Salted cabbage salad with chestnut mushrooms and flaked seaweed

Winter

Occasionally I’m asked: ‘How do you come up with your recipes?’ And it gets me thinking, ‘How do I come up with my recipes?’ I don’t have a method as such. I rely on the seasons to inspire me, but other than that, I just get a feeling. This salad just happened one day. I was salting a few cabbages for sauerkraut, when I decided to tumble a handful of the juicy shredded caraway-spiked cabbage with some sliced chestnut mushrooms. Yum, I thought. A tweak or two later and here we are.

Serves 4

Ingredients

1 sweetheart cabbage, such as hispi
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon tamari sauce
4–6 firm chestnut mushrooms (about 175g/6oz), stalks removed and reserved
2 teaspoons dried seaweed flakes, such as dulse
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
freshly ground black pepper

Method

Peel away the outer leaves from the cabbage, halve it, remove the core and slice the leaves into 2cm (¾in) ribbons. Put the ribbons in a bowl with the caraway seeds, salt and tamari. Use your hands to massage the salt and tamari into the cabbage, tumbling it around the bowl and crushing it between your fingers.

Quite soon you’ll notice the cabbage is giving up lots of its moisture, which has the most incredible flavour – we’ll use this to dress the mushrooms.

Slice the mushroom stalks about 5mm (¼in) thick.

Take a large serving platter and lift the cabbage out of the bowl onto the platter, squeezing out the liquid as you go and collecting it in the bowl.

Add the sliced mushroom stalks to the juices, along with the seaweed flakes and the cider vinegar, and season with black pepper. Tumble everything together. Slice the mushroom caps and arrange them over the cabbage and spoon over some of the mushroom dressing.

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