Fårikål – Travelbag Cruise Christmas Dish

The lovely folk over at Travelbag Cruise challenged me to create a dish for their Norwegian Fjords cruise. I was excited about doing this for a few reasons. Firstly I love learning to cook new food and I rarely use lamb and secondly I’ve been very interested in Norway recently so I thought this would be a fun way to learn more about the country and culture.

So, I took the challenge on over the weekend and decided to create the traditional Norwegian dish, Fårikål- pronounced forrycoal. This dish is very simple, it’s lamb with cabbage. The dish is originally from the Western part of Norway but is now enjoyed all over the country. Once you’ve tried it it’s very easy to see why it’s so popular. Fårikål is often enjoyed during autumn time so I thought that it would make for a good festive dish.

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What you will need:
– Lamb shoulder
– Cabbage
– Whole black peppercorns
– New potatoes
– Salt
– Flour to thicken up the sauce – 
optional

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Kick things off by washing your cabbage and potatoes. You can then chop the cabbage up and leave it to one side.

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Take your lamb and if possible chop it up and place into your cooking pot.

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Add in your potatoes. This is optional, you can cook them separately but by adding them into the cooking pot you will get lots of added flavour into them and it makes things much easier.

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Take your chopped cabbage and layer it into the pot. If you’re making a larger portion you can layer up the meat and cabbage multiple times. I just went for one layer of each this time ’round.

Add the whole peppercorns along with a little salt.

Put the lid on and cook for 2 hours but be sure to keep checking in with it.

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Just look at that!

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We left it to cook for just under two hours and as you can see, it was ready to be served up.

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Cheeky close up.

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Here is the final dish. It’s not the most photogenic of foods but boy does it taste real good.

This was a very easy dish to make. The lamb was very soft and succulent and dangerously easy to eat. On Tuesday I’m heading home for Christmas and plan on making this again for the whole family.

Have you ever tried to make Fårikål?


This post was created in collaboration with Travelbag Cruise.