Cabbage rolls have to be one of my favourite foods. I come from a Ukrainian background, so sour heads are preferred over fresh cabbage. The traditional stuffing we used while growing up consisted of rice and toasted buckwheat but I add plenty of ground beef, onion and diced tomatoes. The sauce we always used sparingly (only to keep the leaves moist while cooking) and instead of being tomato based or brown sauce based it was sautéed onions, mushrooms and heavy cream.
Your recipe sounds delicious, I'd like to give it a try.
It does raise a question for me, though, about the cabbage roll: sauce ratio. You say that you use sauce sparingly, only to keep the leaves moist. I always thought that cabbage rolls cooked by simmering in the sauce, so that they'd need sufficient sauce to be mostly submerged. Is that unnecessary--have I been over-saucing all these years? If you use less, do you need to baste the rolls while they cook? I do like having sauce to spoon over cabbage rolls when I serve them, but can't imagine a pot full of heavy cream.
