This Addictive Ground Beef Cabbage Dish is All I Make Now

I absolutely love cabbage and it has a cult-like following for a reason. In this video, we're going to roast it hard in the oven with onions until it gets brown, sweet, and crispy on the edges. Then we're going to pair it with the king of home-cooked dinners, saucy ground beef. This is simple, cheap, high-protein, and turns basic ingredients into a shockingly delicious complete meal. For the full ingredient list, check the description box below, but enough talking, let's get cooking. The first step to getting this going is doing the quick pickle on the onions. Quick pickles are great because it's not like a full pickle. What we're going to do is we're going to mix half vinegar, and here I'm just using a white vinegar, but you can use white wine vinegar, you can use red vinegar, you can even use an apple cider vinegar, and some water, a little bit of salt, and some honey or some sugar for some sweetness. I'm going to give this a little mix, and we're going to set this on the stove, and we're going to let this come up to a boil while we cut our onions. When you're cutting an onion for a pickle, the direction in which you cut the onion matters a little bit. So we're going to cut this onion in half, we're going to take off the outer layer, and now what we're going to do is we're going to cut the onion, but instead of cutting it horizontally, which normally that's how I cut it, I'm going to cut the onion vertically. When you cut the onion vertically, it keeps the cell walls a little bit more intact so that when the onion pickles, it stays a little crisp, because you don't want pickled onions to be too soft. They should have a little bit of a snap, a little bit of a bite to them, so we're going to cut the onion in the opposite direction that we would normally cut the onion if we were cooking it down. So now we're going to take our onion, we're going to put it inside a jar with a lid. Here I'm using one of these seal lids. I just have this jar lying around and I like it because I like using it to store stuff in the fridge. I'm going to take the onions and just put them in there and just really pack them down as much as I can without breaking or busting any of the onions. A lot of times it looks like you can't fit the whole onion in there, but if you just push gently, you can get it all in there, and we really want it to be filled all the way up to the top. So now we're going to take our boiling pickling liquid and we're just going to pour it into the jar over the onions until we completely submerge them, and you're better off having too much than not enough because otherwise you'd have to make a little bit more to throw in there. I don't have enough. What I usually do is just boil a little bit of water and I throw it on top, but I want to get this all the way to the top. I'm going to try to spill as little as I can. Once these are totally submerged, I'll put the cover on top and I'll just set this aside and just let the hot water do its thing. If we get a little bit of overflow, that's okay because I want to make sure that those top ones are completely submerged. That's why I like using these like seal jars. So now while we're making our recipe, our onions are pickling. These usually are good after like an hour or two. By the time we finish all the rest of the components of this, these will be good to go. Next up is one of the co-stars of this recipe, the cabbage. We're going to simply roast the cabbage in the oven, seasoned with some onions, and we're going to make our beef separate. To clean up the cabbage, we're going to remove the outside leaves. Sometimes I'll give the cabbage a rinse, but once you really remove the outside leaves, you're not really cleaning anything because the cabbage is such a densely tight vegetable. There's no water getting inside. So I'm going to cut the bottom off. I'm going to find a nice flat spot for the cabbage and we're going to cut in half. It's just a little easier to handle this way. So I'll push down through the cabbage. Make sure when you're cutting your cabbage that you're putting your hand away from the knife. Cabbage is a dense vegetable. It's sometimes a little hard to cut, so you've got to have a good grip on your knife. Go down and use the sharpness of the knife to push all the way through. Now the cabbage is a much easier handle to cut in half. You can cut around the core or you can cut the core out. Here I'm just going to cut the core out. I prefer to do that so I don't have any pieces that have that dense stem inside. And now I'm going to cut the cabbage into large chunks. So I'll cut lengthwise on the cabbage or widthwise, I don't even know, is that lengthwise or widthwise? And then I'm going to turn the cabbage and I'm just going to cut it into these large chunks. So now as I cut the cabbage, I'll put it in this large bowl and I'm aiming to fill up the whole bowl. I find filling up the whole bowl is enough that I could spread it out on a sheet pan and it'll give me enough without it being too much. Usually for like a medium-sized cabbage, I usually use a little bit more than half a head of cabbage. And now for our onion, we're going to cut it a little differently. We're going to try to cut it really thinly. I want the onion to fully cook down and I want it to caramelize. So we're going to cut it pretty thinly and small. So as the cabbage is cooking and the cabbage caramelizes, the onions cook down, they caramelize even more. And now here, different than when we cut the red onion, we're going to cut the onion lengthwise into thin strips. Before seasoning, what I like to do is before it's covered with oil and the spices, I'm going to break up the onion and the chunks of cabbage. And I'll just keep working the bowl and just looking for any of the big pieces that are all stuck together and I'll just work it apart with my