MasterChef ™
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Stuffed Cabbage Roll
Stuffed Cabbage Roll with Lamb and Pancetta, Braised Sauerkrat and Tomato Sauce
Daniela, interviewed during cooking :"I'm half Serbian, so I'm doing a smoky stuffed cabbage roll, which is a Serbian dish that I ate growing up, and it's called Sarma. And because it's a long braising process, I broke up the components. I'm using lamb and smoked pancetta."
Joe Bastianich: "How are you going to cook that? You're going to poach them?"
Daniela: "I'm going to poach the cabbage in the broth so that it gets more flavor."
Aaron Sanchez: "Daniela, do you feel that little cabbage roll would have benefited from being cooked in the sauce?"
Daniela: "I think that's a great suggestion."
Judges, talking behind the scenes
"Daniela's taken the classic dish from her grandma. Growing up, it was this tough cabbage with big chunks of lamb and rice, and it's braised for hours. But she's trying to fast track this thing with a ground lamb pancetta, and then she's just blanching the cabbage. I think she's going to be up against it, getting this thing done in time. That thing takes hours to cook properly."
Daniela: "What you have in front of you is a sarma. It's a stuffed cabbage roll with lamb, pancetta, and sauerkraut braised in a tomato sauce. Normally, it's cooked for several hours, so I tried to recreate it without having that long time cooking."
Judges
"Look, white winter cabbage. It's so tough, you can make shoes out of it. And I can just look at this, and I know that cabbage is raw. You could have shortcut this and boiled it and then put it in for a quick saute, but you just didn't give it the cooking time it needed."
"You can hear that crunch on the cabbage, which is not right. So the cabbage is the opposite of what it should be. It's crunchy. It's like eating a salad. So it's the total antithesis of the essence of the dish."
"You know, there's a saving grace in that filling. I love the seasoning, but it's very hard to get over that cabbage. Such a shame. The actual sauce is delicious, but it's not a real representation of how it should taste. And so it's failing on multiple levels. Sorry, Danielle. It's such a shame."
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