Bigos

Fall in the Yukon

The cold weather is coming, and I'm up to my neck in cabbage so I'm making a dish that my dad recently introduced me to that is a good solution to both: Bigos. I'll let this poem introduce it for the rest of you.

Pan Tadeusz

"In the pots warmed the bigos; mere words cannot tell
Of its wondrous taste, colour and marvellous smell.
One can hear the words buzz, and the rhymes ebb and flow,
But its content no city digestion can know.
To appreciate the Lithuanian folksong and folk food,
You need health, live on land, and be back from the wood.

Without these, still a dish of no mediocre worth
Is bigos, made from legumes, best grown in the earth;
Pickled cabbage comes foremost, and properly chopped,
Which itself, is the saying, will in ones mouth hop;
In the boiler enclosed, with its moist bosom shields
Choicest morsels of meat raised on greenest of fields;
Then it simmers, till fire has extracted each drop
Of live juice, and the liquid boils over the top,
And the heady aroma wafts gently afar."

— Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, Book 4: Diplomacy and Hunt

Translated byMarcel Weyland

So there you have it: Bigos is essentially a hunters stew adopted from the Lithuanians? 

Most would agree it is basically a stew comprised of cabbage and sour cabbage (kapusta kiszona) and whatever else they had available to them; this usually meant kielbasa, dried or brown mushrooms, potatoes, some tomatoes, and whatever else you brought back from the harvest, hunt, and forage.

I love the idea the idea behind bigos for three reasons:

1) Waste not: People make best use of whatever they had;

2) The variance of flavours that #1 invites. No two Bigos will be the same, and because the year's crop, hunt, and forage goes into it, its a representation of your space-time (physics!);

and

3) Ideally, you keep a pot going for a week or more, replenishing ingredients as needed. Can't express how much I like this idea.

I had some farmer's sausage, and kielbasa in my fridge that I wanted to use up as well as a cupboard full of yukon potatoes accompanied by a smelly turnip. I was already more than half way to a good sounding Bigos so I grab the remaining ingredients for what I had in mind: tomatoes, mushrooms, kapusta (cabbage), and kapusta kiszona (sauerkraut).

Unfortunately I was a little late at starting my kapusta kiszona this year so I had to substitute in a simple sauerkraut I found at the store. Luckily the one I found uses the same ingredients list as mine:

I haven't changed the way I make kapusta kiszona, or sauerkraut as I call it here, but my entry about it is pretty long so here is the quick how to:

Kapusta Kiszona

1) Kapusta

2) Shred, and if you are lazy like me, keep it "rustic"

Thats "rustic" alright

3) In a jar (that was dipped in boiling bath), and add ~ 1 tablespoon of salt / Ilbs of cabbage

4) Leave it for 3-4 hours as the salt draws the liquid out. If you can't push the cabbage below the liquid level when you return, wait a bit longer, or pour in some salt/water solution ~1 tablespoon / cup. I had to add a little.

5) Rig it so the cabbage is submerged, store it someplace cool (not fridge), and come back in 6 weeks.

onto the:

Bigos

Nothing fancy about this:

Ingredients:

- Kapusta 
- Smelly turnip
- Kapusta kiszona 
- Kielbasa 
- Farmer's sausage
- Mushrooms
- Tomatoes. No need to get any fancier, but I went with some tomato conserva.
- Garlic 
- Onion
- Potatoes
- Chicken Broth (not shown)

The How-To

You've made stew before: brown the meat, deglaze brown bits with some liquid or broth. Add onions, garlic and hardy vegetables: in this case cabbage. Add tomatoes, cubed carbohydrates (potatoes and turnips), add kapusta kiszona, add rest of broth and boil it down until its almost thick enough to eat with a fork. I like to boil it down even further with this dish.

It doesn't look like much, but with a big glob of sour cream, this really hit the spot on a cold day. I made a lot and I'm looking forward to the 3rd or 4th reheating.