Stuffed Cabbage (Plnená Kapusta or Holubky)
One of the best things about online publishing is that it’s a great two-way learning street. Not only it allows you to share your knowledge with others, it also allows you to gain new knowledge from the comments and feedback left by the site visitors. What do I mean? Shortly after I started this website, I started getting requests for a recipe for holubky. I had no idea what people were talking about! Despite living in Slovakia for the first 14 years of my life, I had not heard of this dish. To this date, the first, and only time, I actually had this dish was not in Slovakia, but in the US. It was at a Christmas dinner showcasing traditional Slovak dishes, which, well, didn’t seem so traditional to me. So I started to research this mysterious holubky in more detail, and found that it’s a common dish in the eastern part of Slovakia. Slovakia, despite it’s small size, has quite a large variation in traditional dishes from one end to the other. In the central region, where I grew up, it seems that this dish has not caught on as, let’s say, bryndzové halušky or Hungarian goulash, two dishes I grew up with. But, a week ago I visited a local farmer’s market in Falls Church, VA, the town where I live, and found a nice head of cabbage there. I figured the time has come to finally make some stuffed cabbage (plnená kapusta).
Ingredients: one head of cabbage, 2 tbsp of oil or lard, 1 onion, 3 tsp flour, 1 small container of sour cream, paprika
Filling: 0.5lb ground beef, 1tsp oil, rice (half a cup to a cup), water (twice as much as rice), 1 small onion, 1 egg, black pepper, one clove of garlic
Prep Time: 40 minutes
Make the filling and prepare the leaves
Start by cutting out the core from the cabbage (kapusta). Also take an onion (cibuľa), and grate it using a hand grater or a food processor. You will need two onions, one for the filling, and one for the sauce.
Stir the onion on a bit of oil until it foams. Add the rice (ryža). Next add water (twice as much as rice), cover, and cook until the rice is almost done. The recipe called for 1 cup of rice for the half pound of meat, but this made for a mixture bit heavy on the rice. Use less rice if you prefer more meat.
In the meantime, put the cabbage in a pot of hot water and bring to a slow boil. The leaves will start to fall off. Carefully remove the leaves as they come off with a knife. Next cut off the bottom stiffer part so you get a flexible leave that can be rolled. Save all pieces.
Chop the stiffer cut-off pieces into small strips. Fry for few seconds on oil along with a grated onion and paprika. Cover with water and bring to a boil.
Stir in 3 teaspoons of flour (I used Wondra) into the sour cream. Take a small amount of the liquid from the sauce pan, and stir into the sour cream mixture to dilute it. This is better than directly putting the cream in the sauce, as it will keep the cream from lumping up. Stir the diluted cream into the sauce.
Mix the meat, the egg, ground black pepper, salt, and a crushed clove of garlic. Add the cooked rice, and mix together.
Filling cabbage leaves
Start filling the cabbage leaves. Take about a teaspoon of the filling and place it to one side of the leaf. Flip one side over. Ideally, do this diagonally, as if you were making a funnel. This is not shown too well in this set of pictures.
Complete the roll, and finally tuck the end pieces in.
Cook the Holubky
Place the holubky in the sauce and cover with a lid to keep them from coming apart. This may not be really required, since I cooked some separately and they stayed together.
Cook until done, the best way to check is to take one and try it. It cooked mine for about 30 minutes, until the cabbage leaves were nice and soft. By the way, you can also cook the holubky separately. This will give them a cleaner appearance. Enjoy!
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By the way, there are many different recipes for holubky. Some are even made in a tomato sauce. How did your family make this dish?
My Mom cooked them with kraut….but she also made them much larger, and she didn’t pre-cook the filling!!!
Lubos, glad u wrote about holubky, You’re not really Slovak without cooking Holubky! or Kapusta na meso is a different name, U grew up in the center and heart of Slovakia and u never had ate or heard of Holubkie?
