Cauliflower cheese is a staple of any good roast dinner. It is a heavenly side but can also hold its own as the main event. And, as was true in my case, it could even be baby’s first taste of solid food. Cauliflower cheese in a jar really was my first real meal. In fact, it was the only solid food I would eat for months – my poor mother… Nowadays, the prospect of cauliflower cheese in a jar is a much less appealing thought. I will be honest and say that I went off the dish for a very long time. Too much of a good thing, I guess. But, more recently, I started to wonder if the secret to rediscovering my love of the dish might have been hiding in plain sight all along, right there in the name: cheese.
Grana Padano is the hero ingredient of so many of my favourite dishes and so I decided to work with the Grana Padano Riserva 20-month to create my own, perfect cauliflower cheese. The process of reading through existing methods, experimenting with different flavours, and tweaking here and there has resulted in one of my favourite recipes yet. The nuttiness of the Grana Padano works perfectly to create exactly the kind of velvety cheese sauce you won’t be able to resist on a cosy evening when it’s a little colder outside.
Cheese is obviously just one half of the name of the dish. But – if I am being truly honest – this recipe would taste just as good with broccoli, or (ideally) even with macaroni. We don’t pick the dish for ‘cavolfiore’ or ‘cabbage flower’ (a vegetable that ultimately smells too much like your food compost bin). On its own it is just not appealing. This dish is all about the sauce.
Easy
4 people
50 min
