Whole Roasted Cauliflower Makes a Fine and Tasty Show

SAM_0836

Using cauliflower in spectacularly showy ways seems to be a fad these days, probably a good one. Cauliflowers are usually big, sometimes as big as a small chicken, and since they are white, you can add stuff to them to give them a lovely color, and since they are bland, they are susceptible to various seasonings. And the little darlings are very low in carbohydrates, fats, and sodium, in case you worry about those things, which I do from time to time.

Even though I have a reflexive allergy to food fads (I run a sriracha-free kitchen), I finally capitulated to roasting a cauliflower having seen gorgeous pictures of them on a couple of my favorite food websites. Normally I favor vegetables I can grow, and cauliflower isn’t one. Well, once in a while I get a good one, but my neighbor Nancy and I were both complaining that usually the curds get all loose and purply even when we use the leaf-blanching technique, and my cauliflowers are often puny. Waste of garden space. Give it a big twenty-flour inch spot and all you get is one meal.

If we are to believe the recipes that accompany the gorgeous pictures, however, we would find ourselves using wine, olive oil, butter, and array of seasonings all drowned in a lot of water merely for the purposes of cooking the cauliflower before roasting. I was skeptical. Instead, I salted the poaching water, cooked the cauli until it was mostly tender, then saved the oil, vinegar, butter, and seasonings, for the roasting part of the process. Maybe it would have tasted better had I poached according to the prescription but maybe not that much better.

In fact, as I went along, it occurred to me that generous bastings during roasting with my favorite garlicky vinaigrette would have worked as well as the combination I used. I encourage you to experiment.

The leftovers were fine, too, mashed up with boiled potatoes for a tasty side dish a couple days later.

Looking for…Italian cheese pie. Jan Rhenow, in Harrington, wrote, “A number of years ago I visited a woman in Rockwood who served an Italian Cheese Pie. It was wonderful.  She wouldn’t give out this family recipe. Any chance you have it or can get it?  I would be grateful.” This is a dessert pie, probably made with ricotta, and we’d love to get the recipe. Anyone?

Whole Roasted Cauliflower
 
Ingredients
  • One head of cauliflower
  • Salted water sufficient to cover cauliflower
  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice or rice vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons butter, melted
  • 2 teaspoons cumin
  • 2 teaspoons paprika preferably smoked paprika
  • Salt and pepper
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and bring the water to a boil.
  2. Trim the cauliflower of its leaves and pare down the stem.
  3. Poach it in the water until just tender, remove it and drain it in a colander.
  4. Mix the oil, vinegar or lemon juice, melted butter, and spices together.
  5. Set the cauliflower in a roasting pan or pie plate.
  6. Use a pastry brush to spread the oil mixture over the whole head allowing it to penetrate but reserving some for another basting.
  7. Roast for about twenty minutes, basting again after ten minutes.
  8. When the cauliflower is completely tender, and an even golden color, remove from the oven and

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.