Philka
Nope, I guess it wasn’t something my family was found of? I’ve had my share of stuffed peppers (which I love) while growing up, but never any stuffed cabbage. I have not even heard the word “holubky” until I came to the US. Even these days, it’s tough to find this dish in Slovak restaurants. I’ve been keeping my eye open during my latest tour de’Slovakia, and not a single restaurant we visited had stuffed cabbage on the menu. Perhaps times are a-changing?
same here, a lot of stuffed peppers not many stuffed cabage, though my mom made the, especially when we were making sauerkraut and bought a lot of cabbage.
Must be a central Slovakia thing. It looks to me that stuffed cabbage is a dish more popular in estern parts of Slovakia.
God, I love Holubky….My grandparents and Aunts made it different.
But the essence is there. It is genius.
Hello, MY MOTHER USED TO PUT THE BOTTOM RIND FROM A SLAB BACON, ONLY THE BROWN PART. WHEN THIS COOKED SLOW THE SMOKED TASTE WENT ALL THROUGH THE STUFFED CABBAGE. GOOD
I love stuffed cabbage and my mom made the best with saurkraut along with chopped cabbage and tomatoe sauce and slow cooked in oven.
the bacon rind tip is wonderful will have to try myself.
the hispanics from mexico will smoke tamales on outside fire but the bacon rind good idea for indoors cooking of tamale.
my mom used tomato sauce also, very good
I think I make it more the way my grandmothers (Babas) made it. First make the rice with 1/2 packet of onion soup mix. Then mix it with 1/2 pound ground beef, 1/2 pound ground pork and 1/2 pound ground veal with the rice and a bit of tomato juice (not too much, maybe a 1/4 – 1/2 cup). I freeze my heads of cabbage, then cut the core and stick in boiling water until the leaves come loose. I fashion the rolls as above. Then I put them in an oval roaster or crock pot with 32 oz (one can) or more of tomato sauce (not juice). If I bake them in the roaster, it’s for about 2 hours one 350ºF. If in the crock pot, on medium all day.
MMMMMmmmmmm holubky – a staple in our household when I was growing up – made with uncooked filling and tomato sauce – my Baba used to add saurkraut which I do to this day – talk about comfort food! Oh, and my southern mama used to have mashed potatoes as a “side dish” – heaven!!!
In Poland they are called gołąbki and they are usually coked in tomato sauce.
My family uses tomato sauce and doesn’t pre-cook the rice… that part just makes the process easier.
We always make these at Easter!
This looks wonderful! I’ve never had this particular dish, but I love stuffed cabbage (and peppers, and tomatoes, and eggplant…)Very nicely done and excellent, easy to follow directions, too!
We make ours with the sauce being tomato soup. I also put in quite a bit of garlic in my meat mixture. Bake in a 350ºF oven for about an hour. Note: I live in high altitude so that might make a difference in how long it is in the oven.
This looks absolutely delicious. Printed out the recipe and will make this weekend. YUMMY. Thanks for sharing.
☺
Cindy
I honestly never thought about making it without tomato sauce, will have to try this variation!! Also we sometines add some small pieces of cooked bacon to the meat mixture. We simmer the stuffed leaves in seasoned tomato sauce, slowly till done, works great in a crockpot….
My grandmother used a tomato-based sauce…. Delicious!
Your recipe is an interesting variation of the dish I grew up with that was present at every large family gathering and Slovak wedding. Our family recipe uses a beef/pork mixture with less rice, and the addition of tomato sauce or tomato soup instead of the sour cream. Sauerkraut is also used as a bed and between layers of stuffed cabbage, and we bake the fist sized delights covered in the oven or in an electric roaster or crock pot. Having a large family of cousins, the recipies were always compared in “secret”, and the wealthier family members recipies always had more meat and less rice. If there was a butcher in the family, their meat mixture always had more beef than pork and rice!
Thanks for your efforts to keep these wonderful Slovak recipes alive!
