Cauliflower Information

Ingredients

SWEETNESS BLOSSOMS IF YOU HANDLE WITH CARE

Preparation

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 are a lack of enthusiasm and a tired repertoire.

People steam it until it's almost dead. They under-season 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 be on menus. (It is now, of course - Jean-Georges facsimiles abound.)

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.

I had never cooked it myself, but I 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 nothing. It doesn't need much washing, I thought, then laughed. That was not much of a plus.

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 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 sauteing.

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 sauteing you underline a quality rarely attributed to it: sweetness. Roasting or sauteing also gives cauliflower a chance to absorb oil and seasoning. Cauliflower soaks up flavors much in the way eggplant does.

Only it remains firmer.

Roasted cauliflower can be served warm or room temperature. It could be part of an antipasto of roasted vegetables. Or an accompaniment to a roasted 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 that 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 such as anchovy, olives and garlic. Their juxtaposition seems only to emphasize cauliflower's soft flavor. In southern Italy, cauliflower is tossed with pasta and hot pepper.

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. I made a mayonnaise with Meyer lemons, peanut oil, a little olive oil and lots of freshly ground black pepper.

Waters' 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 almost dry; it needs simply a quick roll in a tea towel to absorb any 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 sauteing cremini mushrooms in the pot before adding the cauliflower. I pureed 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. With black walnuts out of season, 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 sea water. 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. Voila(gra)! 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.

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