Stuffed Cabbage Rolls Recipe (Bosnian Sarma)

During these colder days it's good to eat food that provides sustenance. The traditional Bosnian Sarma is one of those dishes. It has many varieties in Eastern Europe too, but the one provided here is my mom's traditional and very simple sour cabbage meat roll recipe. Now It does need to cook for a longer period of time (4 hours), but no action on your part is required during the cooking time.

Ingredients:

- 1-2 heads of sour cabbage (depending on how big or small you make them)

- 1 kg (2 pounds) minced meat

- 1 onion (or 2 spring onions as we used)

- Salt and Pepper

- 1 cup of rice (washed)

- 1 squirt of tomato puree

- water (amount depends on the size of the pot you will be cooking this in, see description)

click on the images for a bigger view

First we will make the mixture. Combine the meat, rice, onion, salt and pepper and mix in a bowl.

Take a small piece of the meat and wrap it in a cabbage leaf, like in the images below.

Make sure to tuck everything in so that the meat mixture doesn't fall out while cooking.

Layer the rolls up in a big pot. Put a couple of cabbage leaves on the bottom of the pot. You can even layer some bacon in between, for some extra flavor.

Put some squirts of tomato puree on top, and cover everything with water. Cook on high heat until everything comes to a boil, then clamp on a lid, reduce the heat to low, and cook for 4 hours until soft.

We like to serve Sarma with mashed potatoes!

I hope you liked today's look at Bosnian cuisine and that you will make this dish yourself, if you haven't already. You can even prepare the rolls and freeze them up and cook them later or in smaller batches.

Tell me in the comments below if you liked this, and if you would like to see more recipes form this corner of the world.