Question
Donna Carpentier
I'd love a great, reliable way to prep cauliflower (florets as well as steaks) without shooting tiny bits all over the kitchen!?
Answer
Here's the tip for florets that I would use which is most cauliflower, unless you're buying it at the farmer's market, it's coming unwrapped, right. But you can fake this by just putting it inside of a plastic shopping bag. Or if you're buying cauliflower at traditional store that's wrapped in plastic, hold it crown up, stem side down, while still wrapped or wrapped inside of the plastic bag. Smash it down. Right onto the core. And what that does is it, you know, the core is this sort of conical part of it that stents and when you smash it down, that pushes up through the head. And what that does is it largely separates most of those florets and they just slough off, they just fall off. And any mess you have, any of those little bits that would shoot all over your kitchen are thus contained inside the bag. If you do it right, and you can do this with broccoli, cauliflower, it all works, if you do it right, you really don't smash it all up. You really just get florets and you lose very, very little. When it comes to cutting steaks and not getting those little bits all over the kitchen, sharp, big knife, single cut coming down. You don't wanna saw through, any back and forth action is going to rip those florets apart and cause little bits to come around. You know, I'm lucky. I just have, I have a whole lot of knives but I'd use a very large, long chef's knife which is obviously going to be larger than a head of cauliflower and just straight down, as much as you can. And if you wanna get all samurai about it, just one, if you have confidence, just one smack to it and then go get the Dust Buster because you got cauliflower all over your kitchen. It's just kind of par for the course. So there you go.
