A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Cauliflower Flatbread

This was one of the strangest, silliest things I've ever made, but it was surprisingly tasty, so I thought I'd memorialize it here.

I've been avoiding sugar, white flour, and the like (also, red meat) for the last month. That's pretty easy: Just make different foods. We make curries and salads instead of sandwiches and pasta dishes. I'm not the kind to seek out special products (low-carb bread?!) or recipes to mimic the things I'm not eating. But I stumbled upon a paleo diet blog while looking up the nutritional content of something or other, and it had a recipe for cauliflower pizza.

The internet, it turns out, is teeming with recipes for cauliflower pizza.

The idea stuck in my head, and finally I just decided to try it.

Basically, the cauliflower gives structure to the ... well, it's not a dough at all — more of a malleable paste. Cheese provides most of the flavor and browning. And egg holds it together. I didn't expect each slice would stay in one piece, but it does.

Reading these two posts helped me: The Lucky Penny and Closet Cooking. I didn't squeeze the water out of the cooked cauliflower, though I'll try that next time. I won't recreate the entire recipe here — read their blogs — but here are the proportions I used:

1/2 small head of cauliflower, grated on a box grater, about 2 1/2 cups before nuking
4 oz cheese (I used cheddar because we have a lot of it, with a little Parmesan)
1 pinch salt
1 egg
1 t Italian herbs

I put goat cheese, roasted red pepper strips and marinated artichokes on it, and baked it on my Silpat, which was perfect, for about 35 minutes (it was very thin) at 400 degrees.

I couldn't bring myself to call it pizza, because, well, no, but I think flatbread is a reasonable term. It's very cheesy and really fun to make.

6 comments:

Kris said...

Oh, yum. I can see that Silpat would be perfect for baking that.

I just made roasted cauliflower again yesterday and it's also transformational. And to think we ate it boiled and steamed all these years!

Kris said...

Did you roll that out or pour it or pat it in place, or what?

Eva said...

Sort of patted it into place. Very strange texture before baking.

Kris said...

I made this and it was a big success. I did wring out the cauliflower after microwaving--I buzzed it up in the food processor first. Very fun to make, on par with the orange chocolate cake.

Eva said...

Oh good! I'll have to make another one. Did you put toppings on it?

Kris said...

I put red bell pepper and black olives on it. I didn't think it needed any more cheese in this case because I was serving it as a vegetable side.