My family makes it in tomato puree or juice and toward end of cooking used to make a thickening of flour and oil with a little of tomato juice or water added then add to the whole pot. But in recent years my daughters and I have eliminated the thickening completely and still comes out wonderful. All the filling ingredients are raw including the rice which saves a lot of time. I also use the microwave to cook the cabbage which makes it a lot easier. We sometimes add a small can of kraut also.
My aunts taught us to simmer them in a tomato based sauce and then my Mom (not Slovak) adjusted the recipe and used tomato soup. They didn’t precook the filling. Then one of my cousins added her touch and simmers them in the tomato sauce but adds kraut and sausage. I take from all and do the tomato soup based sauce and add the kraut and sausage. Serve with heaping servings of Mashed potatoes too! Oh yes, here’s a tip from that same cousin. Try freezing the cabbage, then when you thaw, the leaves will be soft and pliable – no standing over a steamy pot to soften the leaves. Yummy!
I make them several times a year — never the same way twice! My mom cooks them in tomato sauce and enough water to cover, but I’ve done them with V-8 juice, tomato soup, one can of Ro-Tel (the Mexican tomato peppers). It’s way easy to mix it up for different eaters’ tastes. At church, our standard is one can of tomato soup, one can of tomato sauce and one can of sauerkraut.
I remember it pretty much the same way, though we cooked more of “plnenu papriku” – filled peppers than “plnenu kapustu”
A few differences – we used mostly ground pork (not beef) I assume because pork was more available in Slovakia than beef (in old times).
We semi precook a rice, not completely and let it finish when simmering the whole dish. I guess it’s all about timing and how much it takes to cook all ingredients to be done but not overdone or undercooked. If I remember right, my mom used a tomato based sauce, however, as I said, we made more of “filled peppers” than “filled cabbage” but I remember the sauce was more of the red color.
as a matter of fact, I’ll try to make it with “white, sour cream, based sauce” maybe this weekend to see what I like better. It just shows that you can cook the same dish a different ways, based on your preferences or traditions.
It goes for all cousins, think about Italy and pastas or seafood. You have a white sauces (aka “Alfredo” style) or you have a red sauces (aka “Milanese” style). We are all different and the same when it comes to cooking
My grandmother made huge roasting pans of cabbage rolls every Christmas. I make them now for my family every Christmas Eve. I use a pork-beef-rice mix. I pour a large can of Tomato juice or V-8 over the rolls and cook them in the oven, covered with the hard cabbage leaves and foil.
Lubos:
Coming from Partizanska Lupca plnena kapusta (holubky) were a traditional food. Here is the recipe we use today and eaten with boiled potatoes (mashed on teh p[late and drowned with the sauerkraut omacka. The saurekraut give the plnena an entirely different taste from the tomatoe sauce/ baked variety.
STUFFED CABBAGE
Ingredients:
1-1/2 – 2 lbs. of ground meat
(½ pork and ½ beef)
2 eggs
1 medium chopped onion
½ cup of rice (rinsed)
salt and pepper to taste
3 pieces of chopped garlic
Mix all of the ingredients together
1 large can of sauerkraut
1 head of cabbage (2-2 ½ lbs)
Boil water in large pot. Cut out the core of cabbage and put the cabbage with roots down and cover the pot partially. Cook for five (5) minutes so that the cabbage is not too soft, just until the leaves are tender. Take the cabbage out of water and allow the water to drain from cabbage. Remove the leaves from head and trim the thicker roots. You may have to use a knife to get the leaves off.
Allow the juice to drain from the sauerkraut and put the sauerkraut into a wide pot (put just enough to line the bottom of pot) Fill the leaves with the meat and roll up. I put a toothpick into the roll to hold it together. When the rolls are done put them in the pot on the sauerkraut when they are all in then add the rest of the kraut and chopped cabbage and add a can of tomato sauce and water to the top of the cabbage rolls. Then add 2 bay leaves, some caraway seed, some black pepper. Cook for 1 and half hour.
