'The £1 veg you should be cooking like a steak'

Cabbage has had quite the year. Back in January, BBC Food (among others) tipped the wallet-friendly brassica as a food trend to watch, and since then I've seen it charred, roasted and fermented, starring in everything from crunchy salads to warming braises across restaurant menus and social feeds.

Salting cabbage gets you part of the way to some of my favourite foods – kimchi and sauerkraut being at the top of the list.

This recipe for yamitsuki kyabetsu – which you might know as addictive cabbage – is a salted cabbage salad that's meant to be so good you can't stop eating it. The salt draws out the moisture, intensifying the flavour and the crunch.

Trust me, you can pretty much eat half a head of cabbage on your own when you prepare it this way."

One of my favourite ways to prepare cabbage is treating it as you would a piece of meat. It takes advantage of all those layers and creates the most beautiful texture.

Using a three-stage cooking process gets you a combination of textures and flavours. The searing creates that golden crust and gives you browned bits on the bottom of the pan to make a sauce with. The braising gives you that incredibly tender texture, and roasting it in the oven brings out that nutty, caramelised flavour on top.

Using all the flavour in the bottom of the pan to make a sauce (the same way you would with a steak) makes this dish extra special.

I love Chinese cooking – the heat of the pan and the speed things come together. Cooking cabbage like this creates two perfect textures: soft outer leaves and a nice crunch left in the centre.

I don't have a wok at home, so for this recipe I use a Dutch oven and make sure to get it very hot before I start cooking (always with some oil in, with this type of pan). When that oil is smoking, we go in with our meat, then our vegetables. The flavour of the meat with the sweetness of the cabbage is one of my favourite combinations.

Using spices like cumin and Sichuan peppercorns, we get this floral, numbing hum throughout the dish.

Jesse Jenkins, aka ADIP, is an author and food creator who's won a huge following for his cinematic cooking videos.

Originally published October 2026.

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