Cabbage Healthy Food Guide

Peak season: Fall

Recipe shown above: Warm Red Cabbage Salad

If the only time you eat cabbage is when it’s drenched with mayonnaise in coleslaw or boiled with corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day, it’s time to broaden your horizons. This surprisingly versatile vegetable just begs to be used more creatively—so we’ve come up with some other options for you. Like most of its Brassica relatives, cabbage is a nutritional powerhouse. Rich in vitamin C and fiber, it also supplies isothiocyanates—chemicals that amp up the body’s natural detoxification systems. Studies suggest that cabbage may help fight breast, lung, colon and other types of cancer. Download a FREE Healthy Cabbage Recipe Cookbook!

Since boiling strips away most of its phytonutrients, we like to sauté, steam and even roast cabbage. Our kimchi bypasses the traditional lengthy fermentation process, yet retains all the zest of the original. We’ve also roasted cabbage with a rich black bean-garlic sauce and made a warm apple-and-cabbage salad with caraway. Our mashed red potatoes with buttery sautéed cabbage is a healthier version of the Irish staple, colcannon. Now when you see those pretty rows of cabbage at the market, you’ll be inspired to bring one home.

What you get

Cabbage is rich in vitamin C and fiber, cabbage also supplies isothiocyanates—chemicals that amp up the body’s natural detoxification systems. Studies suggest that cabbage may help fight breast, lung, colon and other types of cancer.

Tips

Shopping Tip: Choose the right cabbage for the recipe. Hard white (a.k.a. green) cabbage and red cabbage are delicious raw in coleslaw or cooked in soups, stews and sautés. Mildly flavored, delicate napa (Chinese) cabbage, with ruffled leaves and white ribs, is widely used in Asian cooking. Try it shredded in salads, quick-cooked in stir-fries or slow-cooked in soups or stews. Savoy cabbage is a loosely packed, wrinkled cousin of common green cabbage. It’s our favorite choice for cabbage rolls and is sturdy enough for roasting.