After the cabbage is cooked, carefully take them out and place on a dish. Take 3 – 4 pieces of bacon and fry them and add one small onion until brown. Finally, add ½ tsp. of red paprika and add all of this to the kraut. Then take 2 medium potatoes and grind them and add about 3/4 cup of milk to them and add this to the kraut, bring everything to boil and boil for a few minutes. You can put the rolls back in until you are ready to serve. ENJOY.
Thanks for your recipes.
Jaroslav
This looks wonderful. I’ve used hot italian sausage and rice instead of the ground beef. It’s good.
I love your Slovak cooking blog. I can’t wait to make the chicken paprikash.
interesting variation and i will try it!My grandmother always used a tomatoe base(probobly soup0.Always had rice,garlic and onion.Always served with mashed potatoes w/pieces of fried bacon.
Holubky… Yummmmmm! Thank you Lubos for posting your holubky and photos. My mamma fried about 2 strips of bacon, removed the bacon from skillet, add 1 cup finely chopped onion, saute for 3 mins.add 3/4c.long grain rice, stir into onions cover and turn of the heat, let rest.10 to 15mins. Meantime, put 1to 2 pounds of ground beef in a bowl, add salt , pepper, add the rice and onion mixture one beaten egg. cover with a plate, let rest. while you prepare the cabbage head and leafs as you did. Tip*** on rolling the cabbage leaf after deveining it,Place cabbage leaf in palm of hand deveined side down, take a large soup soup spoon, of filling tuck it into cabbage leaf and fold envelope style, setting the seam side down into your pot. Mamma cooked in large pot about 24 holubkies! covered with water.
We were 8 in family!
Ilearned when I was just 8 years old how to roll them! Not telling you how many yrs ago that was Ha ha!
Next time I make them I will be sure my High Tech son takes some pics and may I post them to your site?
Pokoj! Philka from Indiana
What timing for a plnena kapusta recipe. I’m preparing a Central European dinner for a friend’s birthday, planning to make segedinsky gulas, or Szeged Goulash, as an entree. I asked my mother, who’s Hungarian in Slovakia, for a recipe, and she recommended that since knedle is so difficult to make from scratch (knedle is what goes with segedinsky gulas), I should make plnena kapusta… Now I don’t know!
Hello! I must say my two grandmothers were correct. Everyone cooks with their own version of family recipes. One was Slovak and the other was Ukainian. They each had their take on Holubky(Stuffed Cabbage)
The Slovak Grandmother used raw rice in a mixture of raw meat and chopped onions ,
The Ukrainian Grandmother used to fry the meat with chopped onion and throw the raw rice in.
They both put on a big pot with water to boil and cut the core out of the cabbage. Pealed off the loose leaves and put in steaming water to become plyable.Then Putting the rest of the cabbage head, stalk side down in the water to steam. As the steam built up the leaves were released and got soft. They were then put on a big tray to be separated and cooled a bit to handle. Then filled and wrapped the same way you did. They Put in bottom of pot chopped up stalks and ripped leaves as a bed for theHolubky . they both then covered the Holubky in water and added a can of Hunts Tomato Sauce on top. If there was leftover meat ,meatballs were made and put on top to cook.Set on medium low flame to cook .YOu would know when it was done! Oh the smell in the house was intoxicating .Both grandmothers served the Holubky with a wonderful Homemade potato salad. and Crusty bread.
Our take on Halusky is different than yours too. Both Grandmothers shredded a big head of cabbage and cut up 1 huge onion in dices. Sauted that in butter. In another pot boiled water for homemade noodles. They put the cooked noodles into the pot with the sauted cabbage and onions. Wonderful meal for lent. This was served with pickled beets and crusty bread.
So now I will go downstairs and make a shopping list for tomorrow and make Holubky for Sunday . Both are family favorites among other ethnic food.
Have a great weekend and try our families recipes.
