Alison Roman's Creamy Cauliflower Pasta | NYT Cooking

cauliflower pasta take one nailed it i'm allison roman and i'm gonna be making a creamy cauliflower pasta with pecorino breadcrumbs this is sort of like my bad day pasta when i come home from work and i just can't anymore and i would like my day to be a little bit better this is what i make i'm really using almost equal parts pasta and vegetable so it's like macaroni and cheese-ish but different great a real chameleon the cauliflower you can roast it you can blanch it you can steam it i'm going to saute it with some olive oil and shallots and once i add the cream and the pasta it just kind of melts into the pasta the flavor is a little bit less assertive than when you're roasting it so if you're like i'm not sure i love cauliflower i think that this is a really nice gateway dish to kind of familiarize yourself with it and there's cheese so if i am roasting it i'm going to keep the green stems on but for this purpose i'm gonna take them off i just don't like the way that they mingle with the pasta and i don't like the way they look in the cream sauce it's a shallow choice but one that i am making once we've cleaned away the green leaves i'm gonna slice it i like to see the cross section of the cauliflower i think it looks really cool and as you'll notice i'm not trying to get like perfect cauliflower steaks you don't really want them any thicker than about a half an inch otherwise they're going to be too clunky and they're not going to get soft in time as they cook down with everything else [Music] this is something that i'm absolutely obsessed with it's just a plastic bench scraper and i started using it when i was a pastry chef working at a restaurant but now i use it as just like a regular person in my kitchen so when we get to the larger parts of the cauliflower like this where you have a lot of the stem it tastes really good and i don't want to get rid of it but i'm gonna break it up i'm gonna use a shallot for this i really like how it's kind of like garlicy and oniony at the same time but if you had a small white onion or a yellow onion you can use that too if you wanted to add garlic to this that would also be awesome and i want to cut these shallots pretty thin i'm not looking for like caramelized onion vibes i cook them at the same time as the cauliflower so they will get soft tender and caramelized the same time the cauliflower gets soft tender and lightly browned so before i start cooking my cauliflower and my shallots and everything we're going to cook our bread crumbs which is probably my favorite food in general the bread crumbs kind of return a little bit of texture and they're salty and cheesy and crunchy and i think that's like enough of a cell these are breadcrumbs just from a stale loaf of bread that i cubed or tore and then put in the food processor until they look like this you can also just use panko which is great they're a little bit softer and a little bit sandier in texture and i think that once you go and try these food processory bread crumbs you will never go back with everything i'm going to salt and pepper it salting something after it's been cooked you get salt on the outside and not on the inside doing it from the very beginning at every stage of cooking you're going to get layers of flavor layers of seasoning bread crumbs love to be seasoned too and then as they become close i am going to add cheese i like the way the cheese kind of melts and gets a little crispy and you get these like granola e i'm going to use pecorino it's got a little bit more of an assertive salty flavor but you can also use things like parmesan it's kind of like when people add potato chips to their sandwich it's counter-intuitive and you're like why would you do that but once you understand that it's also adding like crunchiness and saltiness you're like oh why wouldn't i add breadcrumbs to my pasta every time i'm gonna use the same skillet that i cooked my breadcrumbs in to make the rest of my pasta the fewer things that i can clean the better for me personally [Music] again seasoning as you go i own about 45 pepper mills this one is my current favorite it's called the unicorn [Music] it looks like a lot of cauliflower in the skillet and you're not wrong there is a lot of cauliflower in this skillet but it's going to cook down and it's going to make way for all that pasta as the cauliflower cooks down it's going to start browning on the bottom and that's fine because we are going to add cream which is going to deglaze the pan and you may be thinking to yourself i can't believe it shrunk down that much i didn't think it was possible it did and it is possible yeah she didn't think it was going to happen and it happens so this is about almost where i'm wanting it to be to add the cream but before i do that i'm going to add my pasta this is a giant bag of pasta strikingly beautiful pasta i didn't fly to italy for the top family i'm using a rigatoni which is a short tubular shaped pasta with this i kind of want a shape that's going to mirror the vegetable size itself and similarly to how you just couldn't believe how much the cauliflower shrunk in the skillet you're not going