Meals · Soups & stews

Golumpki soup

Name: Golumpki soup
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 40 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients: 2 tsp olive oil; 500 g 90% lean ground beef; 1 large onion yellow onions, diced; 4 cloves garlic, minced; 1 small head green cabbage, cored and roughly chopped; 1 can (400 g) crushed tomatoes; 900 ml beef broth; 1 1/4 cups cooked white rice; 2 tsp paprika; 1 1/2 tsp dried dill; 1 tsp salt; 1 tsp black pepper

Stuffed cabbage rolls, unstuffed: beef, cabbage, tomato and rice in a big pot of broth, no rolling required. Cabbage was the breakout vegetable of 2026, and this is the dish that carried it — a bowl with a lot of food in it and not many calories.

Time: 55 min (15 prep + 40 cook)
Servings: 6
Per serving: 305 kcal
Protein: 22 g

Both directions are legitimate — the score measures fullness per calorie, not virtue. Every version is the same dish, rebalanced.

Ingredients

2 tsp olive oil10 g
500 g 90% lean ground beef500 g
1 large onion yellow onions, diced150 g
4 cloves garlic, minced12 g
1 small head green cabbage, cored and roughly chopped700 g
1 can (400 g) crushed tomatoes400 g
900 ml beef broth900 g
1 1/4 cups cooked white rice250 g
2 tsp paprika5 g
1 1/2 tsp dried dill3 g
1 tsp salt5 g
1 tsp black pepper2 g

Every ingredient links to its food page — same data, same score, same formula.

Steps

Brown the beef in the oil in a large pot over medium-high heat, 6–8 minutes. Add the onion and cook until it softens, then the garlic for a minute more.
Stir in the paprika, dill, salt and pepper, then the cabbage. It will look like far too much cabbage; it collapses to about a third as it cooks.
Add the crushed tomatoes and broth, bring to a simmer, cover and cook 25–30 minutes until the cabbage is tender.
Stir in the cooked rice and warm through. Taste for salt — cabbage and broth both soak it up — and serve.

Why cooked rice at the end?

Raw rice added early drinks the broth and keeps drinking it in the fridge, so day two is a stew. Stirring cooked rice in at the end keeps it a soup all week.

Why this score

solidly filling

Low energy density — a lot of food for the calories.

Three routes to fullness — one is enough

30% of kcal

86% water

18 g/Mcal

What pulls it down

Nothing here converges the way engineered food does — no sugar, no savoury and no alcohol penalty.

How scores work

Computed on the finished dish, not an average of the parts: 1828 kcal goes into the pot, 2937 g of ingredients comes out as ~2650 g of food → 69 kcal per 100 g. Cooking moves water, and energy density is the score's biggest lever — so we show the math. Full formula here.

Per

Calories: 69
Protein: (30%); 5 g
Fat: (34%); 3 g
Carbohydrates: (37%); 6 g
of which sugar: 2 g
Fiber: 1 g
Sodium: 261 mg

Percentages are the share of calories from each macronutrient.

Computed from the ingredients' USDA data — nothing typed by hand. Every number is traceable, every score recomputable.

More meals

Photo: AI-generated. Nutrition and score are computed from the ingredients with the published formula — this recipe hasn't been kitchen-tested by us yet.