🥬 Japanese Roasted Cabbage
A delicious big-flavoured, easy festive side recipe + my family Japanese sauce that goes with everything!
It is amazing how children pick up on the eating habits of adults without even realizing it. Picture this. Circa 1982, a five-year-old me goes to the daily farmer’s market at 5 pm after dad finishes work. Everyday! I watch my mum pick fresh produce, heckle for the right price and slowly fill up her cotton shopping bags as we meander our way through local farmers tending to their carts and baskets meticulously arranged with pyramids of gorgeous produce.
When we get back home, mum gets a couple of large bowls and puts them in the middle of the kitchen floor. We sit around the bowls at the ready, almost like some kind of seance about to happen. Mum brings the washed produce and lays it out on tea towels. And we begin our daily family bonding ritual. Peeling, stripping, snapping, picking and chopping the produce while we chat. Because I was too young to use the knife, I was always given things like podding the peas, stripping the beans or picking the leaves off bunches of spinach and fenugreek.
My dad was a serial veggie muncher (still is!). It is from him that I first learned to pop the shelled peas in my mouth when mum wasn’t looking. He would be slicing cabbage and pass me some and we would both happily munch away on the sweet and sharp brassica. And radish! Not the sweet little red radish but the spicy long Indian white radish. He would eat many slices and not even break a sweat whereas the mustard-like spiciness would almost take my head off and cause my eyes to water profusely. But I loved it! It was a sense of belonging and being in on something that made produce prepping time very dear to me.
Alas, I haven’t been able to establish a similar ritual with my own family (we have others but not a sit-down-as-a-group and prep veggies kind of ritual … because of lack of time!). But when I am in the kitchen at 5 pm promptly prepping for dinner, my family can hear my munching across the room. An act that has earned me the nickname “The Goat”.
The vegetable that I snack on the most while prepping is cabbage! My dad loves raw cabbage and my mum loves cooked cabbage. I, fortunately, love both versions. And cook with it extensively. Something new every week. A Crunchy Thai Cabbage Salad with the most beautiful orange-tahini dressing, Gujarati Sambharo - a spiced Indian stir-fry from the western Indian state of Gujarat where my family comes from, Cabbage Thoran - a delicious South Indian dry cabbage curry, Crispy Cabbage Fritters and a Jackfruit Okonomiyaki loaded with cabbage.
But one of my recent favourite things to eat a whole head of cabbage is this gorgeous Japanese Roasted Cabbage - gnarly, charred, roasted cabbage wedges drizzled with my go-to Japanese sauce that is so delicious, you would be forgiven for just drinking it from the bowl! A perfectly cooked buttery cabbage dish (vegan!) that only takes 5 minutes to prep and looks spectacular at a dinner party or Christmas table. All you need to do is chop the cabbage, roast it, mix the sauce and drizzle it. Can be prepped ahead and has everyone raving. It is the perfect vegetarian side.
To get this recipe right, I tried many different variations at different temperatures. Here are my findings