Slow Cooker Cabbage Roll Soup
Everything that goes inside a cabbage roll, cooked loose in a pot with tomato and rice until the cabbage is completely soft.
Why You'll Love This Recipe
A cabbage roll is a good thing that asks too much of a Tuesday. You blanch the leaves, you fill them one at a time, you roll them without tearing them, and then you find out an hour later whether the rice inside cooked through. This is the same pot of food with the rolling taken out of it, and after making both I am not sure the rolls were ever worth the extra hour.
Cooking it loose actually fixes something. In a rolled cabbage roll the rice is sealed inside a leaf and cooks in whatever moisture it can find, which is why the centers so often come out chalky. Here the rice sits in four cups of tomato broth for the whole six hours and comes out soft all the way through, and the cabbage gets to go completely tender instead of staying firm enough to hold a shape.
A Sunday spent getting lunch handled for the week is a Sunday well spent. It makes eight generous bowls, it costs very little, and it is one of the few soups I like better on day three than on day one. That is the cabbage doing it, since it keeps softening in the refrigerator and lets go of its sweetness into the broth in a way it never quite manages on the first afternoon.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 lb ground beef
- 1 small head green cabbage, cored and chopped, about 8 cups
- 1 large yellow onion, diced
- 3 medium carrots, diced
- 3 celery stalks, diced
- 4 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 can (28 oz) crushed tomatoes
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 4 cups beef broth
- 3/4 cup dry brown rice, rinsed
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 2 tsp sweet paprika
- 2 bay leaves
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 3/4 tsp black pepper
- 1/3 cup chopped fresh dill, for serving
Instructions
- Brown the beef: Brown the ground beef in a skillet over medium-high heat, breaking it up as it goes, until no pink is left and the fat has rendered out, then drain it off. This is the one step I will not let you skip, because beef added raw to a slow cooker turns gray and pebbly and never recovers, and the rendered fat you pour away here is fat that would otherwise sit on top of the soup for six hours.
- Layer the vegetables: Put the chopped cabbage, onion, carrots, celery and garlic in the bottom of a 6-quart slow cooker and stir them together. It will look like far too much cabbage. It cooks down to about half.
- Add the beef and rice: Scatter the browned beef and the rinsed brown rice over the vegetables. Keeping the rice up in the mix rather than under everything stops it settling into a dense layer on the bottom.
- Build the broth: Whisk the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, beef broth, cider vinegar, paprika, salt and pepper together until the paste is fully worked in, then pour it over the pot and tuck in the bay leaves.
- Cook it low: Cover and cook on low for 6 hours. It is ready when the cabbage is completely soft and the rice is tender with no chalk in the center. Brown rice is slow, so give it the full time even if everything else looks done.
- Finish and serve: Fish out the bay leaves and taste it. It will almost always want another splash of vinegar at this point. Stir the dill in off the heat or scatter it over each bowl.
Variations
- Instant Pot: Cook on high pressure for 22 minutes with a natural release of 15, using brown rice and 3 cups of broth rather than 4.
- With ground turkey: Swap in 1 1/2 lb of ground turkey. Brown it the same way and add an extra half teaspoon of paprika, since turkey gives the broth less to work with.
- Sweet and sour: Add a tablespoon of raisins with the tomatoes and another teaspoon of vinegar at the end. That combination is closer to how my grandmother made the rolled version.
- With smoked paprika: Use smoked paprika in place of sweet paprika. It pushes the pot somewhere darker and makes it taste like there is sausage in it when there is not.
- Vegetarian: Leave out the beef, use vegetable broth and add two cans of drained brown lentils in the last hour. The cabbage and tomato carry it further than you would expect.
Storage & Leftovers
Cooled leftovers keep in the refrigerator for 4 days and genuinely improve for the first two. The cabbage keeps softening and the tomato broth loses its raw edge, which is why I make this one on purpose for the week ahead.
The rice keeps drinking broth as it sits, so what was soup on Sunday is closer to a thick stew by Wednesday. Add a splash of broth or water when you reheat and it comes right back.
It freezes for up to 3 months. Freeze it flat in portions, thaw overnight in the refrigerator and reheat covered over medium-low. The cabbage comes out softer than it went in, which in this particular soup is no loss at all.
Notes & Tips
- Brown the beef, always: It is ten minutes and one extra pan, and it is the difference between a broth with depth and a broth that tastes like boiled meat.
- Chop the cabbage, do not shred it: Rough inch pieces stay in recognizable ribbons over six hours. Thin shreds dissolve completely and you lose the texture that makes this read as a cabbage roll.
- Rinse the rice: Rinsing takes off the loose surface starch that would otherwise thicken the broth into something gluey by hour four.
- Vinegar at the start and the end: A tablespoon at the start cooks in and rounds out the tomato. Another splash at the end is what makes the whole bowl taste finished.
- Do not fear the cabbage volume: Eight cups of raw cabbage will fill the crock to the rim and look absurd. Press it down, put the lid on and it will be half that within an hour.
- Dill goes in cold: Fresh dill loses everything within a few minutes in a hot pot. Stir it in off the heat or put it on the table and let people add their own.
Nutrition & Mindful Eating
- This is a genuinely filling bowl built mostly out of vegetables, which is a combination that does not happen often. The cabbage, carrots and celery are the bulk of what you are eating, and the beef and rice are there to make it hold you until dinner.
- Cabbage belongs to the same family as broccoli and brussels sprouts, and long slow cooking makes it considerably easier on most digestive systems than raw cabbage in a slaw.
- Ground beef is one of the better sources of absorbable iron and zinc, and browning and draining it first keeps the pot from turning greasy before the vegetables go in.
- Brown rice keeps its bran layer, which is why it takes six hours to soften and why it contributes fiber and magnesium that white rice has had stripped out of it.
- Cooked tomato is the main reason this soup is worth eating beyond its bulk, since the lycopene in tomatoes becomes considerably more available to your body once it has been cooked down.
- As you eat, notice how much of the spoon is vegetable, and let the sour edge of the tomato broth tell you when you have had enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I really have to brown the beef first?
Yes. Everything else in this pot goes in raw, but ground beef is the exception. Added raw it clumps and turns gray, and you lose the browned flavor that gives the broth its backbone.
Can I use white rice instead?
You can, but add it in the last hour rather than at the start. Six hours turns white rice into paste, while brown rice needs the whole time to soften.
What makes it taste like a cabbage roll?
The sweet and sour tomato broth, mostly. Traditional rolls are baked in tomato with something sour in it, and the tablespoon of cider vinegar here is doing that job. Leave it out and it tastes like a nice cabbage soup instead.
Can I make it without the rice?
Yes, and it becomes a much lower carbohydrate pot. Add a cup of chopped mushrooms or another carrot so the broth still has something to hold onto.