Article on cooking with Cauliflower

[Guest guest]

I hope it's OK to send this; I was trying to format the recipes in it,

and gave up! Word of warning: I've left the article intact; there

are references to non-vegetarian items, but they are few and may

serve as sources of inspiration. There's one mention of broth, and

the author has a fondness for anchovies. If it wasn't OK to send

this, I apologize in advance.

 

Rudy

 

 

* Exported from MasterCook *

 

The Celestial Cauliflower: Earning a Spot in the Sun, New York

Times Jan 17, 2001

 

Recipe By :By AMANDA HESSER

Serving Size : 0 Preparation Time :0:00

Categories :

 

Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method

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By AMANDA HESSER

 

Hold a raw head of cauliflower in your palm. It is heavy. Sniff it. It

has almost no discernible fragrance. And it feels a lot like a rubber

ball.

 

Pinch a leaf. It squeaks.

 

Good food, your memory will tell you, is not heavy or rubbery. It

smells good and does not squeak.

 

But cauliflower's exterior is nothing more than deceit.

 

Add a dash of heat and it becomes as tender as a string bean. It

smells like a sweet young cabbage. It invites the company of

toasted butter, herbs, beets, even anchovies.

 

More often, what it inspires is a lack of enthusiasm and a tired

repertory. People steam it until it's nearly dead. They underseason

it. They suffocate it with bad cheese. Or they simply don't cook it

at all, dismissing it as boring.

 

Chefs are not innocent. If it weren't for Jean-Georges Vongerichten,

who christened the concept of caramelizing cross sections of

cauliflower glistening, amber-rimmed trees it might never have

been on menus. (It is now, of course, there are dozens of Jean-

Georges facsimiles around New York.) You'll see the occasional

puree or gratin, as well. But mostly, cauliflower is overlooked,

treated with less reverence than a hot dog.

 

Until last week, I ate cauliflower about twice a year. Once at my

mother's house: she pickles it with green tomatoes, peppers, celery

and carrots and serves it as an hors d'oeuvre. And once when I visit

my grandmother, who steams it and showers it with browned butter

and a scattering of bread crumbs. I love it both ways, and forget it

between visits.

 

Now, drifting languorously through the blandness of January with its

dearth of produce, I thought of it once again. I never cooked it

myself and figured it was time. So I drained my local market of its

supply, and set out to find what everyone was missing.

 

I held a head of cauliflower over my sink and felt utterly unmoved.

It offered little. It doesn't need much washing, I thought, then

laughed. That plus was not going to cut it.

 

Then I began cutting and trimming, which is satisfying in the way

cutting up old bread for bread crumbs is. You get somewhere. You

can be forceful and it heeds.

 

I began first with my own version of Mr. Vongerichten's caramelized

cauliflower. I trimmed the stem and leaves, then sliced the large

florets as you would a mushroom, so that I got thick, even cross

sections. I sauteed the slices in olive oil in a skillet over medium

heat. They browned like potato slices and eventually turned limp.

 

You can also roast them. Toss them in olive oil, salt and pepper

and lay them out on a baking sheet. Roast at 375 degrees, and

turn them just once to brown the other side. You get nearly the

same effect as sauteeing.

 

The edges will darken, softening but not turning mushy. The flavor,

however, is striking: sweet and only mildly cabbagy. Its texture is

almost starchy, like celery root.

 

The most common ways of cooking cauliflower steaming or

blanching keep its essential flavors intact. You taste the

pepperiness, the cabbage, the minerals. By roasting or sauteeing,

you underline a quality rarely attributed to it: sweetness. Roasting

or sauteeing also gives cauliflower a chance to absorb oil and

seasoning. Cauliflower soaks up flavors much in the way eggplant

does. But it remains firmer.

 

Roasted cauliflower can be served warm or at room temperature. It

could be part of an antipasto of roasted vegetables. Or an

accompaniment to a roast chicken or lamb. And though they aren't

obvious choices, scallops and lobster, both naturally sweet

themselves, are delicious with roasted cauliflower.

 

Mine never got quite that far. It was so good, I ate it all, as is.

 

With the sauteed cauliflower, I made a warm salad by toasting

coarse bread crumbs and crushed coriander in a skillet and tossing

them with the cauliflower, chopped parsley, anchovy, olives and

capers.

