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I have a recipe that calls for 400g of canned grape leaves. Since I have access to fresh leaves, what amount would I need?

user149408
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Presumably that's a 400g tin, not 400g drained weight. But this is there it gets strange. I can't find tinned vine leaves online, except already stuffed. I can find 400g vacuum packs and a few jars. A little searching suggests that in other sizes of jar, the drained weight is about 2/3 of the total - about 266g.

A leaf from my vine weighs about 3g, so you'd need about 90 leaves. Mine still aren't full size, and a figure I've seen online is more like 4g per leaf brined, drained, which would mean more like 70 leaves. Having made stuffed vine leaves, that's a lot, and a lot of work.

The actual figure is likely to be a bit lower, as they'll still be wet from the brine. That might bring it down to 50-60 leaves if yours are big.

Chris H
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    I just had a look at the recipe again. It calls for 300–500 g of brined grape leaves. Main ingredients for the stuffing are 400 g of meat, 400 g of uncooked rice and 2 tomatoes. which adds up to roughly 1 kg. Each leaf gets filled with 1–2 tsp, which would be close to 10–20 g. That would make 50–100 leaves. So we’re roughly in the same ballpark. There’ll probably be some variation due to leaf size, and how generous people are with the stuffing. – user149408 Jun 17 '23 at 18:32
  • I'm always too generous, and still have to pick and blanch more leaves! – Chris H Jun 17 '23 at 19:07
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    Just made the leaves. Mine seem to be quite big (dunno what the standard size is), so I used 2 tsp of filling per leaf. If I counted correctly, I got 46 leaves (plus one “runt” leaf) out of it. With smaller leaves and 1 tsp of filling per leaf, that would make about 93. 70 leaves is a good guess, but YMMV may vary greatly depending on leaf size. – user149408 Jul 01 '23 at 17:23