Polish Lazanki

Intended to be a way to use up my family’s leftover pierogi filling, this recipe is a more straightforward version of a pasta I ate as a kid. Lazanki (pronounced wah-zun-key), is a comforting Polish-Italian hybrid dish consisting of noodles, cabbage, sauerkraut, mushrooms, and sausage—typically kielbasa—topped with sour cream. Growing up my family called it “messy golabki,” but as golabki is stuffed cabbage swimming in tomato sauce, I now know that title is a little…off base.

While we weren’t good at following the rules, we were good at making pierogi en masse. The familial pierogi assembly line was my first foray into not just cooking, but cooking with efficiency. The high of completing hundreds of pierogi and not having a single one sent back because the crease wasn’t sealed remains unmatched. After making them, any leftover ingredients used in the filling were often used to make this pasta.

My version of lazanki honors the classic while imparting my own personal spin. Dividing the shredded cabbage to be half pan-charred and half quick-soured provides a variety of textures and flavors. The combo of just-on-the-edge-of-burnt and mouth-puckering tang sends your taste buds on a hot chase, tempered by the rich cream sauce. Speaking of cream, that’s the other little tip: Infusing herbs or aromatics in your cooking liquid, then removing them, allows a brief idea of the flavor to linger without it punching you in the face. This is a great trick if you want just a whisper of garlic in a sauce, or are working with whole spices and need a fast fix to imbue flavor without grinding them down. Using broken lasagna sheets as the base is also worth noting. Classic lazanki is made with tiny squares of dried pasta; I turn to broken lasagna noodles to get the same texture without having to make a trip to a specialty foods store.

Read more: Have Cabbage and Pasta? Make Lazanki