 

Cauliflower is odd in that its subtle flavor would seem to demand

gentle treatment, and yet it works well with very strong flavors like

anchovy, olives and garlic. Their juxtaposition seems only to

emphasize cauliflower's soft flavor. In southern Italy, cauliflower is

tossed with pasta and things like pine nuts, capers and anchovies.

It is also blanched with other vegetables and dipped into bagna

cauda, a warm anchovy sauce.

 

A friend told me that Alice Waters includes a recipe for cauliflower

with anchovy mayonnaise in " The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook "

(Random House, 1982). You make a simple lemon mayonnaise

and work a paste of anchovies into it. It's Meyer lemon season, so I

made a mayonnaise with them, peanut oil, a little olive oil and lots

of freshly ground black pepper.

 

Ms. Waters's recipe calls for blanching the cauliflower. Blanching

is fine, and it gives you a chance to season the vegetable a little by

salting the water. But cauliflower can easily turn soggy. And once

it's soggy it's difficult to get any kind of sauce or dressing to coat

it. Steaming, on the other hand, keeps it nearly dry; it needs

simply a quick roll in a tea towel to absorb excess water.

 

I steamed small cauliflower florets, let them cool and then tossed

them with some of the mayonnaise, so that it was like a potato

salad.

 

A memory then conveniently resurfaced. A few years ago, a friend

in Tuscany served a thick cauliflower soup, then went from bowl to

bowl pouring in a swirl of peppery Tuscan olive oil. The olive oil

hung in the soup like embedded jewels and flavored each spoonful

as it got jiggled around the bowl.

 

I got out my pot and worked on a soup. As it turned out, a much

different soup. I began saut ing cremini mushrooms in the pot

before adding the cauliflower. I pur ed the soup, added a little

cream, and served it with a splash of walnut oil at the table, trying

to play up the earthiness of the flavors. The aroma of mushrooms

came first, followed by the gentle persistence of cauliflower. The

walnut oil had a way of filling in the gaps.

 

Cauliflower works well with nut flavors. In " American Cookery "

(Little, Brown, 1972), James Beard suggests browning butter with

black walnuts before pouring them over a steamed head of

cauliflower. I used almonds instead and cut the cauliflower into tiny

little trees so that each bite would be more like a bean salad with

little, soft pieces of cauliflower, a dose of nut-flavored butter, and

crunchy slivers of almond.

 

I also made a cauliflower puree, blanching the florets in water

salted so that it tasted like seawater. You can simply drain the

cauliflower, put it in a food processor with a little butter and finish

the job. (This is a great thing to know especially if you ever

overcook cauliflower. Voilà! It's puree and no one will ever know you

meant otherwise.) Or you can be rewarded greatly for one or two

simple adjustments.

 

First of all, cauliflower purees almost instantly in a food processor.

But if you let the processor go for a few extra minutes, scraping

down the sides from time to time, the texture changes significantly.

It will go from something smooth like pudding to a mixture that's

closer to whipped cream.

 

To underline its natural sugars, I folded in a little apple, which I had

roasted and pureed separately. It tasted almost fruity, but nothing

like a dessert. It helped the cauliflower's sweetness emerge,

without leaving the taste of apple. (With the cold leftovers, I stirred

in some cooked and riced Idaho potato and formed soft pancakes,

which I fried flipping them ever so gently in olive oil and butter and

showered with grated pecorino romano and a few turns of my

pepper mill. It was yet another delicious idea from James Beard.)

 

By this time, I realized that I had found what I was looking for and

was nearing the point of excess. But I had one more head left and

a recipe that a friend had sent me. " Sounds like nothing, but it's

delicious, " her note said. It sounded like a perfect description for

cauliflower itself.

 

So I forged ahead. The recipe was for a pasta dish. The cauliflower

is cooked down with garlic, a dried red chili, tomatoes, chicken

broth and cream. By the end, it, like me, was near exhaustion. It

collapsed at the touch of a fork. The recipe, taken from " The Top

One Hundred Pasta Sauces " (Ten Speed Press, 1987) by Diane

Seed, instructs you to crush everything together with a potato

masher, just before tossing in cooked penne.

 

It was wonderful, in that mysterious way that the puree was,

leaving you to wonder just what it was that made it so good.

 

Description:

" NYT article describing ways to work with cauliflower "

Source:

" http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/17/living/17WINT.html "

 

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