Cauliflower Gratin Recipe

The bitter chilly of a Cincinnati winter introduced me to cauliflower gratin. It was my first 12 months away from dwelling; not like the nice and cozy winters in India that I used to be accustomed to, I used to be within the Midwest dealing with ear-biting wind chills and snowy days. I usually sought consolation and heat in libraries and bookstores and it was throughout certainly one of my journeys to the library that I got here throughout Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book and its recipe for cauliflower gratin. The cauliflower—draped in a wealthy, savory mornay sauce and topped with a sprinkling of buttery bread crumbs—rapidly grew to become my go-to consolation meal. 

Although I’ve lengthy since left Cincinnati, the dish stays a favourite of mine, a lot in order that I’ve tweaked it quite a few instances through the years to my liking. My model builds on the candy and nutty  flavors of the cheeses. Cauliflower florets are coated in a velvety mornay sauce—a béchamel enriched with semi-firm cheeses like Swiss, Gruyère, or Parmigiano-Reggiano—then topped with breadcrumbs. A contact of miso paste brings a deep, savory taste to the sauce as properly.

The Greatest Option to Put together Cauliflower for Gratin

To make sure that our gratin cooks evenly within the oven, we should first prepare dinner the cauliflower till tender. The query is: to blanch or to not blanch? Initially, I used to be curious to see if steaming the cauliflower in a baking dish tightly coated with foil would obtain the identical outcomes as blanching the cauliflower in a pot of salted water. After evaluating the 2 strategies side-by-side, I discovered that the oven-steamed cauliflower wasn’t exponentially extra flavorful than the blanched cauliflower, nor was it considerably quicker. In truth, the oven-steamed cauliflower took 25-to-Half-hour, whereas blanching—together with the time it took to convey the water to a boil—took nearly 10 minutes.

Learn how to Make Mornay Sauce

So as to make a really stellar mornay sauce, it’s important to know how a roux—a mix of fats and flour—works to thicken the soups and sauces it’s utilized in. To make a roux, you whisk flour into melted fats, cooking the starch for a number of minutes to prepare dinner out its uncooked taste. This not solely leads to a extra scrumptious sauce, however it additionally coats every starch granule in fats and reduces the chance of the flour clumping if you ultimately whisk within the liquid, like inventory or milk. 

The form of starch and fats you employ—in addition to how lengthy you prepare dinner your roux and the way darkish you need to take it—will decide the flavour and thickness of your sauce. (You may learn extra right here in Daniel’s deep-dive.) As a result of we don’t need a significantly darkish sauce—the darker the roux, the thinner the sauce—we’re going to prepare dinner the flour simply till it loses its uncooked taste earlier than we add the milk. And whereas we do need a sauce with physique, we additionally must take into account that the addition of Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano will considerably enrich the sauce. Right here, a 1:1 ratio of flour to butter makes a thick however pourable sauce that doesn’t turn out to be too heavy as soon as the cheeses are added.

Making an Umami-Packed Sauce

To focus on the savory notes of the sauce, I added white miso paste, which intensifies the flavour of the cheeses and likewise lends a barely nutty taste. As former Critical Eats editor Sho Spaeth wrote in his profile of Rich Shih, a mechanical engineer and koji authority, miso is made by fermenting soybeans with a koji mould known as Aspergillus oryzae, reworking proteins into flavorful amino acids that our style buds interpret as umami. Along with different glutamate-rich seasonings like onion powder and garlic powder, the sauce is savory and complicated, highlighting the cauliflower’s pure sweetness.

Seasoning the Breadcrumbs

It’s potential to serve a gratin with no crunchy topping of toasted breadcrumbs, however what enjoyable would that be? Right here, I’ve chosen to season my breadcrumbs with za’atar, a necessary ingredient in lots of Arab pantries. Za’atar refers to a selected plant that belongs to the oregano household and is indigenous to the Levant, although the time period additionally, considerably confusingly, is used to explain a spice mix made with the leaves of the plant. As Palestinian author and Critical Eats contributor Reem Kassis talked about in her za’atar recipe, it’s troublesome to supply contemporary za’atar in the USA. Whereas oregano is an acceptable substitute in the event you’re making your individual mix, it’s additionally potential to buy mixes from firms like Burlap & Barrel and Milk Street. Earthy and herbaceous, za’atar provides a vivid observe that enhances and offsets the richness of the cheese and cream within the gratin.