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Hello!
A few years ago, cauliflower became a hot commodity in the food world, and went from being mostly a sad, overboiled, and frankly stinky, vegetable side to a fully fledged ingredient in its own right (is it just me who noticed that this change coincided with the rise of low carb diets?). Thank goodness it did; when you prepare it well, cauliflower is truly wonderful and deserves every bit of its popularity.
Today we’re talking about the best ways to cook cauliflower in your steam oven. The recipes and ideas below are all about how to get the most from those creamy-white curds and stems.
On the housekeeping – or, rather, website upgrading – front, we are still working away on finishing the planned Insiders site upgrade. It’s looking so good and I’m bursting to share it with you, so it’s taking all my patience to wait and make sure everything is working and looking just right! I can’t wait to show you all what’s been done and how much easier it’ll be to cruise around all your Insiders content.
Happy steam oven cooking, see you in June!
Emily x
New to Learn: Steam Oven Cauliflower
A short and sweet discussion about steam oven cauliflower! Whether you love it roasted or you just want to steam cauliflower with other vegetables for a simple side, I’ve got you covered.
Cooking cauliflower in your steam oven retains texture and sweetness over more traditional boiling methods, and it’s a great way to make the most of this ubiquitous vegetable.
New to Cook: Za’atar Cauliflower Steaks
I adore these thick cross-cut slices of cauliflower rubbed with olive oil and roasted with a Middle Eastern Za’atar spice blend. You can make this dish with florets of cauliflower too (just reduce the cooking time to suit), but there’s something about the textural and visual effect of larger pieces that makes it quite special.
The Season Flip
Honestly, I could come up with cauliflower recipe ideas all day long, so it was hard to restrain myself to just a few for this newsletter. These are two favorites for both cooler and warmer weather.
Southern Hemisphere
I know, it’s a bit retro and not very on trend. But a great cauliflower cheese is always welcome on my table, and trendy or not, I can assure you there’s rarely any left at the end of dinner! I prefer to serve this as a main course with a big salad or roasted vegetables on the side, but it’s also a worthy side to a classic roast dinner.
For quite a while now, I’ve been making Nagi’s cauliflower cheese; tweaked for the steam oven. She roasts her cauliflower before saucing, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Here are the steam oven adaptations I make:
Firstly, when you’re roasting the cauliflower florets, preheat the oven to Combi Steam, 430°F/220°C, 50% (medium) humidity. Roast the florets for 6-8 minutes, no more. They won’t be very golden but it’s the perfect doneness for this dish.
I make the sauce on the stovetop per the recipe, subbing out the cream for all milk (personal preference, I find the cream and that much cheese just…too much).
When it’s time to bake the cauli cheese I bump the oven temp down to 350°F/180°C and the steam down to 30%. I leave the time at 30 minutes so the cheese browns nicely on top.
Northern Hemisphere
Cauliflower with Peas, Almond and Lemon
This dish is an ‘idea recipe’ I love to make when the peas are out in my garden (no picture, sorry; peas are decidedly out of season here for now!). It’s a double-dressing kind of salad, which might sound odd but the lemony dressing plays off the creaminess of the garlic mayonnaise perfectly.
The quantities here are up to you. As a guide, for half a large cauliflower I do about a heaping cup of shelled peas.
Start by blanching the peas in boiling water for 1 minute (you could steam them, but it’s not really worth firing up the oven for a minute of steaming such a small quantity of food). Shock them in cold water, then drain and set aside while you make the rest of the dish.
Toss cauliflower florets in olive oil (be generous with the oil), salt and pepper. Roast on Combi Steam, 430°F/220°C, 50% (medium) humidity until they’re dark golden on the edges and tender all the way through.
While the cauliflower roasts, mix about a half cup of good bought mayonnaise with half a grated garlic clove, then smear this mixture onto a large serving plate. Make a fast dressing with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, the same of olive oil and a good grinding of pepper and salt. Set aside.
As soon as the cauliflower comes out of the oven, arrange it over the garlic mayonnaise. Scatter the peas over the top and drizzle everything with the lemon dressing. Top with a handful of roughly chopped roasted almonds and serve. For extra points, scatter with some of the Za’atar mixture from the cauliflower steaks recipe above.
A Thing I'm Loving
Clay therapy.
Over the past several years, I’ve started to play with clay and occasionally I even make something I like! There’s a wonderful clay studio near me and heading there every week or two to get my hands dirty for a few hours is honestly akin to therapy.
I have no specific product to recommend here, more a PSA that having a creative outlet (especially one that’s not linked to your work, if you work in a creative field), is so valuable. Find your own local clay studio, book a craft course, buy an embroidery kit, anything! Modern life is busy and doing something that forces you to go more slowly will always be a thing I love.
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Here’s your opportunity to ask me anything you like related to combi steam cooking!
I really encourage you to submit questions, and will do my best to answer as many as possible. Though I may not be able to get to every single question, I will carefully curate ones which are relevant and represent a variety of topics. We all learn from each other, and I often learn new things based on questions from all of you!
If you have an AMA question, please email it to [email protected]. Make sure you include the phrase INSIDERS AMA in the subject line so I can collate and read all your submissions.
From Elaine
Q: What I struggle with often, is how to cook various components of the meal that require either different steam or temperature settings, (or both) to have the complete dinner ready and on the table at the same time. I usually end up cooking in stages and keeping the first-cooked warming while I cook the second and third foods. Not all foods are suitable for this approach – do you have some guidelines or hints that would help me improve in this area?
A: This is a tricky issue if you don’t have a second oven to achieve those different-time, different-temp results. In some respect, you’ve answered your own question in that not all foods are suitable for keeping warm while you cook something else. But plenty are! The best guideline I can give is to work with what you’ve got; by this I mean that if you’re working with one oven, try to take the stress off by choosing dishes which will cook well in the oven together. Combining, say, delicately steamed dumplings and a high-heat combi steamed fish dish is never going to be simple unless you have two steam ovens, or can steam your dumplings on the stovetop. Roasted potatoes with that same fish dish would be a great choice; you can start the potatoes off first, then add the fish to the oven when they’re just about done and have everything come out together.
If you have, say, an oven and a microwave, work with that. There’s no shame in giving micro-suitable foods (think rice, sauces, roasted veg, pasta bakes) a quick but careful blast in the microwave just before serving. Or if you happen to have a warming drawer, pop roasted meat in there to rest and hold while you make sides.
I hope this helps; I have the topic of multi-stage and multiple-dish cooking flagged for a future Insiders newsletter, so I’ll go into the different choices and workarounds I use in more detail there.
From Barbara
Q: Loved your ideas for using stale bread! Bread pudding is a favorite method for doing that in my home. Here is one of my recipes (peach bread pudding) which seems to lend itself to steam oven baking since it requires baking in a pan of water. How would you convert this non steam oven recipe into one using my combi steam oven?
A: Peach bread pudding is new to me but it sounds fabulous! I’ve just filed it away to try out when peaches come back into season in Australia (for everyone else following along, I found the internet version of Barbara’s magazine-clipped recipe). I find combi steam gives bread puddings a more custard-y finished texture that I really enjoy, just be careful not to overcook or they will dry out and be quite firm.
The conversion for this is pretty straightforward, it will just be the cooking time you need to play around with. I’d bake the puddings using Combi Steam, 350°F/180°C, 50% (medium) humidity. Do away with the water bath and just put them straight into the oven; at a guess I’d say individual puddings as written in the recipe will take about 20-25 minutes. They will puff like souffles in the oven, then deflate somewhat when you remove them (this happens to a lesser degree with a water bath too).