P.S. I do my Holubky using my mothers recipe, she was Ukrainian and cooked like her Slovak mother in law. BaBa’s Slovak recipe for Holubky It is more to our taste. But the Ukrainian Grandmother could make Paska(Ukrainian Easter Bread) like a master chef. Delicious and Very decorative. ! And her Pysanky were a wonder. But that is another letter for Eastertime. The were both winners in the kitchen.How Lucky was I to grow up in a family kitchen cooking like both Grandmothers??
Excellent instructions for a great receipe. My mother taught me a different way to make stuffed cabbage- with an egg, no sour cream, or onion ! I will print out your recipe and make it. Thanks for your good work in establishing this news letter. Also, it was nice to meet you at the Slovak Festival this Fall in NJ and eat your excellent cooking.
Hi: I often make stuffed cabbage. My mom’s recipe is the same as yours; however my neighbor (Jewish gal) introduced me to a new way of removing the cabbage leaves from the head. Put the full head of cabbage in the freezer overnight. When ready to separate the leaves, put the frozen head of cabbage in a dish pan, add warm water, peel off the leaves. It works and you don’t have to deal with the hot leaves. Try it.
This sounds a lot like the way my Mom, Aunts, and Grandfather used to make it. They combined ground beef and ground veal together and also poured tomatoes into the meats and over the top when it was served.
I used to live in southern Slovakia and this dish came to us from Hungary.I do not speak their language but some of their food I love.My friend in Budapest used to make it the best.She stufed cabage leaves with cooked rice and ground meat just like you say,put it in the deep pan and bake it in oven.Saute onions,garlic,paprika,bay leaves,caraway seeds and sour craut.Put there some chicken stock.Put it over the stufed cabage leaves,bake for one hour.Serve with home made bread and top with sour cream.EXCELENT !!!I also like szegedinsky gulas.Perfect winter dish.Vynikajuca je tiez KAPUSTNICOVA POLIEVKA.Dobru chut vsetkym vam.
My Slovak grandmother taught us to place a portion of sauerkraut, small amount of brown sugar, and Ketchup BETWEEM the layers of stuffed cabbage rolls. No tomatos or tomato sauce needed, as the ketchup gives the desired tomato taste to the sauce. (She cooked hers on top of the stove in a deep pot, so there were several layers.) After placing all of the rolled cabbage and layers (sauerkraut, brown sugar, and ketchup), she added enough water needed to cover the last and highest layer. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 1 hour and 20 minutes. All of my family members have used this procedure for the past 50 years. . . a delicious dish ! Our recipe for the stuffed cabbage is similar to those posted here, although always an equal mix of ground beef and ground pork butt.
very good recipe, my grandmother and aunts used to do this and it was the most delicious meal. Now I am happy that I found the recipe. Thank you for publishing this online. very useful.
Folks have already commented on HOW the dish is prepared in THEIR family and I have nothing substantial to add over what has been written.
So I will just comment on the romance of the holubky dish!
Ha! Holubky and romance in the same sentence? And you thought it couldn’t be done!
What a treat to come home as a kid to a big pot of holubky on a cold winter day! You can have your Campbell’s soup as depicted thawing a frozen kid. Me? I’ll take holubky every time.
My mother called them “Turtle Eggs,” though I don’t know why. She used sauerkraut, dry rice, and ground pork and veal. That is she used veal, if she could get it or we could afford it, which was not often. But most often, it was ground beef, but I liked ground pork best.
I can still remember the very big aluminum pot, a prized possession in the 1940s and 1950s, being layered with the holubky and kraut and sneaking a bit of kraut to eat in anticipation of what was to come.
We often had mashed potatoes with this dish as well. I still love the juices and a bit of the kraut on mashed potatoes.
Both my sister and I still love these dishes from the halcyon days of our youth, though we never lived in Slovakia.
When I stopped to think about it decades later, I realized that many of these dishes are what one might call peasant food. Dishes like holusky and holubky were a time and generation tested way of feeding large families on little food using the least expensive ingredients, stretched as far as they would go.
Peasant food or not, I would pass up any fine and $$$$ meal for one more pot of anything made by my mother.
