5 Secrets to the Best Runza Recipe, & from a Nebraska gal (me!)

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Years of experimenting with this recipe yields this result: 5 secrets to the best runza recipe. Hands-down. No contest! You betcha. And you’re welcome.

Everybody’s Gotta Eat . . .

. . . even when you are in a paradisiacal land of plenty like New Zealand, which is where we were most of the month, by God’s grace and great blessing, during which I made the runzas pictured here. I was tickled that I had already refined and perfected (cough) this, my best runza recipe, before we traveled to New Zealand.

This is–quite simply–the best runza recipe you will find out there (she admitted, with all earnestness and humility she could muster).

My explanation for how I found myself making runzas in our host family’s Tauranga kitchen one lovely afternoon goes as follows:

1. We were all going to be home that evening;
2. I didn’t have access to a car that day (so no going out adventuring);
3. the kids and I had already been to the beach and had our daily ice cream cones (our ambitious goals for the day);
4. we were all a tad homesick, and lastly . . .
5. I wanted to do something nice for the folks who opened up their home to us for our stay.

All those things added up to one thing: I needed to make runzas.

 . . . but what are runzas? And why are they special?

Please explain.

Okay.

Runzas, I’ll wager most–if not all–Nebraskans are familiar with. After all, the history of the Runza restaurants that are scattered across several states in the Midwest started in 1949, when Sally Everett and her brother, Alex Brening, opened a small Runza restaurant near Pioneers Park, in Lincoln, Nebraska, to sell their hot cabbage-and-hamburger-roll sandwiches.

The two sold the sandwiches there for nearly twenty years, before Sally’s son Donald Everett Sr. bought the franchise and started a Runza Restaurant at another location in Lincoln. The chain has only grown steadily and slowly since then, with dozens of locations now throughout Nebraska, and a few in Iowa, Colorado, and Kansas.

And back to today, and to the best runza recipe, please?

When we are not gallivanting about the globe, that is to say when we are home in Nebraska, we crave runzas regularly. Thankfully, there’s an easy fix for this: we drive twenty miles in three different directions to get to a Runza restaurant and order piping hot runzas and “frings” (a combination of french fries and onion rings) in short order, and fairly often we do this.

But we don’t always want to go out to get these delicious sandwiches/er, meat-filled buns/delectable hand-held . . . what are they, anyway?

But wait . . . you can actually make them . . . ?

Yes indeedy you can! . . . It’s easier to make them then explain what they are, almost. Quite often I make runzas at home. Everybody loves them, and they are so great to sock into freezer bags and pile into the freezer for quick heating later.

Hot. Tasty. Filling. Scrumptious. That’s what these homemade runzas are.

However. The sad, painful fact is this: it’s easy to make runzas at home that will elicit the following disappointing reaction from your family: “Meh.” Furthermore . . .  it’s a worthy challenge to make the best runza recipe, the one that elicits cartwheels and swooning glances from your family. That would be this one right here, gentle reader. Even better, the batch that results in these words, the ones you know you desperately want to hear:

“You are the most amazing person on the face of the earth, bar none. And this runza just made my day better.”

I certainly live for these words, myself. 🙂 No kidding.

I’ve made runzas enough times in my many many many (yawn) many many years of daily cooking and baking, to have amassed five crucial secrets to the really great and best runza recipe that you can make at home, rather than the mediocre ones that it’s too easy to come up with.

Mic drop moment

Furthermore . . . I’m gonna share these secrets with you. For. Free. Consider this post your very own personal shortcut, Gentle Reader, to delicious homemade runzas at your house, from the best runza recipe there is.  (You’re welcome, I’m sure. 🙂

This best runza recipe is a culmination of many, many runza-making sessions, not only in my own kitchen, but in my mother’s, as well. We’ve tried to break the runza-making code together, Mom and me. So some of these secrets are from her kitchen. I also gained a tip or two from this website, so a hat tip for this blogger, also a Nebraska grandma who shared her insights on runza-making.

Okay, let’s get on to the recipe, and then I’ll share my runza-making related secrets, and then we’ll all have a big party in my honor. (Well, why not? I’ll bring the bubbly. 🙂

The best runza recipe, at last

Runzas

dramamamafive

It's not difficult to make a decent batch of runzas, but it's dang tricky to make a FANTASTIC batch of runzas. This recipe includes several secrets to superlative runzas, those iconic cabbage and hamburger baked sandwiches that you can find in Nebraska and hardly anyplace else.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 1 hour hr

Cook Time 30 minutes mins

Servings 20

Ingredients

  

• 2 cups chopped onions
• 2 garlic cloves, smashed and diced
• 2 lbs ground beef
• 1 head of cabbage, shredded
• 1 can of sauerkraut, with the juice
• salt and pepper (to taste) & cheese (optional)
• DOUGH:
• 1/2 cup butter, unsalted
• 1 Tb dry yeast
• 2 cups warm water OR milk
• 1 TBs salt
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 7 cups unbleached flour
• 1 cups whole wheat flour

Instructions

 

