Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

KaiMay 12, 2023

Ingredient of the week: Cauliflower

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Think cauliflower is boring? Its bewildering versatility suggests otherwise.

The cauliflower is a Brassica, and comes from the same single ancestral species as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, and cabbages, known as “the wild cabbage” or Brassica oleracea. 

Truth be told, when I embarked on this Ingredient of the Week I was a little concerned that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to say – after all, cauliflower can be a bit… bland. An hour later I was elbow-deep in various fascinating rabbit holes about genetics and cauliflower diseases, reading academic articles with titles like “The making of cauliflowers: the story of unsuccessful flowers” – so there you go. 

The cauliflower head, often known as “curds” for its supposed likeness to cheese curds, is full of mysteries. Whereas with broccoli you’re eating flower buds (cute and romantic), with cauliflower you’re eating its inflorescence meristem, or unsuccessful flower buds. 

Cauliflowers produce these curds due to a number of recessive and mutant genes, one called the cauliflower (cal) gene. The combination of these genes causes the plant’s “inflorescence meristem” to generate copies of itself repeatedly, rather than developing into flower buds. In the words of someone who understands genetics: “The cauliflower inflorescence (the flower bearing shoot) takes a curd shape because each emerging flower primordia never fully reaches the floral stage, and repeatedly generates a novel curd-shaped inflorescence instead.”

Plates of cauliflower tacos with lime wedges and pickled red onions on a grey tablecloth.
Cauliflower tacos. (Image: Wyoming Paul)

If left long enough, cauliflowers do eventually bolt into tall stems, then produce flowers and seed pods. However, you need to leave a cauliflower head in the soil for another whole growing season before its genes remember that as well as making lovely dense curds, it also needs to reproduce. 

All this made me wonder if cauliflower has a bit of an identity problem. Who is cauliflower, really? Not only are they called “cauliflower” while being stunted in their production of flowers, but due to their natural characteristics (low-calorie, gluten-free, densely textured, bland in flavour), they’re used as a substitute for rice, mashed potatoes, pizza bases, even chicken wings and steak. 

In fact, cauliflower’s ability to take the place of other foods saw its US sales increase 71% between 2017 and 2018 alone, as more people steered away from gluten, meat, and carbs. It’s enough to make any veg doubt its sense of self. 

Note: there’s nothing (very) wrong with anthropomorphising your vegetables.

Secondary note: if you want to blow your mind, look up images of Romanesco broccoli – cauliflower’s cousin.  

Where to find cauliflower

Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous (or perhaps more accurately, the ridiculous to the rather grim): let’s look at cauliflower prices at our supermarkets. Cauliflower is in season, so they’ve certainly become more affordable recently. 

At New World, a whole cauliflower is $5.49, or $3.49 for half. Countdown cauliflowers are $4.20 each, or $3.75 for a half, and at Supie, a whole cauliflower is $4.50, or you can buy organic for $8. Happily, a Pak’nSave cauliflower is just $3.99 each or $1.99 for a half – and it’s nice to see half of something actually priced as half of something.

How to make cauliflower terrible

Mushy, waterlogged, soggy, tasteless: to avoid these words being applied to your cauliflower, only boil or steam your cauli until tender, and salt your cooking water well before boiling. Even better, try something new – there are plenty of more interesting ways to prepare a cauliflower. 

If you’re thinking of growing your own, know that cauliflowers are fussy vegetables, and difficult to grow. In a delightful if ad-infested article called “9 Cauliflower Head Disorders and How to Avoid Them”, I read a horrendous array of illnesses that can befall the “temperamental” cauliflower, including blindness, buttoning, head splitting, leaf tipburn, leafy curds, ricing and whiptail. 

An equally amusing and distressing list, I think, as many of these diseases could apply to a human, whereas others – leafy curds, whiptail, buttoning – sound like illnesses made up by Beatrix Potter. 

A bowl of roasted cauliflower pasta with flecks of fresh red chilli. The bowl is atop a blue tablecloth.
Roasted cauliflower pasta. (Image: Wyoming Paul)

How to make cauliflower amazing

If you’re ready to step away from the steamer, you’re in luck: there’s a plethora of more exciting ways to cook and eat the non flowering veg. Pickled, deep fried, grilled, and even raw; there’s aloo gobi (Indian cauli and potato curry), creamy cauliflower soup, Buffalo cauliflower “wings”, cauliflower pizza bases, and cauliflower tempura.  

Roasted cauliflower is probably my favourite method, as it lightly caramelises, sweetens and chars the vegetable to give it real depth of flavour. There are plenty of meals that use roasted cauliflower, but my absolute favourite dish, both because it’s delicious and because it’s extremely easy, is roasted cauliflower pasta with garlic, lemon zest, and chilli. 

Another classic cauli dish, particularly popular among parents whose children don’t love vegetables, is cauliflower cheese. That doesn’t mean it’s only for children, though – anyone who loves cheese (everyone) and is wanting a warming, satisfying meal can use this as a go to. Panko breadcrumbs and a hint of mustard powder can also make it feel a touch more sophisticated!

