Roasted Cauliflower Salad - 1st attempt

One very memorable food experience in Canada was visiting the Rocket Bakery in St John's, Newfoundland after my hike to Signal Hill. I had a black bean burrito with a side of roasted cauliflower salad that was out of this world (my phone was flat, otherwise I would have included it in my Canadian highlights post). It was so good I am determined to add it to my cooking repertoire. I wrote down the ingredients I could recognise, red onion, cherry tomatoes, garlic, mint, capers and roasted cauliflower and googled it when I got back to Australia.

The only recipe I could find was posted by The Shiksa in the Kitchen, apparently it's an Italian recipe ! Who knew! Mine is pretty close to hers, except I added mint + tomatoes and I didn't have any olives... she has a very detailed step by step instructions about how to cook the cauliflower that I did not strictly follow. It turned out really tasty, but not quite the same as my Rocket experience. I added way more herbs which made it almost like a low carb tabouli and the cauliflower in mine was quite soft. At Rocket it was brown and carmelised from roasting but still firm, almost crunchy. I'm going to blame my crappy oven and my slightly overcrowded roasting trays. Maybe next time will put the oven on a really high heat, or maybe grill it and not add the minced galic (because it will most certainly burn). My first attempt was as follows...

preheat the oven to 180 degrees C

 

Chop half a cauliflower into small, even sized pieces.

 

 To reduce the amount of crumbly cauliflower bits at the end, a good trick to cutting your cauli is to start with your knife cutting down into the solid steam and once you reach the bulbus part of the floret, gently twist your knife (by rotating your wrist) to allow it to break apart into more cohesive bunches. 

 

 

mix the florets in a bowl with 2 cloves of minced garlic and  a generous splash of olive oil. Lay flat on some oven trays and place in a 180 degree C oven

 

while the cauliflower is roasting cut up the rest of your salad ingredients.

 

1/2 a red onion finely diced

2 tbl capers

2 tomatoes deseeded and diced

small bunch of parsely finely chopped

10-15 mint leaves finely chopped

juice of 1/2 a lime

 

Like the Shiksa says, the parts of the cauliflower in contact with the oven tray caramelise the most efficiently. I checked on them every 10 minutes, each time giving it a little stir. In the end, I cooked mine for about 30-40  minutes.

 

 

mix it all up with the juice of 1/2 a lime and you're done!