Sweet Ginger Soy Fried Cabbage

INGREDIENTS

For this sweet ginger soy fried cabbage recipe, almost all ingredients can be found at your local grocery store with the exception of dashi powder. Dashi powder can be found online, or at an Asian grocery store – I usually find mine at a Japanese or Korean grocery store.

Dashi powder is optional for this fried cabbage recipe. It adds a bit more salt, and a slight smoky umami flavor but is not required. Although I highly recommend buying a small jar if you do a lot of stir fries or fried noodle dishes. A teaspoon of this adds quite a bit of umami flavor for any kind of stir fried and noodle dishes 🙂

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

How I Like to Remove the Cores of Cabbages

Personally, I find cutting cabbage to be a bit of a pain because of how tough it is to cut through and how wobbly it can be but once I get the core out – cutting it is a breeze.

To cut out the core, I like to first cut the cabbage in half. Once I cut it in half I cut an upside ‘V’ out of the bottom to remove the core. Once the core is out, I usually like to cut the cabbage halves into half again before slicing for smaller bite sized cabbages leaves.

Do You Really Need to Grate the Ginger?

No, you don’t have to grate the ginger, but if don’t then you should keep the ginger intact in larger slices.

Grating the ginger helps spread the ginger flavor into the cabbage and the sauce without biting into large chunks of ginger (which can be overpowering) while you are eating the cabbage.

Not everyone has a grater small enough to grate ginger though, so to work around that you can slice the ginger into large slices. That way, you can still brown the ginger in the beginning with the garlic to infuse the oils with ginger flavor and when you are finished cooking, you can easily fish out and discard the large ginger pieces.

Caramelizing Cabbage Without Burning the Onions

Caramelizing the cabbage and giving it a bit of char gives this dish a bit more flavor, but onions cook and burn a lot faster than cabbage so my work around to charring the cabbage without burning the onions is to add the onions after the first round of cabbage charring. Don’t worry, the onions will cook along with the cabbage during the cabbage’s second round of charring. (There’s 2 rounds in total)