Forget Stuffed Cabbage: The Soup That's 10x Easier To Make

While we love a delicious, simple cabbage dinner — which might include cooking our cabbage like a steak or turning it into a scrumptious Greek-style side salad — one of our perennial faves involves a bit more work. Stuffed cabbage is a homestyle delight due to its heartiness and nostalgic comfort food status, but making it is definitely a commitment. Happily, however, we've found a soup that preserves everything we love about cabbage rolls with a tiny fraction of the time and effort involved in making them. Unrolled cabbage soup, also called stuffed cabbage soup or cabbage roll soup, is meaty, savory, and utterly craveable.

Basically, all you have to do is brown your ground beef and add it to a broth of tomato sauce and beef stock in a Dutch oven or stockpot. Go ahead and add cut-up cabbage, seasonings, and rice. Barely half an hour later, you have all those flavors you love about cabbage rolls, only in soup form! You might just find that this nourishing, savory bowl warms your belly every bit as much as stuffed cabbage does on a cold night, but that the soup is much more amenable to busy weeknight schedules. As if you needed one more incentive to make this soup ASAP, keep in mind that it's also meal-prep friendly. You can easily cook it ahead of time and portion it out to freeze, so consider doubling your recipe (which adds very little extra prep work) and save half for an upcoming meal.

A home cook can really play around with the texture of their unstuffed cabbage roll soup to get the desired consistency. While a good beef stew might be thickened with a cornstarch slurry, you may find that the cabbage roll soup is plenty thick for meaty, hearty main-dish status ... maybe even a bit too thick. Our advice is to thin your soup with some vegetable juice. V8 is a classic fave with plenty of rich flavor. 

White rice is the default for this soup, but you can sub in brown rice or even low-carb cauliflower rice. One thing you definitely don't want to do is overcook your grains and let them get soggy, however. You may also notice that many internet recipes for cabbage soup include a small amount of brown sugar to cut the acidity of canned tomato products while not making the soup overly sweet.

We can imagine really toying around with this soup to make a very satisfactory meal. If you prefer ground sausage to beef, feel free to substitute it. Spicy sausage will add heat that many eaters will find pleasant. You aren't beholden to rice in your soup, of course, and can swap it out for gnocchi or noodles as you wish — just adjust the cooking time to avoid turning these to mush. We would also really enjoy a steaming bowl with crusty bread to sop up the juices left in our bowls. Those who have a favorite sourdough recipe may be tempted to go the extra mile and have a fresh loaf waiting alongside the butter dish.