Wonderful food. Wonderful memories.
Hey! What am I talking about? Though Mother has long been late [God rest her], my wife learned to cook these and more from her, and we still eat these dishes today!
Don’t get me started on stuffed peppers (plnená paprika)!
I grew up with what we called Haluki – also known as “pigs in the blanket”. It was the ground beef/ground pork mixture, with rice, wrapped in cabbage leaves and cooked in a tomato sauce. Like many of you, my family used bacon and sauerkraut in the making of this incredible dish. I have no memory of life without it, and like Walter, I would pay top dollar for this dish. It, to me, is the epitomy of love and comfort. I can feel my family all around me whenever I have the dish, even though most of them are gone. I have no family left from the “old country”, just wonderful memories that they gave me. And having Haluki makes those memories fresh and real.
When I was in Slovakia, Holubkij were prepared much like you said in the eastern part of Slovakia. It seemed to me that more Rusyns prepared this dish rather than Slovaks. Along with a few variations, the overwhelming style was sauerkraut, no tomatoes or cream! Relatives in Tichy Potok also made this with a lot of half-sharp paprika – perhaps this is where the idea for using tomatoes came from? Since Christmas Eve was still fasting, we in the States made the stuffed cabbage meatless, with rice or grated potato.
Thanks for the recipes….
Hello, I’m Lina, from Indonesia. I tried some of your recipes (Stuffed cabbage, potato salad, toasted Slovak snack, loaded schnitzels) they’re all just so delicious! Thanks a lot for sharing.
I always have such a good meal with my boyfriend. 
I enjoyed reading about some of the variations upon holubky or plnena kapusta. My grandparents came from Hervartov and their original method was done with pork and beef, raw rice, and then cooked with sauerkraut. (I was told they didn’t have tomatoes in the region at the time they emigrated.) They started cooking the hopubky in tomato sauce when I came along and didn’t like sauerkraut!
Interestingly, my halusky were done with either browned butter oir fried cabbage. Never heard of brynza until a few months ago!
There is a cookbook, published in 1976, apparently out of print but available used, called Favorite Recipes From Our Best Cooks Sisterhood of St. John’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church Johnson City New York. My Baba’s holubky recipe – which predates this book by decades – is virtually identical to one found in this book, except that it is called holubtsi in Ukrainian. My Slovak great-grandparents were from a pair of tiny villages in what was then the Hungarian County of Ung. His village is just barely in modern Slovakia, just south of Michalovce, and hers was in what is now Zakarpattia oblast in Ukraine. Many of the Slovak immigrants of a century ago were actively recruited from the eastern Slovak regions. They would have had many Ruthenian and Ukrainian neighbors. Since this recipe appears in a Ukrainian cookbook, and the recipe is mostly known among the descendants of Slovak immigrants to America, my guess is that it was adopted by Slovaks living in or near western Ukraine, which is why holubky are so common among American Slovaks yet so rare in modern Slovakia. That same Ukrainian cookbook also has several Paska recipes, one of which is just like hers, and several hrutka recipes, one of which is close to hers, except she never used a double boiler and tied 6 or 7 whole cloves in the hrutka while it cooked down.
My baba grew up in Trnava in west Slovakia, and was a cook for a wealthy family near Vienna. She emigrated to the US in 1917 (her passport stamped Austria—probably Austrian Empire). She cooked holubky with water which came from steaming the cabbage (lots of flavor in there!!). My mother watched baba make holubky and she taught me to layer the rolls with ketchup (not tomato sauce) diluted slightly with the water. The ketchup adds sweetness. Filling was very simple– ground beef, cooked rice, egg, some salt, onion (my baba used saffron in many things, and I suspected she added it here too—probably the secret ingredient, and one I use too). My oldest aunt (baba’s eldest daughter) suggested adding sauerkraut and some horseradish too when I cooked this with her. As noted in several comments, this is always my favorite!! I’m so glad I found this blog…have been hungry for Slovakian food these days.