Three in One Soup

A way with cauliflower

Cauliflower - a controversial vegetable?

As much as it has become wildly popular, cauliflower is a controversial vegetable. Eaten raw it is dry and gritty. Not great for a crudité platter and perhaps only as good as the dip. What little flavor it has is bound up tightly in its stiff stems and curd-like florets, not helped much either by cooking. Boiled, steamed or roasted cauliflower begs for a forceful seasoning or sauce accompaniment. However, I was surprised to find some time ago that cauliflower makes an extraordinary puréed soup. When blended, its subtle mustard-like flavor comes into clear focus.  

That it should be transformed from a fibrous mass into a soup with a silken smoothness is due to its rich pectin content. Pectin is usually associated with a substance in fruits that causes jams and fruit syrups to gel. But it is also found abundantly in many vegetables. Cauliflower is one of them. Normally embedded in the cell walls of the plant, pectin is activated and dissolves when heated in a liquid—ideal for the medium of soup. Due to its fragility of flavor, cauliflower is altered if moistened by anything but water. Made only with a little stewed leek or onion in the base, water and salt, cauliflower soup is a good example of the austere requirements of certain foods and that the clearest expression of their flavor suggests adding next to nothing.   

The History

It wasn’t too long ago that colors of cauliflower other than the white variety started appearing in markets. In 1970 a farmer in Toronto discovered an orange-fleshed dwarf cauliflower growing amid his field of white, a genetic mutation that held more of the red/orange pigment beta carotene. It wasn’t until 2003 that successful crosses with white cauliflower yielded the orange variety also called “cheddar.” Purple cauliflower followed a similar path developed by plant breeders, however, its color comes from the same compound (anthocyanins) found in the skins of grapes, plums, and eggplant. Green cauliflower known as “broccoflower” is a cross between broccoli and cauliflower. And both purple and orange broccoli are loaded with more Vitamin A and healthful anti-oxidants. Evidently, cauliflower has greater potential locked up within it than it appears.  

Because of the success of the simple white cauliflower soup I started with, I began crossing the colors myself by making individual soups and pouring them together in the same bowl. The result was a stunning juxtaposition with nuanced differences in flavor that resembled a painting good enough to eat. Making three distinct soups may seem like a complicated task, but because they are so limited in ingredients and the process is so simple, the only trouble is a few extra repetitive steps. 

Blueprint