2 Simple Mistakes To Avoid When Making Cabbage Steak

Pepper steak may be a tasty dish of steak cooked with peppers, but cabbage steaks, by contrast, are simply thick slices of cooked cabbage. Mashed's recipe for cabbage steak comes from developer Kristen Carli, a cabbage enthusiast who gushes "I truly love roasted cabbage, and I like to eat it as my veggie side fairly often." Among the numerous different cabbage recipes from all over the world, cabbage steaks stand out for their simplicity.

All you need to do to follow this recipe is to slice up a head of cabbage (the standard green kind), sprinkle it with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and olive oil, and bake it. It's pretty hard to mess up, although Carli cautions "Don't forget to season the cabbage" as it really does need the extra flavor from the spices. You should also avoid overcooking the steaks — while Carli tells us, "I love that the cabbage gets slightly crispy" when it's baked, if it's left in the oven for too long it might go beyond crispy and turn into a carbonized lump that no one could muster much enthusiasm for.

Despite the name, cabbage steak is not a meat replacement because the vegetable doesn't contain much protein. A single serving of these cabbage steaks contains about 2 grams, whereas the recommended daily intake (as per Harvard Health) is 0.36 grams per pound of body weight. This means that a person weighing 140 pounds would need about 50 grams a day, so to serve as a main course a cabbage steak would need to be topped with an egg (they are the "perfect protein," after all), some peanut butter, or another protein-rich food. As a side dish, though, cabbage steaks work with a variety of meaty entrees. Cabbage is often paired with rich, fatty foods such as pork or duck, although you could also serve these steaks with leaner meats such as steak, chicken, or fish. A starchy side like mashed potatoes or buttered noodles could round out the meal quite nicely, too

If you're worried that these cabbage steaks may be too plain for your taste, you might want to embellish them a bit. Add a little acidic bite with lemon juice or balsamic vinegar, smother them in a creamy cheese sauce, or sprinkle them with crushed red pepper or hot sauce to amp up the heat level. While cabbage steaks alone may not be the most exciting vegetable side out there, one thing you can say is that they work well as a blank canvas to be "painted" with other flavors.