hands. I may do this a little bit more after, once we season, but I want to make sure that the pieces get seasoned and we're not just holding big chunks of cabbage that the seasoning is not going to get on the inside. This bowl is a little small, so let me transfer over to this much larger mixing bowl. Now to our cabbage and onions, we're going to add some olive oil and some of my base seasoning. This is a blend of garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. I'm going to give this a mix and if I run into any more big chunks that I want to break up, I'll go ahead and do that now. Now to a sheet pan lined with aluminum foil and parchment paper, I'm going to spread out the cabbage and the onion mixture on the sheet pan. You can see that we got a lot to start off with, but cabbage shrinks down so much as it cooks and part of this is we want a large pile of cabbage so the top browns while like the bottom steams and then as we mix it, we get a lot of different textures. If we put too much, it just steams and we don't get a lot of browning. If we don't put enough, a lot of this is just going to end up burning, but onion and cabbage tastes great when there's like caramelization and char on it, so that's what we're trying to get and that happens best while some of it steams underneath and the top gets exposed to the high heat. We're going to put this in a 425 degree oven for about 30 to 40 minutes. We're going to mix it once or twice as it's cooking and we're looking for this to shrink back, cook, soften, and get a nice char on the outside. Next up, we're going to make a very simple and quick yogurt sauce. This recipe has a lot of components, but they're all really simple, so even though you're making the cabbage, the beef, this yogurt sauce, the pickled onions, it all goes together really fast and it all runs in a nice tight timeline. We're going to add some of this Greek yogurt to a bowl. You can use whatever percentage Greek yogurt you like. You like full fat, go full fat. You want to go a little leaner, go lean, as lean as you want. No judgment on my end. To the yogurt, we're going to add a big spoonful of mayonnaise. It's going to add some additional flavor. The juice from half a lemon and if you don't have lemon juice, the vinegar that we put inside the pickled onions, that would work great too, but the lemon, not only does it add acidity, it adds really nice flavor and the lemon, you put a larger volume than the vinegar because it's not as acidic and it's not as concentrated and the additional liquid is going to help thin this sauce out because we want it to be like a little bit watery and have almost like a pourable consistency. Now we're going to shred in two garlic cloves, so I'm going to use my microplane. If you don't have a microplane, use whatever fine shredder you have. This would also be another good application of the garlic in the tube paste. Not a big fan of that stuff, but it works really well for sauces like this. Fresh is always going to be best. And if you're not into raw garlic and raw garlic's too potent for you, you could skip this or tone it down, but if you don't like garlic at all, you might be on the wrong channel. I'm a garlic lover, so I'm going to put two cloves and I really think that's the limit. If I put any more, it would start to get a little garlic spicy. And if you had too much raw garlic, you know what I mean. And now to finish off this sauce, a little pepper and a pinch or two of salt. Just like the pickled onions, this is probably more than we're going to use, but that's okay because pickled onions, they go on everything. This white sauce, this creamy garlic white sauce, it goes on everything. So if you have extra leftover, you're going to find that you're going to be garnishing everything with pickled onions, a little bit of this garlic sauce, and it'll take just really ordinary things like chicken or whatever vegetables you got lying around and really jazz them up. I want this sauce to have a little bit more of a portable consistency, so we're going to add just a little bit of water just to thin this out a little bit. That's much better. The best thing to transfer a yogurt sauce into a squeeze bottle is going to be a milk container or like a juice container with the top cut off and you just put it upside down. It's a nice, super wide funnel. A lot of wiggle room to pour your sauce in and it just goes right in. Regular funnels, unless they got a super big hole, really don't work well here, but this always does. I'm going to set this yogurt sauce in the fridge while we get to the last component and the co-star of this dish, the ground beef. So we're going to take our ground beef and we're going to add it to a bowl because before we cook it, we want to do a little trick that I like to get extra browning on the ground beef for a crumbled ground beef. So we're just going to break this up into little chunks just to get it out of big square packaged form. So it's a little loose and it's got way more surface area to it. So now in a small container, we're going to take a little bit of baking soda. For every pound of ground beef, about a half a teaspoon of baking soda and we got two pounds of ground beef, so one teaspoon and then I'll add an equal amount of water. So one teaspoon of water. Now I'm going to give this just a mix to take the baking soda from powder to a liquid and what we're going to do is put this right on the ground beef. This is going to raise the pH of the beef and make it less acidic and more basic and that's going to help draw in a lot of the moisture into the beef and it's going to allow it to get more brown and less gray. So I'll take this liquid and spread it out and now with my hands, I'll just do like a light massage and massage the paste or liquid into the ground beef and I'll just give it a little bit of a mix to coat as much of the surface area of