Sweet Cabbage with Tahina Harra
Chris created this dish for America's Culinary Cup Season 1, Episode 10 — the Bittersweet Semifinals, where the Final Four were each assigned one of the five basic tastes and asked to produce both a hot and a cold dish around it. Chris drew sweet, and built his hot composition around wood-roasted cabbage glazed with date molasses and honey, served on a bed of tahina harra (the spicy Lebanese tahini sauce that anchors samke harra), with a piece of seared black cod on top as the protein. The judges' verdict was unusually clean. Padma Lakshmi called the cabbage "the star of your plate." Michael Cimarusti called the dish delicious in absolute terms. But all three judges questioned why the cod was on the plate at all — Wylie Dufresne supplied the specific fix on the night, suggesting that Chris could have put the tahina at the bottom, dropped the cabbage on top of it with the sauce, and that would have been a real mic drop. This version follows Wylie's blueprint exactly: the cod is removed…
- Time: 70 min
Source: Relaxed Recipes
Ingredients
- STEP 1: PREP THE CABBAGE
- Preheat your oven to its top conventional setting - 250°C / 500°F or as high as
- STEP 2: BUILD THE DATE-HONEY GLAZE
- In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, combine the date molasses, honey, butt
- STEP 3: ROAST AND GLAZE THE CABBAGE
- Place the cabbage wedges on a heavy roasting tray, cut-side down, and slide into
- STEP 4: MAKE THE TAHINA HARRA
- In a medium bowl, whisk the tahini with the lemon juice and garlic. The tahini w
- STEP 5: TOAST THE PINE NUTS
- In a dry skillet over medium heat, toast the pine nuts, shaking the pan, until t
- STEP 6: PLATE
- For each plate, take a generous spoonful of tahina harra and either swoosh it ac
- EQUIPMENT NEEDED
- Heavy roasting tray or rimmed sheet pan
- Large heavy-based skillet or cast-iron pan
- Pizza or wood-fired oven
- Microplane or fine grater
- Whisk and a small bowl
- Squeeze bottle or small spoon
- Sharp chef's knife and a sturdy board
- Small saucepan
- CHEF'S NOTES
- The pizza oven is doing the same job as a screaming-hot conventional oven — push
- Date molasses is doing the heaviest sweet lifting here. It carries a complex, al
- Tahina harra is the canonical sauce of samke harra, the Lebanese coastal dish of
- TROUBLESHOOTING
- Cabbage came out steamed, not charred — pan was overcrowded or oven not properly
- Glaze burned on the cabbage — glaze went on too early or oven was set too long f
- Tahina harra is gritty or split — water added too fast or tahini was old. Whisk
- Sauce too thick to drizzle — tahini stiffens as it sits. Whisk in another tables
- Sauce too thin — whisk in another spoonful of tahini to rebalance and check seas
- Heat from chili overpowers everything — Calabrian chili paste varies wildly by b
- Cabbage tastes one-note sweet — glaze went on too thick, or salt at the end was
- STORAGE & MAKE-AHEAD
- Tahina harra makes ahead beautifully — sealed jar in the fridge up to 5 days. It
- Date-honey glaze keeps up to 2 weeks in a jar in the fridge. Re-warm gently befo
- Pomegranate seeds are best the day they're shucked. They keep covered in the fri
- Toasted pine nuts keep up to 3 days in an airtight container at room temperature
- Roasted cabbage wedges are best straight from the oven. Reheating loses the cont
- Once assembled, you have about ten minutes before the sauce meeting the cabbage