Braised Red Cabbage with Apple and Red Wine

I bought some red cabbage and I want to find new ways to cook it besides salad or simple garlic stir fry.
So, I think there might be some braised cabbage stuff online and searched. Indeed, there are many braised cabbage recipes, even Jamie Oliver has one, but I don’t have bacon , so I can’t use his.

Then I saw this recipe. Ok, it sure does look interesting, and I have jam, wine, apples… Ok, all set. I adapted the recipe with some changes. I didn’t use any spices at all, because I’m afraid Mike won’t like it. And I reduced the sourness and therefore had to reduce the jam used. Overall, it’s still quite similar. You may try the original recipe if you like spices.

Braised Red Cabbage with Apple Recipe

300gm red cabbage, sliced
1 medium sized green apple (about 110gm), peeled and grated. Discard core after finished grating
Half red onion, peeled and sliced
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp rice vinegar (I reduce a lot of this, because Mike doesn’t like anything sour. But this is essential to retain the colour of the cabbage)
2 level Tbsp raspberry jam (best is lingonberry jam or red currant jam)
80ml or 1/3 cup red wine
1/3 tsp salt and pepper to taste
another 1 Tbsp butter (to be used at the end of cooking)

1. Put onions and butter into a saucepan and cook until onion softens.
2. Put in sliced cabbage and grated apple. Immediately put in vinegar, then only stir.
3. Put in raspberry jam, red wine, salt and pepper to taste. Stir until well combined. Bring to a boil.
4. Put lid on and simmer for 30 minutes (time is much shorter due to much lesser amount)
5. Stir in butter and turn off the heat.

After doing seeing the recipe, I did some reading online and found that the red pigment in red cabbages can be used as a PH indicator. Just incase you do not know what is a PH indicator, it means, the colour can detect whether the solution it is in is acidic or alkaline. It turns bluish green in alkaline and reddish when in acid. Which is why you must put in the vinegar as soon as possible after you have put the cabbage into the pot.

Read :
Red cabbage contains a pigment molecule called flavin (an anthocyanin). This water-soluble pigment is also found in apple skin, plums, poppies, cornflowers, and grapes. Very acidic solutions will turn anthocyanin a red color. Neutral solutions result in a purplish color. Basic solutions appear in greenish-yellow. Therefore, it is possible to determine the pH of a solution based on the color it turns the anthocyanin pigments in red cabbage juice .

Adapted from here

The braised cabbage is really nice to eat. The alcoholic smell of the wine is no longer there after braising. The smell of the jam is really nice and it really marries well with the vinegar. The cabbage is not too mushy. It still has a crunch to it because of the vinegar. This tasted like something I had in Shangrila Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. The international buffet serves some German roast beef and had some cabbage served with it, but it’s not red cabbage, just the usual cabbage, but it sure was almost like this, sourish, sweet and fragrant. Nope, it’s not sauerkraut as that is salty. I think this is called Blaukraut or Rotkohl in German.

A fresh change to the usual salads or Chinese stir fries. I do recommend you try this out if you like sweet and sour stuff.

And a reminder to do all measurements with measuring spoon, just incase you used the rice eating spoon. Because 1 rice spoon of vinegar is much much lesser compared to if you heaped the jam with the same spoon.