this beef as possible without over mixing it. So I want to be kind of quick when I'm doing this. I found that this step really gets nice browning and much better browning than if you didn't do this step. I'm going to stop before I over mix this. I'm going to let this sit for about 10 to 15 minutes, let the baking soda do its thing while we prep a couple ingredients that we need for this seasoned saucy ground beef. Our cabbage is ready for the first mix, so let's stop this prep and see what that cabbage looks like. So after about 20 minutes, you can see that we got nice char on some of the onions and the cabbage and the layers underneath are starting to steam and vegetables that are steamed or softened up a little bit will caramelize and brown a little bit more. So what I'm going to do is I'll take my wooden spatula and I'll just start to mix this and get some of the brown stuff towards the bottom and get some of the steamed stuff towards the top. You can already see that in about 20 minutes, we've already lost a lot of volume. The sheet pan does not look as packed as it did and what I like to do is just find any of the brown spots and just cover them up with the stuff underneath and that'll give more opportunity for the cooked onions and cabbage to caramelize just like the other layer did on top. Because remember, browning is flavor. The more stuff gets brown, the more flavor that we're going to get out of this delicious onions and cabbage. All right, let's send this in the oven for about another 20 minutes and we'll finish the prep and cook our ground beef. To that beef, we're just going to work with a couple of scallions and some garlic cloves. For our garlic, we're going to put a fine mince on it. This is where the stuff in the tube doesn't cut it because I wanted to have a little bit of a mince so it doesn't release so much flavor and it cooks a little differently when it's minced versus pulverized. We're going to cut off the root end, give each one a smash and now rocker chopper, keeping my knife touching the cutting board, I'm just going to keep working through the garlic until I get to the mince consistency that I'm looking for. So now our scallions, we'll also cut off the root end just like we did on the garlic and now I'm going to separate the greens from the whites. So if I find any that are really green, I'll cut those off. You can see that these scallions, this part is white, this part is green. So if I cut it here, I'm still cutting part of like the green off. So I'll go a little extra further and I'll cut the greens off individually, set those aside for a garnish and then we'll get to our whites. These are going to go inside the beef. So we're going to cut these nice and thinly. We're going to use that same rocker chopper motion and the greens we're going to reserve for a garnish. So if I see any of the ends are a little ratty, I'll cut those off. And now for scallion garnish, I'll cut them on a little bit of an angle and I like to press them down a little bit. Pressing them down compresses the tube a little bit and makes it just a little easier to cut. So now I'll work on an angle and cut my garnishes nice and thin and on an angle. Now that our prep is done, let's head over to the stove and make our ground beef. So I got my large frying pan hot over a high heat. I want to get this pan ripping hot. You can already see we got a little smoke coming off of it. We're going to add a little oil to the pan. That pan should be so hot that the oil should smoke instantly. And then we'll take our ground beef that we mixed with that baking soda and we'll spread it around the pan and I'm going to give it just a light push into the pan just so it keeps good contact. And now I'm going to let this sit for a couple of minutes undisturbed to get really nice a browning on this first layer of ground beef. The pan cannot catch up in heat, so however hot it was when it hit, that's the hottest it's going to be because the heat is transferred to the meat. So you really want to make sure that your pan is super hot and then once it hits, let it stay for at least two to four minutes until we start to see the edges start to brown. The browning is going to add unbelievable flavor to this ground beef. That is probably one of the best things you can do to the ground beef to enhance its already awesome flavor. After a couple of minutes, I'm going to season with some salt, fresh ground black pepper, and a little smoked paprika. Now if we flip over some of this beef, you can see that really awesome brown crust that's on there. That is mega, mega flavor. And we should have that a little bit everywhere. Look how awesome that looks. That's going to add big time flavor to this crumbled ground beef. And we keep calling it crumbled ground beef, so let's start to crumble it. So I'm going to give everything a flip. Look how awesome that looks. If we didn't do the baking soda trick, it would be way less. Now I'm going to take this, I'm going to flip it over, I'm going to give this a crumble. So once I've cut up a lot of the bigger chunks, I'm going to add in those scallion whites and the light green parts. We're going to give that a mix in and let these scallions cook down a little bit while the ground beef continues to cook. So let's take a look at our cabbage and onion mixture. You can see how much the volume has really shrunk down. So I'm going to do the same thing one more time and just send this back in the oven for a few more minutes. But this is really close to finish. Maybe five more minutes in there and this will be good to go. But the thing I really want to point out to you is, look how much the volume shrunk down. So when you're starting off with the cabbage, start off with what looks like too much, and then it'll be a good amount by the time you get back down to the bottom. Try to cover up those brown spots, try to get the less cooked