Cooking Cauliflower
Cooking Tips
Cauliflower is versatile and can be prepared in a number of ways:
Sauté it. This provides the greatest flavor, texture, and overall recipe success
Steam it. The simplest way is to steam it. You can steam the whole head or cut it into florets.
Roast it. Cut the head of cauliflower into steaks or florets, spread them on a cooking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast in the oven until it’s golden.
Puree it. Once cauliflower has been cooked, it can be pureed until it's smooth. Some people use it as a substitute for cream sauces or add it to smoothies.
Mash it. Boost the nutrition value of mashed potatoes by steaming some cauliflower and mashing it into them. Or skip the potatoes and opt for low-carb mashed cauliflower instead. You also can mash cauliflower into pizza dough for a lighter crust.
Soup. Don't overcook the soup, see below
Raw. In salads and other dishes
Get the most out of cauliflower
There is strong nutrient richness in both raw and cooked cauliflower.
Chewing of raw cauliflower could also serve to break down cell walls and make carotenoids more bioavailable.
Soups can also be increased bioavailability from the freeing up of nutrients that remained inside the cells in raw cauliflower but got released from those cells during cooking due to the breakdown of cell walls.
We strongly recommend the purchase of fresh vegetables—including cauliflower—whenever possible, frozen cauliflower may make a second-best option in some meal plans
Vary Cooking Time to Coax Out Cauliflower’s Different Flavors
Cauliflower’s flavor changes dramatically depending on how long you cook it. Shorter cooking times bring out its cabbage like flavors, while longer cooking times turn it nuttier and sweet. Too much cooking drives off all its flavor. To bring the full spectrum of possible flavors into our soup, we cooked some of the cauliflower for 15 minutes and the remainder for 30 minutes.
15 MINUTES: The punchy, cabbage like taste and the sulfurous odor of a compound known as carbon disulfide are dominant.
30 MINUTES: Carbon disulfide dissipates, allowing the sweeter, nuttier flavors of other substances known as thioureas to break through.
60 MINUTES: After an hour, nearly all the flavor has dissipated, leaving the cauliflower bland and flavorless.
Food Pairings
Citrus especially lemon, garlic, eggs, honey, milk, cream cheese, cocoa, curry, cilantro, peanuts, figs, olives, baked bread, tomato, peppers, and fish