to believe how much the pasta bulks up once it's cooked so you may be thinking there's no way that that amount of pasta is gonna be enough for four people but i promise you that it is especially in the context of all this cauliflower and now i'm gonna add the cream which is gonna make it really saucy and thick and nice what do you know just a cup i actually didn't pre-measure that but sometimes you get extremely lucky and have just the right amount this is definitely the ugliest dish i've ever made but definitely also one of the most delicious the color of this went from like a white creamy situation to a golden brown and that's because all of that brown bond which is what happens when a meat or a protein caramelized in the bottom of a skillet gets lifted up once you add a liquid black pepper if you're using enough of it which you should be is also going to give you some heat but i like to be a little bit more direct and add chili flake and if that's not your thing you don't like spicy then you can always leave it out and after obviously all that heavy cream you're going to want to keep it super light and fresh so i'm gonna add some lemon zest which if it wasn't there you'd be like i wish this were just a touch lighter [Music] that is very good and spicy i'm gonna add some more salt [Music] we're from italy it's that annoying [Laughter] that doesn't mean you need to fly to italy for your chili flakes but what i will say is that you do want to make sure that you're looking for really bright red kind of oily looking chili flakes that means they're fresher if you've had a jar in your pantry for like over six months i would say thank you next get them out of your house and buy a new jar of chili flakes i cook pasta so often that i can kind of feel when it's ready but when i think that it's close i'll take one lucky rigatoni and i will cut into it and i will test it for doneness and basically i'm looking for it to be about i'd say three quarters of the way through um you can see the ring inside of white and that's uncooked pasta so to me this indicates that we're about three quarters of the way cooked but i'm also going to bite into it and that is extremely al dente but it's actually great because i do want to finish it in the skillet so i'm going to add it now same reason we cook pasta in salted water so that the pasta as it cooks absorbs the salt and seasons it is the same reason we finish it in the skillet so any liquid in the skillet is going to go into the pasta so it's going to be more deeply seasoned throughout it's about a cup i may not use the whole cup but i always like to have the option the starch that releases from the pasta itself is going to thicken the sauce that water is going to evaporate and we're going to get back to that same thick creaminess that we were just at before we added the pasta [Music] i'm going to add more cheese because she's everywhere there can be cheese and again if little pieces break off into the skillet consider yourself extremely lucky so visually speaking this is exactly where i want it to be it's thick it's creamy all pasta will continue to thicken once you plate it so i always make sure that it looks maybe a little looser than i would want it in the skillet so it doesn't dry up once you serve it i'm gonna pick another lucky rigatoni and give it a test it's got a little bit of that white ring but that's good because that means it's al dente i like a bit of texture to my pasta so we are almost ready to eat our cauliflower pasta i'm going to add some fresh herbs and i don't want to add anything that's not going to contribute flavor and because we're already dealing with a pretty minimal ingredient list here i'm going to use chives i just really like the way that they contribute to reinforce the shallot in their savoriness and their onions and their springiness the cauliflower has kind of melted into the sauce and that's sort of the idea it's almost like ragu-ish in texture where it just becomes one with the dish you're not looking for giant hunks of cauliflower [Music] so she's going to get some bread crumbs which will kind of ruin you for eating pasta any other way for the rest of your life and then more cheese because we're living a little [Music] chives and then maybe some chili flake i like food really spicy you could also add more lemon zest if you wanted that'll be nice and not that i'm trying to like take a brown bowl of food and make it look prettier but it does look much nicer and then more breadcrumbs because we have it and you want it trust me now i get to eat the pasta [Music] now that rigatoni is enormous maybe not the most elegant pasta to eat on camera but one of the more delicious that is for sure you should all try them i will i literally will eat this whole thing alone i have done that you

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 924,187

Keywords: cooking, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, alison roman, alison, roman, cauliflower, cauliflower pasta, pasta, dinner, recipes, cooks, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, comfort food, vegetarian, vegetarian recipe

Id: bGgbA3B8eO0

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019