off-book and added a can of blenderized tomatoes. It didn't make much of a difference, but at the time it seemed like it might. 

Thar she blows!

Now, the recipe claims that we should only cook these for eight minutes. At first I thought that was preposterously short for how much raw meat and everything else was in the pot. But the cooker's handle has a handy guide which had some insanely short cooking times. You can allegedly cook rice in five minutes. Even microwaves aren't that fast.  

Eight minutes after the top started to gently rock back and forth, I turned off the stove and prepared to unveil our dinner. This brings me to something I didn't realize about pressure cookers until too late: You can't take a peek at your food. Nor can you give it a quick stir to prevent anything from burning at the bottom. You have to stop the cooking entirely, depressurize the pot, and then reseal and repressurize it if you need to cook things a bit longer.

Grievances aside, the cooker worked exactly as advertised. By the time eight minutes had elapsed, these looked like they'd been cooking all day.

All right, so they're limp and nearly gray. And the semi-congealed tomato on top is not helping. But they actually didn't look so bad once we got them onto a plate.

I honestly don't get the point of wrapping these in cabbage leaves. You can't just eat them like you would egg rolls or burritos. No matter how skilled you are with cutlery, you end up with a slimy heap of leaves on the plate and a brown log of meat.

Maybe I'm not very traditional but I would sooner just make a casserole of all of this. But with that said, I do like getting meat, rice, and greens in one easy portion that you can just lift out of the pot with a pair of tongs. And the meat itself was incredibly tender, like it had been simmering all day.

I do think these needed more seasoning though. I saw a few variations where you add cheese and other things to the meat, which I think would improve it. But even though these were a bit bland, I was very glad the leftovers were waiting for me.