Back in November I turned 40. To mark the occasion I threw a party in our barrel cellar . I did all the food and we had a feast. I cranked up the SnW offset smoker. Somewhat surprisingly the dish that left the biggest impression on people was the vegan BBQ main.
Inspiration for this dish came from Jonathan Burger , a remarkable classically trained BBQ obsessed Austrian chef who worked at SnW for a year. He did a vegetarian special that involved cabbage stuffed with garlic and herb butter smoked low and slow. I took things in a slightly more Indian direction. As I wanted a vegan option I used a nut based ‘cream cheese’ but for my own consumption I would use butter.

Ingredients

1 head of cabbage
200g softened butter or vegan spread / vegan cream cheese if going for vegan
3 small red chilli chopped
Handfull of chopped coriander
2 tablespoons cumin seed toasted
1 table spoon black peppercorns toasted
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt

 
– grind cumin and black pepper coarsely in a pestle and mortar.

– In a bowl combine all ingredients apart from cabbage

– make a series of cuts in the cabbage down towards the stalk that dont go right through . You are sort of turning it into a ‘flower’. Stuff the filling down into the cuts working it into the cabbage leaves .

– seal the cabbage back up by covering the cut end with tin foil. You dont want to wrap the whole thing as you do want smoke to be in contact with the cabbage.

– smoke in a bbq smoker for 5 hours. You could wrap in tin foil after the first 2 hours in order to limit the smoke intensity . If you dont have an offset BBQ you could smoke it briefly on a charcoal BBQ or in a fish smoker then transport it to the oven to finish at 150c.

Thanks to Annika Corley for the pics.