Not Butter Or Oil: Cook Cabbage With This Ingredient For 10x The Flavor

So-called "melting cabbage" gets its evocative name from the fact that it cooks down in cream over a long, hot bake into luscious tenderness that melts in your mouth. While we love a good cabbage sauté in butter or oil for unctuous enjoyment, we think that, once you pair cabbage with cream and see its effects on the texture of this popular, healthy veg, you're never gonna want to go back. Best of all, cooking cabbage in cream couldn't be easier. First, portion out thick plants or wedges of cabbage in a fashion not dissimilar to how you'd cut cabbage into veggie "steaks" for flavorful cooking. Keep the core of the cabbage intact, though, as otherwise your leaves are going to wilt away to nothing. 

After giving the cabbage a good sear, prepare your cream sauce. There are dozens of ways to do this, whether you emulsify cream cheese in chicken stock, cook down heavy cream, or make a roux. Many foodies already have a favorite recipe for a cream base, so utilize it here. Drench your browned cabbage in the cream and bake it for close to an hour, during which time the substantial chunks of cabbage will soften into the cream. The result is fork-tender, succulent cabbage that's equally enjoyable as a rich side dish or as the foundation of a delicious meal. Perhaps our favorite aspect of melting cabbage is how ridiculously versatile it is. Cream and cabbage are both blank slate ingredients, so it's effortless to integrate your favorite flavors for a dish that's exactly what you're looking for.

Several melting cabbage recipes utilize garlic and parm to flavor the cream, and we're not surprised. Properly-cooked cabbage is a scrumptious vehicle for a garlicky, cheesy sauce, and the combination of cream, garlic, and parm is one for the ages. Want to push your recipe a step further? Say "yes" to the "marry me" flavor trend with a sauce that incorporates sundried tomatoes with cheese and garlic. We'd never turn down fresh herbs here, either, and your cabbage would be all the better with some additions from your windowsill garden.

We've upgraded cabbage in the past with French onion soup mix, and this wouldn't be a bad time to add a packet into your cream, preferably with fresh sautéed or even caramelized onions. Alternatively, a lemon-pepper seasoning packet can give cabbage a big boost, and that goes double for when you dissolve it in a cream base for the ideal, tangy side to grilled meats. For something a little different, we might even steer our cream sauce in a pan-Asian direction with the addition of a little white pepper, ginger, and chili crisp. The choice is yours!

If you stick to cabbage and cream, your dish plays well with your next roast or rotisserie chicken. To make a main dish, we might sub the tender chunks of cabbage for pasta under juicy slices of steak or pork tenderloin! Spiking the cabbage with bacon is another can't-miss idea. Of course, to keep things veggie-friendly, you can always stir in vegetables that will complement the dish's flavor profile, like sweet chunks of carrot, parsnip, and turnip.