Cooking Vine Leaves, Greek style Dolmades (stuffed vine leaves)

Vine leaves on the kitchen table. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

In England we association vine leaves wrapped around rice with Greece, but from the internet I learn that they are also popular in other countries, such as Lebanon. You can make the filling from rice and meat, which is more of a filling main course dish.

Greek Dolmades
I remember going to Greece for the first time and being surprised that every meal seemed to start or continue with rice wrapped in vine leaves. Not being a fan of rice, my favourite food being the potato, I did not take to dolmades, as the Greeks call them, but I certainly remembered them. In fact, I was glad to get away from them. But now things have changed.

Trying and Enjoying New Foods
You travel just as much when young, but don't like the new foods. Why? Firstly, one advantage of growing older is that you start to like olives and sour foods, and savouries.

Secondly you make an effort. You expand your willingness to try new foods and persist. Why?

Apparently your metabolism changes. But also as your history of health mishaps increases, so do your aches and pains. And your discovery of side effects, hence the search for natural remedies and prevention rather than cure.

You gain knowledge of healthy, another generation going, the swings and roundabouts of health fashion bring one food then another into the list of food you must eat to cure your lack of vitamin whatsit. This new discover accounts for either your energy or lack of it, and will cause you to lose your hair and your life if you don't eat much more, preferably three times a day, every day.

Vines Around The World
But, I digress. Back to the subject of vine leaves around rice. Where can you see vines? Europe, America, Australia and South Africa, Lebanon, Israel, France and England. You can visit vineyards which are ready to receive tourists in America, France, England, South Africa and Australia. About 50 or more countries within 30-50 degrees latitude grow vines, and apart from Greece and Lebanon, most countries don't make a great thing of gathering vine leaves, just growing grapes for eating or making wine. What a waste of edible leaves.

Photo by Dr Avichai Teacher, of sculpture in Petah Tikvah, Israel. 

Supermarket and Garden Grape Vines
After we brought dolmades back from the supermarket, I looked out of the window at the vine leaves growing in the garden on our vines planted last year and thought, 'We don't yet have enough grapes to harvest for making wine, but what about the leaves?'

One year after planting in the garden, vines ordered from an online catalogue. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

How to Harvest
My first question was, is it safe? I'd heard that some plants have poisonous leaves, although you can eat the fruit. For example, rhubarb. I found no reference to any dangers.

Wild Vines
As usual Google is the encyclopaedia, with wikipedia and the whole world keen to tell us their knowledge. I read through pages of Americans reporting how they harvested vine leaves from wild vines. So Americans who don't have home vines can look for wild vines. Now I have the opposite problem. I have a garden vine, from a nursery, but no wild vines. But since the leaves are edible, and not used for anything else, and it is not damaging the plant to remove them, we shall use our garden vine leaves.

Wild vines which produce little or no fruit are best, they say. Meanwhile we are experimenting with our garden vine. I've never seen a wild grape vine in England. On the other hand, I wasn't looking.

Legality
Another factor in the UK is, would picking a wild vine be legal? You are not allowed to pick flowers planted in public parks nor along motorways, however profuse they seen to be. Nor is it legal to pick wild flowers and deplete the stock or wipe out the last of rare flowers.

Oddly enough, from what I've read, you are supposed to ask your neighbour and get their permission even to take fruit on branches hanging over your land. However, in the UK, apparently it's legal to pick an occasional fruit on either private or public land, so long as it is for home use and not commercial (which would be on a bigger scale, and more frequent).

Currently none of this applies to us. We are just looking at not wasting the vine leaves, and the fun of finding out how dolmades are made.

Our leaves look a pretty pales green, not the dark colour of the ones served in restaurants and now bought from supermarkets (Waitrose) in the UK.

Picking Season
We have already missed spring. Apparently, the secret is to pick the leaves spring to summer. The Americans say from this American holiday until that, which leaves me puzzled as I can never remember which holiday is when. Luckily, with July 4 being today, and we picked the leaves yesterday, we were just in time.

Leaf Colour
The leaves, interestingly, can be green with red stalks. You pick them with the stalks, which are discarded later.

We found that the leaves turn darker after you cook them. We found recipes on the internet.

Cooked vine leaves turned dark. Fresh vine leaves. Rice with herbs for stuffing. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

Blanching and Washing Leaves
First pick your vine leaf. Then blanche it. This means wash quickly with boiling water, then cold. Why? Apart from removing surface dirty or poison, you soften the plant.

