Bulgarian Sarmi with Minced Meat and Sauerkraut

Bulgarian Sarmi are the small cabbage or vine leaves stuffed with delicious mixture of mince, rice and spices (for meat lovers) or just with rice and spices, for vegetarians. During summer when there are a lot of fresh vine leaves (Bulgaria is a famous wine producing country), the stuffed vine leaves are prepared widely. Here are the recipes for the meat-including and vegetarian version. If you visit Bulgaria in summer, I highly recommend you to try them. Every winter there are a lot of sauerkraut heads sold on every farmer’s market and this is the time for the sauerkraut sarmi (Sarmi s kisselo zele), which meat versions are with chopped meat (recipe here) or minced meat (today's recipe).

This dish is very traditional for the Christmas eve and for the New Year’s menu. 

Happy New Year!

Sarmi (Sauerkraut rolls with chopped meat)

"Sarmi" is a popular Bulgarian dish, which stands for sauerkraut rolls prepared as a vegetarian dish (stuffed with chopped onion, rice and spices and served traditionally on Christmas Eve) or the other popular variety, for the meat lovers (stuffed with onion, minced meat, little rice and spices). The recipe I share with you today is called "Tsarski sarmi", which mean sauerkraut rolls for the King. The reason for that - they are prepared with chopped meat insted of minced meat and you can feel better the taste of the meat. There is leek instead of onion, which adds a slightly sweet taste to the dish and matches so well with the pork. No rice, no onion, just some crushed dry peppers - hot if you like the sweet taste and sweet if you do not. So this is a dish for special occasions. Bulgarian sauerkraut is not sweet and shredded, as it is in Germany and some Central-European countries - the whole heads of cabbages are prepared without any additional flavours and we enjoy the sour taste of the cabbage. 

Many families still prepare homemade sauerkraut in Bulgaria, but this is a long and hard process which requires a lot of patience and results depend a lot on the quality of the cabbage, on the temperature in the place where the fermentation takes place and of course on the skills of the housekeeper. The good thing is, that these days there are lots of vendors who sell heads of sauerkraut cabbage in plastic bags on every farmer's market, so I can enjoy the tasty Bulgarian sarmi without making all that efforts.

Stuffed vine leaves (Sarma or Dolmades gialantzi)

Stuffed grape leaves are popular dish across the Balkans. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece - every one of these countries has own variety concerning the stuffing mixture. The two main categories concern the stuffing, which could be meat mixture or rice mixture. The meat varieties are eaten warm and the vegetarian ones - at room temperature. In Bulgaria this dish is called sarma or sarmi, which has Turkish origins - sarmak means 'to wrap' in Turkish. 

In Greece dolmades are part of the Meze platter, in Bulgaria Sarmi is a main dish. The stuffing includes different ingredients - rice, minced meat, pine nuts, raisins, mint and some others. The following recipe is a vegetarian version which includes lemon juice and mint. It could be served cold or warm and is good either ways.  In late spring and summer you can find fresh vine leaves, which should be first boiled for 5 minutes into a salted water.  Choose grape leaves that have very thin veins, which will make the taste less stringy. In February on the Balkans you can only use preserved vine leaves. So did I. This dish reminds me of summer, it is light and tasty. My only regret was I did not prepare twice as much.