Recipe of the week: steamed cabbage with sunflower-seed dressing

I first tried something similar to this at a small restaurant in east London, says Olia Hercules. Though Japanese, its toasted-seed flavour took me back to Ukraine and I reimagined the recipe with an extra injection of home and used sunflower seeds instead of sesame. It is one of the most delicious dressings and would work on many other steamed or roasted vegetables.

Serves four as a side dish or two as a light lunch

Ingredients:

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• 100g sunflower seeds
• 2 tbsp mild vinegar, to taste (cider or rice vinegar is good)
• 1 tbsp honey, to taste
• 1 tbsp soy sauce, or 1 tsp sea salt, to taste
• 2 tbsp unrefined sunflower oil (you can use sesame or rapeseed here or something nutty to intensify the flavour)
• 1 pointed (hispi) cabbage, or regular white cabbage

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 180°C fan. To make the dressing, put the seeds on a baking tray and roast in the oven for 6 minutes. They should become golden and tasty. You may need to give them a little shake and put them back in for another 2 minutes; use your judgement here, as ovens vary.
• Blitz most of the seeds into a paste, reserving a handful for sprinkling over at the end. I use an old coffee grinder for this, but a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle should do the job. Put the seed paste into a bowl and add the vinegar, honey and soy or salt, then trickle in the oil, combining it all into a smooth, thick dressing. Taste and see if you fancy more vinegar or salt or sweetness and adjust the flavour to suit. To make the dressing a little looser, add a small dash of hot water and whisk.
• For the cabbage, set a steamer (if you don’t have one, a colander and a pan with a lid will work perfectly too) over a pot of boiling water. Whatever cabbage you are using, cut off the dry end of the stalk. If you’re using hispi, quarter the cabbage lengthways through its core. If you’re using a regular white cabbage, cut it into manageable wedges, again through the core. Steam for about 10 minutes until it looks relaxed and is easy to cut through. White cabbage might take closer to 15 minutes.
• Let it cool down a bit and then dress with the sunflower-seed-paste dressing (I use a brush and dab it on), putting the rest in a little bowl to spoon on extra at the table. Then sprinkle the cabbage with the reserved sunflower seeds and serve.

Taken from Home Food by Olia Hercules (Bloomsbury Publishing, £26), which is out now. Photography by Joe Woodhouse. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £21.99 (incl. p&p), call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.