Steemit Iron Chef 2018 Act 01 Round 02 : Butter-Braised, Pan-Seared Cabbage

This was really good. Sometimes amazing dishes are super-simple. I watched a cooking video with this technique a few weeks ago and was replicating it as best as I could from memory. Look what I started with:

That's a plain green cabbage, some butter, salt, basil, and kombu.

I removed the gross outer leaves and chopped the cabbage in half. Then I heated up a cast-iron skillet with just a little avocado-seed oil pretty hot, and charred the cut face of the cabbage for about five or ten minutes. I moved it around just enough to keep the oil spread and to prevent sticking, but no more. Then I threw in a whole stick of butter and as that melted, tipped the pan up and used a spoon to continually pour the hot, frothy butter over the cabbage -- especially the thick, core section. As I did this, the water frothed out of the butter and it browned. It's a little hard to know when the cabbage is done, but I did this for a while, until it seemed right and that worked for me. At the very end, I poured in the powdered kombu to the butter and kept spooning that over the cabbage which helped lend some umami. I removed it from the heat, let it set for a minute or two, and them moved it to a cutting board where I sliced it in half, sprinkled salt over it, and tucked basil leaves between the hot cabbage leaves. (This is a little tricky to do without burning myself, but I managed.) And then I sprinkled basil blossoms over the whole thing.

Here's the braising technique which is pretty simple, really:

Once I moved it to the plate, it was sort of a study in lovely contrasts:

Note that when you tuck the basil into the hot cabbage, it starts wilting and becomes wonderfully aromatic right away -- you want to serve it pretty much immediately.