But what dirt can be on a plant in the garden, if it's not the part of the plant in the soil.

Somebody in my family once said there's no need to wash fruit or vegetables, because boiling it or cooking it will kill anything living on it. However, another reason for washing is to remove chemicals from pesticides.

 In your own garden, where you have no pesticides, you also want to wash off any urine from dogs.

But we don't have a dog. What about foxes, cats, bird droppings, flies? Have you ever had in your garden a fox, cat, stray dog, bird or fly? Even if you have not, in daytime, you don't see what goes on at night, when 90% of animal activity takes place. Yes, I think washing would be a good idea.

Leaf Colour
Which leaves can you pick? What if the leaf is not dark green on both sides?

Some leaves have white undersides. The French phrase blanc de noir means white wine from black grapes. A famous wine comes from a vine with leaves which are white on the underside.

The five lobed vine leaf, with points and tooth-like edges and V-shape veins. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

How Many Leaves?
Apparently you need to pick extra leaves to put in the base of the cooking pot.

Rice Filling
After washing the leaves, you have to prepare the rice. We took a trip to the supermarket to buy the herbs to add. Mint. Two more herbs. Parsley. Onion to chop. I wanted to buy herbs as whole plants, not just leaves, to grow in the garden.

Which Rice?
Which rice? We could not see any advice. The chef in the family decided the rice had to be the sticky stick-together for that makes rice pudding, so that was what we used. The end result was a solid mass. The long grain or Basmati rice gives separate grains with a crunchy bit.

Herbs For Filling
We used to have flowers in flower pots. Now I keep herbs in flower pots. That way I can find them easily and not get muddled up with flowers and edible plants. The traditional kitchen garden has a large area for each vegetable. Unfortunately, my garden started out with flower which now invade vegetable areas which are not fenced off as it's a small garden. The herbs I planted have also expanded.

Rolling up Vine Leaves
The most entertaining part was learning how the vine leaves are rolled up to make neat little parcels. If you were wrapping a Christmas present such as a rolling pin or column shape tin of biscuits you would cut a neat oblong of paper. A vine leaf looks a most awkward shape.

First we unwrapped a supermarket dolmades to see what they did. They used two leaves. Why?

We soon found out. How do you wrap the first leaf?

Dollop your rice mixture into the middle. Roll up the vine leaf half way. The filling squishes into the shape of a cigar. To be politically correct for myself and other health conscious people, I suppose I should think of another image.

Anyway, having rolled half way, falling away from yourself, (because you grab the nearest piece of vine leaf) you then fold in the leftover edge of vine leaf from the outside left and right into the middle.

Third stage, continue rolling away. So the second half of the rolling away wraps around the left and right pieces.

The second vine leaf sticks to the first, makes a more solid wrap so it doesn't break up. From a nutritional point of view, two leaves gives you more vine leaves and thus vegetable per serving of rice, and uses up more of the huge numbers of vine leaves you have collected.

Storing Leftover Leaves In Freezers
Leftover leaves can be stored in the freezer, ready for hewn you want them. Store in separate smaller bags inside a larger zip lock bag so you can take out half of them and use on more than one occasion. To prevent the love getting crushed in the freezer drawer, put in a Tupperware or sealing plastic box. If you are short of boxes of the right size, you can use a shoe box. In our little fridge freezer in London we would not have room for this.

I remember visiting a family on a remote farm in Canada. They went into the city only once a month. They stocked up with huge quantities of frozen food, as well as freezing food from their own land. They had two or three giant freezers. They would use a shoe box.

Eating Dolmades
The end result was rather bland. We needed more onion and salt and pepper.

Now you know what to do, so you can do the same. If you can't, you can enjoy reflecting on how it's done, which adds to the pleasure of looking at vineyards and vines on your travels. You can also think how the dolmades is made, when you see the dolmades on your plate and other tables at Greek restaurants in Greece and around the world.

Buying Dolmades
You can buy stuffed vine leaves in supermarkets in the UK. You can even sign up to a comparison site and get money off an online shopping order.

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/morrisons-price-comparison/Fresh_Ready_Meals/Delphi_Dolmades_Stuffed_Vine_Leaves_4_per_pack_150g.html

See my previous posts on vineyard visits in the UK and other countries and wines in this blog. What do you drink with the stuffed vine leaves if you have them as a meat main course? Perhaps a Greek wine, such as retsina.

For dessert I prefer a sweet muscat grape wine from the island of Samos. (See one of my previous posts.)

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.