spots or the steamed ones to the top and you get more caramelization, more browning on there. And if you see any big chunks of that cabbage that you didn't break up before, just break them up with a spatula. So let's send this back in the oven for a couple more minutes and while we finish our ground beef. So now back to our ground beef. We're going to add our garlic in with a little tomato paste. We're going to mix the garlic into the tomato paste and we're also going to lower down the heat in the pan. We don't need it over that higher heat anymore. Garlic has a tendency to burn. We've already got good browning out of the ground beef, so now we just need a lighter heat to cook the rest of this. And if any ground beef is stuck to the pan, great, because that means that there's additional browning on that. So I'm going to give this a mix so everything looks well coated in the tomato paste. And tomato paste is a cooked tomato product, but it has a raw flavor to it, so it needs to be cooked a little bit. And this frying of the tomato paste with the garlic is one of the best ways to take off that rawish flavor and really enhance the flavor of the tomato paste. After that cooks for a minute or two and you can start to smell the fragrant garlic, we're going to add a few more pantry ingredients. First up is going to be some of this here Worcester sauce, a spoonful of some Dijon mustard, some red wine vinegar for some acidity, and some beef broth for some additional flavor and also to get us a little bit of liquid so we get a little bit more of a sauce. Now we'll take this and mix this all together and make this ground beef nice and saucy. And I'm just trying to work the mustard into the other liquids and mix that all with the ground beef. And while I'm doing that, just scraping up the bottom of the pan because if there's any like burnt bits, I want that to incorporate in the sauce that we're mixing in here. The smell coming off of here is unbelievable. So I'm going to let this cook over this medium heat for just a few minutes until the sauce clings to the ground beef. But once the sauce looks nice and uniform, the beef looks nice and glossy, this is done and we are good to go. So now let's take a look at this cabbage and onions. This looks really good. It smells fantastic. The volume has shrunk down a lot. We have a lot of these nice burnt charred bits. Like these colored cabbage is so delicious. Even the onions that get softened and a little bit of this char, they're so delicious. And if you're looking for a side dish, you can just make this all by itself and this eats wonderfully. So now let's start building one of these bowls. So I'll give the cabbage just a mix to get some a little bit of everything, but look how wonderfully softened and charred this cabbage and onion mixture is. It was so easy. So we're going to put a good amount of this for our base before I put the ground beef. Just give it a little bit of toss. The top dries out a little bit just because moisture is evaporating from it, but that sauce is on the bottom. So give it a mix before you serve it. And now look how appetizing that beef looks. It doesn't look gray. It's got some nice color to it. The smell coming off of it is fantastic. We'll take that and we'll put that in the middle. And now some of our yogurt sauce, our sliced scallion greens, and some of these quick pickled onions. Look how those onions transform. Look how nice and pink and rosy they are. And now how amazing does this beef and cabbage bowl look? This looks absolutely fantastic and I can't wait to try it. Let's see if we can get a little bit of everything on one bite. So we'll start at the bottom. We'll get some of the cabbage, some of that saucy ground beef. I think we need a little bit more of those pickled onions on top. This is going to be an epic bite. This is home cooking. It's delicious. It's easy. Everything other than the cabbage and the ground beef, I have on hand all the time. And you do too if you cook. This recipe comes out of the necessity to make something with what you got on hand and the reused pantry ingredients. And this is so good. I would be so proud to serve this to anyone. This isn't even just reserved for weekday stuff. Somebody could come over for a dinner party, I'll make this, and they would absolutely love it. This is so good. The cabbage is softened and delicious. It's got such a nice bite to it where it's not overly mushy, but it's not overly crunchy. It's like that perfect blend. The onions, these pickled onions are so easy. I keep calling them pickled onions. They're really quick pickled onions because pickling is a little different than quick pickling. But they're wonderful. I've made this a couple of times before and it didn't really come together until I added that sauce. It really needed a sauce to pull everything all together. But if you're looking for more delicious ways to make cabbage and ground beef, this is definitely one of them and definitely makes the hit list. This is so good. If you wanted to add a starch, you could serve this on rice, you could serve this on potatoes. All of that would be really good. But that being said, this doesn't need a thing. This is so good. Maybe you don't eat beef and you want to make this with ground chicken or ground turkey. I would do it exactly the same. I wouldn't change a step. I would just do everything exactly as I did it in this video. This is so wonderful. I'm going to eat the rest of this for lunch. If it's your first time here, don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Get the notification bell going. Like the video if you like the video and drop me a comment when you think about the video or if you made the recipe. And if you're a cabbage freak like me, check out my braised cabbage wedges. That is a really awesome dish that highlights how amazing cabbage can be. I will see you there. Thanks.