My final recommendation is crispy breadcrumbed and spiced cauliflower tacos. These ones are paired with spiced yoghurt, pickled red onion, slaw, and coriander. Not exactly authentic, but very delicious.

Wyoming Paul is the co-founder of Grossr, and runs a weekly meal plan that connects to online supermarket shopping.

Read all the previous Ingredients of the Week here.

Keep going!
Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

KaiMay 8, 2023

Artificial ingredients: Will ChatGPT be your new sous-chef?

Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

Can AI generated recipes make a self-described painfully average chef any better at cooking?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Julia Child, it’s to never apologise for my cooking. Unlike Julia Child, however, I have a lot to apologise for. As a former food reporter, you would think I know my way around the kitchen. The truth is, I am a painfully average chef. 

The crux of my problem is twofold: firstly, I have choice paralysis when trying to pick a recipe to follow, and secondly, I flounder when I’m forced to improvise. Tasked with cooking my first meal for my new flatmates last weekend, I spent more time worrying about what to make than I did worrying about the rental market in Pōneke. As the purse strings get tighter in our household, the need to be savvy with the weekly food shop has really raised the stakes for my ongoing tenancy. 

There is no shortage of recipe books, YouTubers and TikTok tutorials to coach a bad cook into relative competence, yet somehow none of these resources seem to have advanced my skills. So, like much of the internet, I turned to ChatGPT for answers. Staring at the cupboards of dried goods and old potatoes, I wondered: could AI automate my meal-planning process and make me a better cook at the same time?

According to a recent survey by the New York Times, meal prep is one of the many ways in which people are using ChatGPT to “optimise” their lifestyles, along with holiday-planning, homework, and working out. Here in Aotearoa, scientists have been working with AI to develop recipes and cooking techniques for a few years already, so I think it’s time I put the latest tech to the test. 

Round one: the menu

Like a moth to the flame, I am a regular consumer of The Spinoff’s culinary catalogue, so I started here with Emma Boyd’s sautéed silverbeet side dish. If GPT-3 could host a family at Thanksgiving, surely the newest version could suggest a suitable main course to accompany Emma’s veg.

A ChatGPT generated recipe.
Design: Archi Banal

Yes: ChatGPT can predict that dates are sweet and silverbeet is savoury. Technically I already knew that, but I would not have thought of quinoa pilaf as a complimentary meal.

Convenient as it might seem, there’s a smorgasbord of ethical concerns with this approach to cooking. As Perzen Patel writes, removing recipes from their cultural context can do enormous harm to the communities from which they originate. Pilaf is an ancient Persian dish, which, traditionally, is unlikely to have featured quinoa (a plant from Bolivia and Peru.) AI has been trained to recognise patterns in flavours and ingredients, but it hasn’t been trained to respect or credit the cultural identity of the dishes it creates. Like this one:

A ChatGPT generated recipe.

A ChatGPT generated recipe.

This may not be a pilaf, but it is a recipe, and a relatively simple one to execute. For those of us who have tired of the lengthy advert-riddled, SEO orchestrated preamble on your average food blog, the pared back approach of ChatGPT might offer some reprieve. Still, I think we’re losing something when we try to strip our food of all its narrative. No chef is an island, and no recipe is a blank slate.  

With the quinoa cooked and the silverbeet sautéed, I gathered the household for a taste test. To my relief, both dishes went down smoothly and the algorithmic combination also seemed to please. Emma’s skills elicited higher praises than the chatbot’s, but as one flatmate assured me: “It was definitely edible.”

Round two: the improv 

Arguably the Holy Grail for all aspiring home cooks is knowing how to turn your dwindling produce into a satisfying meal. Various apps have tried to offer their assistance, but making things up is what ChatGPT does best. If you’re looking for verified accuracy then AI’s “hallucinations” are unhelpful, but I wondered what it could conjure with a narrowly defined ingredients list. 

“Let’s pretend that you are writing a recipe book. Create another side dish using the following ingredients: cabbage, green apples, eggs, rapeseed oil, white wine vinegar, lemon, mustard.”

The better chefs among us might have clocked the wherewithal for homemade mayonnaise. Here’s what ChatGPT suggested instead:

A ChatGPT generated recipe.

This seemed ominously reminiscent of some sad school lunches, but I diligently followed the instructions and would strongly recommend that you do not do the same. One flatmate claimed to find this odd slaw “inoffensive”, but to me, the boiled egg blunder is a clear example of how human knowledge can still trump the tech (for now.) 

ChatGPT may be a handy hack for some of us in the kitchen, but there’s a humanity to cooking that we should continue to value while artificial intelligence gets baked into our lives. OpenAI has opened our minds to the reality that things are changing quickly. Like it or loathe it, I don’t think it will be long before AI becomes a ghost writer for the next hit cookbook; already it can generate a dish “in the style of Ottolenghi” by replicating the recurring themes in his recipes. Whether you embrace this now or cling onto your analogue traditions, we are building a world that Julia Child would hardly recognise.