Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man screws up simple tasks to empower you to step over his burnt huddled form to greatness. I’m your Canary in the Culinary Coal-Mine, Jon O’Guin. Today’s recipe is, like Wednesday’s post, a pretty simple sandwich that I SOMEHOW STILL FUCK UP. If you want to avoid the tragic details, click this link and get to the recipe on your own. For everyone else, let’s talk about my many mistakes, and Missed Steaks.

Caul me, Beep Me, if you Wanna Reach Me

This is one of many explorations on the site of the simple fact that, if you bread cauliflower, it’s a reasonable approximation of chicken. Not perfect, by any means, but it’s honestly not too far off. This specific version of the same idea, however, played to some interesting facets of the process, AND was a fairly low-investment recipe: the only things I needed to buy that weren’t always in my house already were hamburger buns, cauliflower, and buttermilk. (And technically one other thing, but we’ll get to that.)

It’s a topic I LOVE visiting for some reason. It’s especially weird because it’s like, the ONLY method I accept cauliflower as a replacement. Because Trust me, there are a LOT of them. Seriously, today’s recipe came from an Insert in a Food Network Magazine titled “Cauliflower Magic” and featured such hits as:

-Cauliflower Pizza Crust

-Cauliflower Tortillas

-Cauliflower Hummus

-Cauliflower Gnocchi

- Cauliflower Alfredo (which is arguably not even a replacement: it still uses all the ingredients of normal Alfredo sauce, it just ALSO uses blended cauliflower)

-Cauliflower Rice

-Cauliflower Couscous (which, sure, basically just Rice again)

And a bunch of normal cauliflower recipes (cauliflower in tagine, minestrone, etc), and several “Cauliflower Chicken” recipes such as Buffalo Cauliflower, Cauliflower Parmesan, and today’s dish, Fried Cauliflower sandwich.

The main point is that Cauliflower is a firm enough vegetable, and retains enough of its structure in cooking, that it feels satisfying and ‘meaty’ as an entree.

And that…kind of burns through everything new I have to say about the cauliflower. Luckily, there’s some other stuff we can talk about, like the coating!

Dredging up the Past

So, the basic system here is what I think of as “the standard chicken dredge”, with a little extra flair, and it’ll allow me to revisit a topic I know I’ve covered before, with some added information. In case you’ve forgotten, or don’t know  the term, ‘dredging’ is the English word used for “rolling or flipping something in multiple stages to produce a good breading.

The standard system is “seasoned flour, egg/liquid, breacrumbs”, a system called “pane” (PAN-ay) in French cooking. That really threw me for a loop when I started watching Sorted, since they use the term almost exclusively for the process, and I’d NEVER heard it before. But yeah, pretty standard.

CHICKEN, especially in the American south (or places replicating their methods) is ever so slightly different, in that they tend to kind of fuse two of the steps. Because you don’t use Breadcrumbs to fry chicken, it’s just more seasoned flour.  So the ‘standard chicken dredge’ is “seasoned flour and seasoned buttermilk”. The exact order varies: some places just brine the chicken in the buttermilk, take it out, and toss it in the flour. Others brine/season the chicken, lightly dust with flour, coat in buttermilk, coat in flour again.  The point is that there’s two stations instead of three.

Pink station and Flour station.

And also, our version uses some secret techniques from the fried chicken side of things: specifically, seasoning the buttermilk with hot sauce (a common move), and pre-clumping the flour. If you don’t know about this move: basically, the bigger, crunchier breading is created by, logically, big clumps of flour and buttermilk. In restaurants, they have various ways of doing this, but a big one is just straight up the speed required: they’re pulling the chicken out of the brine, tossing it in the flour, flip, flip, into the oil, repeat with the next chicken.

And that’s the key: the left over little nuggets of buttermilk and flour from the previous chicken can stick to THIS piece, given better breading. So, to replicate that, this flour is doctored up a little. Firstly, with the standard salt and pepper (and you can tinker with this a little if you want: cayenne isn’t uncommon here, nor garlic powder), along with some finely chopped cauliflower florets for more oomph, AND a tablespoon of buttermilk just tossed into the whole shebang to get some crumbly flakes.

You can definitely see the chunkiness

Also, don’t make my mistake: start with a large enough container. I thought I was going to be able to do this on a single large plate, but once I pour the flour and cauliflower on it, I knew there was no way I was tossing anything on that plate without a huge mess.

The buttermilk gets seasoned with hot sauce (the idea being that the added acidity and spice will help cut some of the richness of the fried breading, and will season the ‘meat’) and you’re ready to dredge your cauliflower. Kind of.

