Knowledge Base > Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, November 05, 2024 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Char Nolan in her virtual office as she welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to ask anything – from cooking techniques to cou… Read More.
Question:
I have a recipe for whole roasted cauliflower with veggies that calls for oil to coat the vegetables. What should I use instead of the oil?
— Steve Farbman
Answer:
Well, there are a couple of ways that you can do this if you have made some delicious. Uh, we have so many great oil free salad dressings here at Rouxbe. So I'm thinking off the top of my head, if you took the, um, lemon vinegarette and that dressing takes two seconds to make, and you coated your cauliflower with that, it would have such a delicious flavor. Some of the feedback that I get when I read the roasted cauliflower assignment is that people say that for the first time, they have been able to truly taste what a vegetable tastes like. But you could also use stock, you could also use broth. I like the salad dressing because it kind of, uh, coats it a little bit and it becomes very, very flavorful. You could also, Steve, if you wanted to have a really delicious tasting cauliflower, you could marinate it for a while in your refrigerator, uh, in the dressing. And then once it's ready, once it's ready to bake, you would wanna make sure that your oven is set correctly. And I have to say, you may wanna also look into getting an oven thermometer because the readout that is on your stove might not be the same temperature that is inside the oven. And you wanna make sure that there aren't any incongruities about how you bake that. Then you would want to arrange those pieces of cauliflower, big pieces on the outside of the pan, near the rim of the pan, and smaller pieces in the middle apart about an inch apart, so that they will roast beautifully and develop that caramelization. Because when vegetables are packed too tightly in a roasting pan, they will steam rather than roast and get that nice mahogany brown color that you're looking for.