Sarmale - The absolute essence of Romania

Sarmale is pretty well the national dish of Romania. You find them everywhere. No party or wedding celebration is complete without them and traditional restaurants keep their recipes as secret as the pepsi formular.

On my last trip I was shown how to make them by an expert. She has made 500 or more in one session for family celebrations like weddings. A wedding party there is expected to last 15 hours or more and much beer and tuica will be consumed so it is important to have the correct food to line your stomach.

The ingredients are simple, Salted cabbage leaves, pork, rice, onions and seasoning.

First the cabbage. Romanian white cabbages are huge. I mean massive. And in about October or November they are plentiful and that is the season to pickle them. They are put in plastic food containers with brine and mustard seeds and left for at least 6 months. If you don't get around to pickling your own, they are available from the supermarkets.

I think it is fair to say they have a distinctive smell and flavour. Definitely not zuurkool or saurkraut. And not the chinese suan cai.

The meat is usually pork but pink veal is used on occasion too. This was bought from the supermarket, where they have an industrial sized mincer and they will mince any cut you like. I didn't recognise the bits that went into the mincer but as you can see it is quite fatty and dark. The pork there puts the palid english supermarket pork to shame.

All good recipes start with "Chop some onions. This is no different. Three decent sized onions and a clove of garlic chopped together and fried slowly in plenty of oil. They should not brown or even go golden.








While the onions are frying wash the rice. Naturally there is a special rice. It has extremely small short grain rice. Any short grain rice will do but this is the best. You are aiming to have about 1/3 rice and onion mix to meat.






 The rice goes in with the onions for 10 minutes with some boia dulce. The nearest thing we get in England is probably paprika. It is not at all hot and quite delicately flavoured. And some very fine black pepper





 The rice and onions are added to the pork and then you get your hands dirty mixing them in. With some thyme. I'm told they are simply not sarmale without the thyme.

The mixing takes a while and the mixture needs to be cohesive and homogenous.





 The cabbage leaves are prepared by cutting out the hard stems to leave nice flexible wrappers. The bits you cut out are not discarded. You will need them later. In a token gesture to remove some of the massive salt content the leaves are soaked for a few minutes and squeezed dry.

The rolling is a bit of an art. They have to be tight and the ends have to be tucked in neatly to make sure they don't unroll during the cooking. There might be pictures of me doing it. I'm not saying.

Mine were odd sizes and shapes but when my instructor did them they all turned out like peas in a pod.

Now they can put in the pan, but first the pieces of cabbage that did not make it into the wrapping are placed as a bed and the sarmale arranged on it. A few peices of kaiser ham go in too, with a bit more thyme.

 To finish they get a blanket too of some leaves that were to hard to roll.








Then they are covered in water. I'm told the pump water is much better than that from the tap. To stop them unrolling a weight is put on top







The cooking takes a couple of hours and the sauce is finished with a little tomato puree While you wait you might want to have a bottle of Hungarian prosecco ready chilled.

After cooking the sarmale are served with mamaliga (polenta) and smantana (imposible to say properly for English mouths as is has two nasal vowels) but it is the very mild sour cream that goes with just about everything.

5 per person is a fairly good meal with all the accompaniments. I lost track of how many I ate. I finished when I had trouble standing up...but that may have been the palinka too.