Cauliflower (Where to start?)

Maybe 15 years ago now, I was listening to a programme on Radio 4; they were talking to UK farmers about how the cauliflower used to be incredibly popular, but that popularity had been lost in favour of green vegetables. Today I think that trend has reversed again. It’s so popular! You regularly see it on menus as the hero: the vegetable equivalent of a roast chicken or a nice chunk of beef. And there are so many ways to cook it. Where to start?

You can eat it raw and grated, a little like couscous or rice; you can boil it quickly, or steam it; and of course, roasting a whole cauliflower looks spectacular when presented to the table. All the bitterness gets replaced with sweetness in the oven. Slice it, and serve it with a sauce. If it falls apart completely when you cook it, you might be doing it badly…

When we opened our business more than 20 years ago, people loved that Sami Tamimi and I were doing innovative things with vegetables. Using lots of spices, using herbs, using other condiments – it took on a life of its own. We now live in a world where vegetables are the centre of so many delicious meals, but it wasn’t so long ago that that was a rarity.

Most vegetables need to be injected with flavour; they just don’t have their own satisfying flavour like the ones meat and fish bring with them. But the cauliflower – especially compared with root vegetables like potatoes or members of the pumpkin family – absorbs flavour really well, which gives you so much to play with. It sucks in flavour as it cooks. In my recent book ‘Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things’, there’s a recipe for cauliflower shawarma. You treat it like meat, marinate it in shawarma spices and roast it, before serving with a green tahini sauce and a cabbage slaw. It really takes on those sweet and savoury flavours, the turmeric turns it nice and yellow, and you get something very meaty without it being meat.

Cheese and cauliflower cooked together is just spectacular; cauliflower cheese is one of the most wonderful things on earth. Make sure to flavour your sauce – my favourites to use are curry spices, or mustard powder, or seeds. You could use harissa as well, which would make it spectacularly red. And you could add roasted peppers and chillies. Most importantly, cauliflower cheese needs to be creamy and cheesy and thick: people hate when they get disintegrated cauliflower sitting in an unidentifiable liquid.

I love how much you can get out of a cauliflower: one of my favourite ways to eat it is as a salad from my book ‘Simple’. Grated raw cauliflower, roasted florets and stems, pomegranate seeds and lots of herbs. There are so many textures, and the sweetness of the pomegranate really works with the sweetness of the roasted cauliflower. I don’t think I’ve ever come across any cauliflower-based desserts, but I’d love to try one. I’m sure you could do some kind of carrot cake equivalent. A savoury cauliflower cake, maybe, with butter and parmesan and nigella seeds… Oh, I have done a cake actually! It’s in my book ‘Plenty More’.