• First, make the filling: Chop onions and garlic and sauté in a large frying pan with a little butter or olive oil until tender.
• Add ground beef along with generous amounts of salt and pepper and cook through, then drain well, if needed. (This will depend on how fatty the beef is.)
• Put browned ground beef into a large pot (I like to use my Crock pot). Stir in cabbage and kraut and simmer 3-4 hours, stirring often, and seasoning and tasting. (If using a Crock pot, cook on "low" for 5 to 6 hours.)
• Now to make dough: Heat the butter in the milk until almost completely melted. Let cool until room temperature. Stir the yeast into the warm mixture.
• In a large bowl, mix together sugar, salt, and eggs. Beat in eggs, then stir in yeast mixture.
• Add flours quickly one cup at a time, stirring well after each cup. (I use my Bosch mixer for this step.)
• When the dough begins to pull away from the side of the mixing bowl, turn out onto a lightly-floured countertop and incorporate remaining flour by kneading. Knead 100 strokes until the dough is elastic and smooth. (Kneading can be omitted but this will make the dough nicer to handle, and with an improved texture.)
• Let rest in a covered bowl one hour or until doubled in size.
• Cut off golf ball sized pieces. Lightly flour countertop and roll out each piece.
• Fill each circle of dough with approximately 1/2 cup of filling, and optional cheese if desired. Pull edges of dough around the filling and pinch tightly. Place on a sheet of parchment on a sheet pan, or a 9x13" pan. Or any pan that you like, actually.
• Preheat oven to 375 while allowing runzas to rest for 30 minutes. Bake for approximately 30 minutes, until approaching golden.
• Swash with melted butter and bake for 10 more minutes or until golden. Serve while hot. Urge caution! The filling will be very hot.

Now on to my runza-making secrets!

Secret #1: the Crock-pot secret

After you brown your hamburger with chopped onions and cabbage, dump it all into a big crock-pot and let it cook (on low) all afternoon. Trust me on this. It makes the filling so oozy-tasty-delectable. You don’t want the cabbage to be crunchy at all,  and this long, slow cooking does the trick to render it all sloppy and soft, like you want it.

Secret #2: Over-season the meat mixture

Salt and pepper it just a tad more than you regularly would. Season it, then taste. Taste and season. Over and over again until you think “Hmm. That’s just a little too peppery,” and then you know that it’s perfect. The bread part of the runza will temper that overseasoning. Be more careful with the salt than the pepper.

Secret #3: Behold–how to form a runza that won’t leak

My mom taught me this secret for runza forming. (Thanks, Mom!)

1. First, roll out a circle of dough approximately 1/4″ thick. It shouldn’t be so thin that it is breaking up into holes when you handle it.
2. Then place it into a bowl, which has been nicely smeared with soft butter.
3. Dump your filling on top of the dough, and then pull the dough around the filling and pinch and pinch and so forth until it looks like this:

Then, flip it over and it’ll look like this: Pretty, huh?

(Yep, in New Zealand, I cooked barefoot. Everybody does nearly everything barefoot over there. We loved it.)

Secret #4: Add a cup or two of whole wheat flour to the dough.

It makes a prettier runza dough, and makes the dough more nutritious.

And, finally:

Secret #5: Slather melted butter on the runzas during the last ten minutes of baking time.

This simple hack increases the prettiness, too. And that buttery taste on the hot bread: who doesn’t love that? Nobody, that’s who. 🙂 We like pretty, don’t we, you and I? Not to mention pretty and buttery. Yum.

Pretty buttery. Two words that work quite well together.

See the darker flecks? That’s whole wheat flour. And the browning is so pretty, because of the butter.

That’s it, Gentle Reader! If it seems like a complicated recipe, it actually isn’t–and if you don’t have time in one day to make all of it, you can make the filling and dough one day, and then put them all together and bake them the next.

Just a tip. Word to the wise. And whatnot.

What you might need to make this best runza recipe:

1. A really good rolling pin, handmade by my own little ole’ Dad, right here in Nebraska.
2. This is the type of Bosch mixer I use to make my runza dough, and many other doughs as well.
3. I use these reusable parchment sheets daily, for baking and many other uses!
4. This is my favorite type of baking pan for runzas, brownies, bars, and cookies.

A few other posts of interest:

1. Another New Zealand adventure: going to a Farmer’s Market and finding treasure . . .
2. If you don’t have a decent rolling pin with which to roll out your runza dough, shop for one right here in my li’l ole shop, all made by my talented li’l ole geezer dad. <3
3. Here’s a recipe for fresh mint milkshakes–a treat I whipped up after returning home from New Zealand. We had spearmint milkshakes in New Zealand that were to die for. Mine is a pretty good copy, if I say so myself! They go well with runzas. And there are more New Zealand photos in this post, if you can’t get enough of them. (I love them.)

Pin it for later!

Now go. Make runzas. Conquer your fears. And eat well. The world is counting on you to make a difference. 🙂

I know you can do it.

*hugs*

By the by . . . have you got an Amazon list? I nearly always do! I live a good hour away from most stores, so ordering from Amazon has been a convenient (sometimes too convenient) blessing for me. If you click through from my links to Amazon, they’ll give me a tiny commission on anything you purchase (though it won’t cost you another cent). Thank you in advance, or TYIA.

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