Roasted Cabbage Steaks with Horseradish and Browned Butter

This delicious low-carb main course (or succulent side dish) combines healthy, leafy-green cabbage with piquant horseradish and rich, fragrant browned butter. It’s that simple: you only need those three ingredients—plus salt and pepper—to prepare it!

Tips for making the Roasted Cabbage Steaks with Horseradish and Browned Butter

A couple of tips will guarantee success here:

First of all, one large cabbage head makes about 8 steaks. This recipe calls for 4 steaks (only because I couldn’t fit more on the baking sheet!). So, if you make this recipe, you can either make a double batch or reserve the leftover cabbage for another use, like this The Best Southern Fried Cabbage.

Also, when you heat the butter, don’t burn it! You want it nicely golden brown, not dark brown. If it gets dark brown it’s ruined and you can throw it away. So, to prevent wasting your precious butter, keep your eye on it when it’s heating. First it will bubble a lot, and when it stops bubbling, it will turn brown very quickly. When you see it getting a bit of brownish color, it’s time to remove it from the heat.

Another important thing is to leave the cabbage crisp-tender rather than bake it until soft. If it gets soft, it will lose its taste and acquire a nastily mushy mouthfeel. It will also break apart easily, so when you transfer the cabbage steaks from the baking sheet to the serving plates, they will simply fall apart. And that would be a catastrophe! (Well, not really, but it’s undesirable at the very least.)

I recommend using fresh horseradish, if you can find it. You can naturally use prepared horseradish if you can’t find the fresh root, but try to avoid it if possible because it has more carbs and it’s more processed. (Any healthy diet avoids processed foods!) And fresh horseradish usually has more flavor, though I noticed that there is a huge difference between the individual roots: some are far more flavorful than others, so adjust the amount of horseradish to your taste and to the spiciness of the root you happen to have.

Be sure to use enough salt and pepper. The cabbage itself tastes very bland so it really needs seasoning to make it taste like something!

Let’s take a look at how to make this appetizing cabbage dish:

Take four 1/2-inch (1.3 cm) thick cabbage slices. These are your cabbage “steaks”.

Place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Leave enough space between them.

Take the butter and place it into a thick-bottomed saucepan.

Heat over medium-high heat, stirring constantly.

It bubbles a lot. Remember to stir all the time!

After it has stopped bubbling, the butter will quickly turn brown so keep your eye on it! It should get only lightly browned. Remove the saucepan quickly from the heat when you see it beginning to brown.

Add the horseradish to the browned butter.

Mix well. The mixture will foam a bit.

Spoon the browned butter mixture evenly on top of the cabbage steaks.

Sprinkle with enough salt…

…and white pepper, too.

Bake for 30 minutes…

…or until the cabbage is crisp-tender.

If you have any leftover browned butter (hopefully you have!), drizzle it on top of the servings. You can add freshly grated horseradish to really bring out the flavor, too. Also, some freshly chopped herbs, like parsley, make for a beautiful presentation.

My roasted cabbage experiments

I conducted my first experiments with roasted cabbage steaks and horseradish last year. Here, I was ranting that combining melted butter and freshly grated horseradish still didn’t lend enough flavor to my cabbage steaks. Argh! At that point, I ended up with combining cabbage with bacon and blue cheese and posted the recipe here on my blog. Those were bold flavors indeed!

This week, I was pondering which recipe to post on my blog. I do have several ideas, and I’ve actually written down a schedule for what to post and when. But that never works: I always end up posting the recipes in an arbitrary order depending on how much time I have for the recipe and what I’m in the mood for at the moment.

Usually, time is pretty tight. Most of it gets eaten up by computational linguistics projects. I do lots of stuff like speech recognition and synthesis for different languages. I’ve been doing this for the past 20 years! Any leftover time is used for studying, writing, and testing recipes. And I naturally need some time for my family, too.

This week, I remembered my experiments with roasted cabbage with horseradish and how bland they turned out. I got intrigued and thought there must be a way to make the dish tastier. First of all, I think I used cabbage slices that were too thick, and that’s why they didn’t absorb enough flavor. I could also add more salt (well, that’s a surefire way to add more taste to any dish!), but also more horseradish and maybe white pepper to amp up the taste. White pepper goes so much better with cabbage than black pepper. Plus, it’s a perfect match for horseradish, as both contribute a sharp, tongue-tickling flavor.

So, I went to the grocery store and bought three large cabbage heads and some horseradish. I still didn’t know if I should add the horseradish before baking or after. In my first experiment last year I added it after, and it didn’t provide enough taste. I was afraid that if I added it before — mixed with melted butter — it would turn out even more bland.

Suddenly, I realized that I could use browned butter instead of melted butter! That would lend a nice, nutty, toasted flavor.

I was ready to conduct my first experiment with my new ideas. I cut four cabbage steaks (i.e. thick slices of cabbage). They were some 1/2 inch (1.3 cm) thick. I placed them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

I browned 2 oz (60 g) salted butter in a saucepan. Then I brushed the cabbage slices with the browned butter and sprinkled lots of salt and white pepper on top. I baked them at 400 °F (200 °C) for 40 minutes.

Well, they turned out slightly too soft, so 30 minutes would obviously have sufficed. But I wanted to proceed with my experiment anyway, so I took 1 tablespoon freshly grated horseradish and sprinkled it evenly on top of the slices.

There was still a little bit of browned butter in the saucepan so I drizzled it over the slices. Well, there could have been more; I think the butter was doing most of the work in terms of flavor. Had to remember that in my next experiment!

Now it was time to taste-test, and to see whether this experiment had turned out any tastier than my first experiment one year ago. Well, it did — but only slightly. There was definitely room for improvement!

At least I knew what to do: add more salt, add more horseradish, and add more butter. But I still wanted to see what would happen if I combined the horseradish with the browned butter and added it to the cabbage slices before baking. Maybe the cabbage would soak up the horseradish flavor, resulting in a bolder taste?

For my next experiment, I combined 1 tablespoon horseradish with the browned butter and drizzled this mixture on top of the cabbage slices before baking. To be honest, I didn’t notice any difference in terms of taste. I think I got the best result when I combined horseradish with the browned butter and also sprinkled some fresh horseradish on top of the cabbage after baking.

I conducted one more experiment in which I used 3 oz (85 g) butter. That 2 oz (60 g) I used before wasn’t quite enough. When I used 3 oz (85 g), there was still enough browned butter left to drizzle on top of the cabbage steaks right before serving. I finally got all the flavor I wanted!

Here’s the recipe:

 

 


 

Nutrition Information	In total	Per serving if 4 servings in total
Protein	11.6 g	2.9 g
Fat	69.1 g	17.3 g
Net carbs	23.6 g	5.9 g
kcal	752 kcal	188 kcal

 

Happy Easter 2019!

I wish you all a very happy Easter! To celebrate, I made this Keto Angel Food Cake (batter divided in 6″ x 4″ and 4″ x 4″ pans), filled it with blueberry quark (curd), covered with simple sugar-free vanilla buttercream and decorated with chocolate drip and some homemade sugar-free chocolate eggs. This was my first ever attempt to make a chocolate drip cake, and I’m surprised it was that easy! Highly recommended!