If We Can Steal Salads
We can certainly steal an appetizer or two, right?
I ADMITTED IN OUR LAST BULLETIN to a certain amount of unresolved guilt about stealing restaurant salads—maybe capturing them is a better word. The point is I feel terrible! So this week, in order to heal some of my bad karma, I have stolen a dish that is not a salad. That ought to even things out.
When I eat out these days, I rarely order or even notice appetizers. However, this little dish just begged to be made at home. It’s nothing much to look at; if I’d seen a photo of it I most certainly would have passed over it. It was the simple description that grabbed me—CAULIFLOWER coated with miso chili sauce $8. And my instincts were right: simple, spicy, warm—temperature-wise and with the wonderful umami richness of miso.
And when you find a simple cauliflower dish at a fancy sushi bar—I was visiting a place called Fudo for the first time with my cousin Toni, and we both really loved it— my feeling is you order it. My reasoning has to do more with my love of Japanese food and the element of surprise (I’ve never found a cauliflower recipe in any of my Japanese cookbooks) and much less to do with the fact that cauliflower has become the reluctant It Vegetable, as the clickable TikTok below proves.
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I knew I had to share it with you the minute we finished the dish; I was sad it was all gone. (The sushi was great, but it did not arouse similar feelings, probably because I eat sushi all the time, including from the grocery store. If you told me you found some sushi between the cushions of your sofa, I’d probably eat it.)
Plus, it was $8. So I also knew if I wanted it again, I would have to make it myself.
I put on my lab coat (I don’t have a lab coat) and set about trying to decrypt and recreate it. I’m very happy with the results! I tried it with three different chili condiments—chili crisp, garlic chili sauce, and fermented crushed Calabrian chili sauce. The winner was garlic chili sauce, which is probably the most widely available.
It’s the kind of dish you can put out before dinner or with cocktails—just pull your roasted cauliflower from the oven, toss with the sauce, sprinkle with scallions, and let people poke it with little toothpicks. Otherwise, everyone can use their forks or whatever your family does.
Since I started working on this, I’ve eaten an entire head of cauliflower this way for dinner twice. The things I do for you, my subscribers, my loves!