See, here I ran into two problems: firstly, my recipe called for 2 steaks of cauliflower from a large head, which were…rather awkwardly sized, compared to the buns I had to serve them on.

It’s more filling than bun now, twisted and sandwich.

That was fairly easy to fix, of course, just cut the steaks in half (through the stem, so each half still has structure) and make 4 reasonable sandwiches instead 2 enormous ones. That done, we can turn to the other difficulty: the oil.

I’ve mentioned before that I do NOT like deep-frying things. If a recipe has more than a couple tablespoons of oil, I get anxious. And this time, things were remarkably more complicated. As I waited for the oil to heat, I stepped out of the room to talk to Nate for a couple minutes. When I came back, the oil was 50 degrees over where it was supposed to be, and continued to heat to almost 450. Which was worrying to me: in case you don’t know, bringing oil past its smoke point makes it much less healthy for you. In fact, pushing oil past its smoke point will cause it to break down and create carcinogenic compounds in the oil and in the oil vapor.

I was able to wrangle it back down before it hit that juncture, luckily. Though I did spend several minutes worried that I had gone too hot, and debated dumping out an entire bottle of oil to be safe. Instead, I just got it cooled down, and went on with things. But that fuck up really set the tone for the next 20 minutes, because it shook me. I could NOT stabilize the heat on the recipe once I through myself off.

The white arrow is where the blue is SUPPOSED to be.
Guess what the red arrow is.

And in case you don’t know why that’s important, most of the complaints people have with fried food COMES from improper oil temp. You think fried foods are too greasy? That’s because they were fried in too cool of oil (and/or too long). Hot oil boils water in the breading/food, forming steam that keeps the oil from seeping too deeply into the breading. If there’s a bunch of oil in the breading, then it either A: wasn’t hot enough to boil the water and get the vapor barrier up in time, OR B: it was fried long past the time all the water was out of the coating. Breading is burned while the inside is still cold? Means the oil was too hot.

Because I couldn’t keep the oil consistent, I got BOTH. But we’ll cover that in a second. Because these guys have to fry for 10 minutes (there’s a lot of water in cauliflower), and we have to make another replacement: the original recipe for this called for serving the fried cauliflower on toasted buns with a slice of lettuce and tartar sauce. And, fun fact: I do NOT like fish, so we don’t eat it very often. Because of that, we don’t tend to keep tartar sauce in the house. We often buy like, one bottle, let it sit in the fridge for a year or two, then throw it out and replace it. But we purged our fridge during the stay-at-home order, so we haven’t had a reason to get more.

Now, you CAN make tartar sauce with mayo, relish, and some other ingredients (capers, dill, onion/shallot, etc), but Nate convinced me we didn’t need to do that, so I instead made a pseudo-tartar out of the following ingredients.

Seen here replicating a top-down band shot for a mid 90’s alternative bamd.

That’s yellow mustard, whole-grain mustard, mayo, and relish. It’s creamy with a little pungency to help cut the fat of the frying. Nate used barbecue sauce, since that’s what he puts on fried chicken sandwiches.

And we served it up!

I would say “this looks like fried chicken”, but in honesty, “this looks like breading”

The results were…mixed. As I noted, Nate complained that the breading was a little greasy, because his batch hung more on the cooler side of the wrong temp. Mine wasn’t too greasy, but WAS a little burnt in the craggy nooks. I definitely felt that the barbecue sauce cut through the fat a little better than the mayo (I probably could have doubled the whole grain mustard in the mayo mix, and still had a fine result.)

Personally, I think if you can get the oil right, this is a pretty damn good sandwich for relatively little effort.

MONDAY: WE MAKE BEEF WITH OUR NUTS. WAIT.  

Recipe

Fried Cauliflower Sandwich

Serves 4

Ingredients

 1 large head of cauliflower

The breading

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon buttermilk

                The dip

1 cup buttermilk

2 tablespoons hot sauce

The fixings

Enough oil for frying, at least 1” deep.

4 hamburger buns

Condiment of your choice

Preparation

1. First, cut two  1” thick steaks out of the center of the cauliflower, cutting each steak in half to make 4 portions. Finely chop an additional ¾ cup florets, to incorporate into the breading. Bring oil to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. To make the breading, combine the salt, pepper, flour, and diced florets in a large shallow pan. In another plate or pan, combine buttermilk and hot sauce.

3. Coat steaks in buttermilk, then cover in flour mixture, pressing to adhere more coating. Put coated steaks in the oil, frying for 10 minutes, turning over once about halfway through cooking. Move to a rack to briefly drain, and assemble sandwiches and serve.