Vegan Cabbage Curry Recipe

Serve cabbage curry with warm rotis, or as we like it best, with brown rice and sambar!

Cabbage! When amma cooks it, we can smell it all over the house! Yum! Take care not to let it rot, though – you can smell it in the next house, too! Yikes!

An abundant source of Vitamin C, cabbage is a versatile vegetable, going into side dishes, soups and salads!

Do you think cooking cabbage without oil is difficult? No it isn’t! We use the best quality oil in whole nuts instead of lower quality extracted oil.

Try out this simple oil free stir fry cabbage curry recipe – a quick recipe with simple ingredients. Serve it with warm rotis, or as we like it best, with brown rice and sambar! 🙂

Whole Food Plant Based Cabbage Curry Recipe

Course: Course 2 (Vegetable Dish) for Lunch & Dinner Meals
Cuisine: Karnataka Recipe from South India
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 15 minutes
Servings: 2 people

INGREDIENTS

1 small Cabbage chopped
1/2 tsp Mustard Seeds
1/2 tsp Bengal Gram Dal
1/2 tsp Jeera cumin seeds
1/8 tsp Asafoetida / Hing
1 Green Chili slit
1 inch Fresh Ginger chopped
1 strand Curry Leaves
1/8 tsp Turmeric Powder
2 tsp Miso Paste (Healthy Salt Alternative. See Nutrition Science Highlights below)
1 tbsp Almond Butter
1/4 cup Coriander leaves chopped
1/8 cup Water as required

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Finely chop cabbage using a mandolin or a sharp knife. Peel and chop ginger into small pieces. Slit green chilli along its length.
2. Cook chopped cabbage, ginger, and green chilli with turmeric powder and 1/8 cup water, with closed lid. Once done, switch off the stove.
3. Heat an iron tawa or thick bottomed steel vessel. Add bengal gram and roast it till becomes slightly golden in color. Add mustard seeds & jeera. Dry roast until it splutters. Immediately mix into cabbage curry with almond butter.
4. Garnish with curry leaves, and coriander leaves. Serve it with your favorite roti or sambar rice!

Nutrition Science Highlights for WFPB Cabbage Curry Recipe

1. Why Miso Paste? Miso paste is fermented & salted soya bean paste. American Heart Association Maximum recommended maximum daily salt intake of 3.75 grams per person to minimise risk of high blood pressure, stomach cancer and chronic kidney disease. In addition to helping us restrict salt intake, replacing salt with miso paste also helps by neutralising the negative effects of salt by soya phytonutrients. You can easily make fresh miso paste at home by mixing 100 grams of cooked soya paste with 10 grams of salt, or 10 tablespoons of cooked soya paste with 1 tablespoon of salt. If making at home, ensure to use immediately, or freeze in batches to use later. Or, simply use 3.75 grams of salt or less per day per person and add 18 to 20 grams (dry weight) of soya beans in any dishes, spread through the day!
2. Why mustard seeds? Myrosinase, an important enzyme in cruciferous vegetables such as knol kohl, cauliflower, cabbage, radish, and broccoli, is essential to form sulforaphance, a powerful anti-cancer compound in the body when we consume these vegetables. However, when they are cooked, myrosinase gets deactivated and sulforaphane does not get synthesised. By adding raw or slightly roasted mustard seeds, or a little of any raw cruciferous vegetable to the dish after cooking, we can add myrosinase back into the dish and protect the powerful anti-cancer functions of cruciferous vegetables.
3. Why not tadka? Tadka, thaaLippu, oggaraNe. Tempering spices in oil is quintessential to Indian cuisine. This practice may have started as a compromise when whole nuts were unavailable, and indeed, is more common in inland, drier areas where nuts do not grow easily, all year round. You can enjoy the taste and fragrance, though, by just dry roasting the spices you require, without the oil, or even better, mixing spice powders directly into your dish!