Two deliciously different red cabbage salads

Two recipes this week: Red Cabbage and Carrot Coleslaw, and Korean-inspired Red Cabbage Potsticker Salad.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO WE WENT TO A BIG FUN FAMILY BARBECUE in Milwaukee, and our daughter Laurel brought a huge bowl of coleslaw—a recipe that as far as I can tell, she made up the night before. It was wonderful! Crisp, flavorful, fresh, crunchy, and very pretty—just the thing to accompany the many awesome, meaty mains.

Turns out it’s also incredibly easy. You do one thing the night before, then in a few minutes you do the other things, and then it is ready. And it has only six ingredients, including the salt. The most onerous thing about preparing these dishes is cutting the carrots into matchsticks. You need to get into a meditative mood and then the process will just sweetly float along.

One cabbage, even a small one, expands into a fairly sizable hill of shreds, and shredding carrots, while it doesn’t result in such a spectacular volume, does take some time That is, committing to prepping all those vegetables made me wonder how else we could serve them. As so often, the answer came from the internet.

Coleslaw is a European dish. Early Dutch settlers in New York brought a dish they called koolsla. Kool is Dutch for cabbage and sla means salad. The second recipe here is  red cabbage potsticker salad, a descendant of a popular Korean dish, Bibim Mandu.

For this pair of recipes, one modestly sized red cabbage will make enough coleslaw for six to eight generous servings, as well as enough potsticker salad for at least four servings.

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Red Cabbage and Carrot Cole Slaw

Prep the cabbage the night before and this colorful, delicious coleslaw comes together quickly.

Course Appetizer, Salad

Servings 6 to 8

Ingredients

• 2/3 of a red cabbage, cored, tough outer leaves discarded, and shredded
• salt
• 2 or 3 carrots, peeled and cut into thin matchsticks
• 1/4 cup or so crumbled blue cheese (we use the precrumbled kind, which is drier than the fancy named varieties and this more suitable for this use)

For the dressing

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (we prefer Bragg’s)

Instructions

• The night before you intend to assemble the salad, shred the cabbage and put it in a bowl or container that has a lid. Salt it lightly, then toss everything with your hands to ensure the cabbage is uniformly salted. (You don’t need a lot of salt—it just needs to be mixed through thoroughly and evenly.) Cover it, put it in the fridge, and forget about it for at least eight hours or until the next morning.
• I recommend going ahead and prepping the carrot at this point—store it in the fridge in an airtight container until you are ready to put everything together.
• Assemble the coleslaw. Put the cabbage and carrot into a bowl and toss them together lightly with your hands. Then mix together the olive oil and apple cider vinegar in a small bowl. Pour this dressing over the vegetables and toss together. Finally, add the blue cheese. Give it all a thorough mixing and that is it. You’re done. Store the coleslaw in the fridge until you bring it out for serving, to keep it cool and crisp.

Red Cabbage Potsticker Salad

Red cabbage potsticker salad is a descendant of a popular Korean dish, Bibim Mandu, which in recent years has been reinterpreted all around the world—with lettuce, with green cabbage, with packaged salad mixes. I don’t think I ran across two recipes that were identical. Here is our take.

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Red Cabbage Potsticker Salad

Store bought frozen potstickers help this Korean-inspired salad come together quickly.

Servings 4

Ingredients

• 1/3 red cabbage, cored, tough outer leaves discarded, and shredded
• 1 or 2 carrots, peeled and cut into thin matchsticks
• 1/2 green bell pepper, sliced into sticks (you may also use julienned cucumber, shredded radish, lightly steamed peapods, or a spicier pepper, like a jalapeño or Fresno, in addition to or instead of the bell pepper)
• 2or 3 tablespoons toasted white sesame seeds to garnish at the end
• frozen potstickers, 4 per person (we like Trader Joe’s Chicken Gyoza Potstickers)
• salt, if needed

For the dressing

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and finely minced
• 2 or 3 tablespoons maple syrup or sugar or a combo
• 1/2 teaspoon hot oil (optional)
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil

Instructions

• Prepare the vegetables and add to a medium bowl.
• Put all the dressing ingredients into a lidded jar or other container that has a well fitting top. Close the lid and give them a good shake for ten or fifteen seconds to blend together. Set aside for the moment.
• Start cooking the potstickers according to package instructions—the Trader Joe’s ones we used take about 10 or 11 minutes to cook.
• Once you get the potstickers started, toast the sesame seeds—do that in a small dry skillet on low to medium low, stirring the sesame seeds with a spatula until they turn a light golden color. It will take about 4 minutes. I heartily recommend this process because it is hilarious, with occasional random seeds deciding they’ve had enough of this toasting thing and popping wildly all over your stovetop. Once the seeds are toasted, pour them into a little bowl or cup and set aside.
• Next, pour maybe half of the dressing over the vegetables. Be mindful—you want the dressing to lightly coat the vegetables, not inundate them. You can always add a bit more if you wish. This dressing will keep for a week in the fridge.
• Taste the dressed vegetable mixture and season with salt, if needed. Portion the vegetables onto individual plates.
• When the potstickers are done, arrange on top of the individual plates—we usually aim for a serving of 4 potstickers per person. Give each serving a generous scatter of sesame seeds. Done!