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Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.
D’oh!
A reader recently reminded me of this recipe for deeply caramelized cabbage from a few years ago. It triggered my inner Homer because I’d always meant to make the Swedish dish that I’d used as inspiration. So I did, and now I’m mad that I waited so long.
Kålpudding combines the well-cooked cabbage with a mix of ground beef and pork. I first read about it in The New York Times back in 2017, and while the newspaper’s recipe calls it meatloaf, former food editor Sam Sifton wrote that Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson describes it as more of a casserole. But it’s really a deconstructed version of the dolmas that Swedish king Charles XII loved to eat during his exile in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1700s. He brought home some Turkish cooks, but they couldn’t get the grape leaves or rice, so they stuffed cabbage with meat and bread and called them kåldomar (kål, pronounced kohl, means cabbage, and domar comes from dolma).
Part of the simple, traditional Swedish cuisine called husmanskost, kålpudding varies from cook to cook. Some recipes call for rice, a fairly recent addition to the Scandinavian pantry, and some use eggs to bind the ground meat. While most kålpudding recipes stick to cabbage and onions, since it’s meatloaf adjacent I used my polpettone technique and added more vegetables. They get cooked together on the stovetop until they’re very soft and beginning to brown, then they’re layered with the ground meats and baked. It’s not meatloaf, but kålpudding is very tasty and makes a great sandwich the next day.
Recipe
½ head of cabbage, chopped (about 3 cups)
1 leek, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1 small carrot, finely chopped
1 jalapeño, finely chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
½ teaspoon kosher-style sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon ground coriander
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons molasses*
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
½ pound ground beef
½ pound ground pork
½ cup bread crumbs
½ cup cream
1½ tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
½ cup stock or water
*The Swedes use a syrup made from sugar beets, but molasses, cane syrup, Lyle’s golden syrup, Karo corn syrup, or even maple syrup will work.
Use a large skillet to cook the vegetables with the salt, pepper, and coriander in the olive oil over medium high until they begin to color, about 20-30 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the molasses and vinegar.
In a bowl combine the beef, pork, bread crumbs, cream, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.
Add about ⅓ of the cabbage mix to the meat. Spread that in a 8- or 9-inch baking pan or skillet, then top with the rest of the cabbage. Pour the stock over the pan and bake at 350°F until it’s deeply caramelized and very dark, about an hour.
The Swedes traditionally serve kålpudding with lingonberry jam, sometimes mixed with a little vinegar and butter to make a velvety, sweet and sour sauce. But it’s also good with ketchup.
