One of Annalena's newest, bestest galpals is Melissa, who owns the wonderful Bar Eolo and Pastai restaurants. Melissa has her own blog, which Annalena encourages you to frequent: http://1001feasts.com. It is from this blog, and from Melissa's restaurant, that this dish comes from. Annalena modified it, and she will explain how.
After she digresses. It doesn't come out immediately, that cauliflower is a quintessentially Italian vegetable. But it is. We Italians love our vegetables, and in the winter, in Italy as everywhere else, there is not much that grows or stores. So Italians, like anyone else who cares about food, do what they can with what there is. Alice Waters once said "if all you have is fennel, you better learn a lot of different ways to cook it wonderfully." Such is the case with cauliflower, and there are no better approaches to this vegetable, than Sicilian ones. Annalena probably has about a half dozen Sicilian cauliflower recipes at her command. This is now her favorite. She also has a great number of cauliflower and pasta recipes at her command, and has blogged at least one other. Try this one, ragazzi. It involves some shopping, and some elbow grease , but at the end, you will have a restaurant quality dish. Truly.
You start with one head of cauliflower, which Annalena wants you to cut into quarters. Put three of them aside, and take the fourth. Break off the florets, and now put THOSE aside, while you take the stems with the other three quarters. Again, break off florets, and now, take all of those stems and chop them roughly. Keep the larger and smaller portions of cauliflower separate. We're going to do different things to them.
You are also going to need to smash 3-4 cloves of garlic, and get rid of the skin. Just SLAM down with a big knife.
As Annalena cooked this dish, she used half a cup of white wine. Now, there is no alcohol in the dish at the end, but for Annalena's friends who don't even want to have alcohol in the house, she recommends that you make this substitution: go to a good grocery store or specialty food vendor, and ask for verjus. This is unfermented juice of unripe grapes, and it will serve, if you add a bit of vinegar to it. So get a half cup of verjus, and add a tablespoon of white wine vinegar to the stuff, and you've got "pseudo wine." Also have ready 3-4 cups of stock, be it chicken or vegetable (you might not use all of it), and a couple of tablespoons of dried oregano. Melissa recommends Sicilian oregano, which does indeed have a wild fragrance to it that is not repeatable. You can, however, use any Mediterranean oregano here. Annalena's came from Turkey, and it worked. DO NOT USE MEXICAN OREGANO, which has a very distinct taste that will not work here. Splurge and buy some saffron - good stuff - not the powder - and have half a teaspoon or so if it ready. And, finally, at this stage, a third of a cup of raisins or currants. Melissa recommends soaking them in brandy, which is a good idea, but if your dried fruit is "fresh" and moist, there is no need. Annalena used the golden raisins.
Complicated, huh? Well, this is just the first part! Get a large frying pan, and put three tablespoons of olive oil in it, together with the larger portion cauliflower, and the garlic. Make sure your pan is big enough so that all of the cauliflower is contacting the oil. No layering here, you want the cauliflower to sear, as if it were chopped meat (because in a lot of ways, it IS chopped meat in this recipe). It will take a while, but the stuff will brown nicely. Get a good sear on it. Toss it to get it as browned as possible. The garlic will brown with it. When you have a good color, add the wine, and move your face back. The wine is going to bubble away almost immediately. In essence, you have deglazed the pan, the way you would for a meat sauce. Now, add the saffron, the raisins, the oregano, and three cups of stock. Bring this to a medium boil, and cook it away. Every now and then, get a spoon and press down on the cauliflower to see if it's breaking apart. It will take about ten minutes to get there, but it will get there, so pazienza.
On a second burner, get a pot of salted water going and when it boils, add the remaining cauliflower. Cook it for no more than two minutes, and get it out of the water.
We aren't anywhere CLOSE to being done, bambini. Now, get a small frying pan, add a couple more tablespoons of olive oil, and start searing the boiled cauliflower.
C'mon, stick with it. You're going to love this. When the cauliflower in the broth has broken down, and the boiled cauliflower has taken on a brown, seared color, you can stop... In fact, Annalena did all of this on one day, and stored the two components separately, before finishing the dish.
Oh, yes, ragazzi, we've got more to do, but now it's going to start to really be fun. Get a half cup of dry bread crumbs, and a couple of tablespoons of your favorite fresh herbs. Annalena used thyme, and rosemary. Put these in a frying pan without oil and toast them. You know that the crumbs are ready when you see some serious browning at the perimeter. Then dump them immediately in a clean bowl, and add a third of a cup of pine nuts.
A note on pine nuts here. You don't want to leave them out of the sauce, but you will have to make a decision. If you've ever removed the nuts from pine cones (which Annalena has), you will appreciate why they are so expensive. Sicilian pine nuts are the best, but they can cost about 60 dollars a pound at some stores. Hence, if you have to, "bite the bullet" and buy the Chinese ones.
Incidentally, do not be fooled. Chinese pine nuts are short and stubby, Sicilian ones are long and thin. Keep that in mind when you're looking at costs.
Ok, back to cooking. Dump those nuts into the hot pan where you just toasted the bread crumbs, and keep them moving for about 2-3 minutes. You'll smell something when they've toasted. Get them into the bowl with the bread crumbs.
Let's look at our components: we have a wet cauliflower ragu, we have chunks of seared cauliflower and we have a bowl with bread crumbs and pine nuts.
We're not done. Now, grate a third of a cup each of pecorino romano and parmesan.
Almost there. Get a big pot of salted water going, and add a pound of long pasta. Bucatini is traditional and it's fun: there's a hole in the middle of each strand, and you almost feel like you're whistling when you eat them. but if you have trenette, or linguini, or some other long pasta instead, use it. As it is coming to the boil, put the wet cauliflower ragu back into the big frying pant, add the chunks of cauliflower, the pine nuts and the bread crumbs, and heat it gently. When the pasta is just a little bit more than al dente, spoon off about a cup of the pasta water, and then use some tongs to put the pasta into the pan with the sauce. Begin tossing it around, adding the cooking water in thirds. As you toss the water and pasta with the cauliflower sauce, you will see an almost creamy texture developing. This will only increase when, OFF THE HEAT, you add that grated cheese and toss it all around.
NOW, you're ready to plate and eat. Make sure that you get equal amounts of pasta and sauce on each of 3-4 plates, and sprinkle a little salt on it (Trapanese sea salt if you have it, to be authentic), and if you like, some black pepper (Annalena does like).
The saffron will be evident in the almost golden color of the pasta. Some of the raisins will have dissolved into the sauce, and some will remain whole, giving bites of brilliant sweetness, set off by the acidity of the reduced wine, and the bitterness of the cauliflower. You add to that the creaminess of the cheese, and the soft sweetness of the stewed garlic, and.... WOW. This is a dish for the ages.
Yes, you worked hard to make this one, but it was worth it, and Annalena has been giving you easy ones, almost every time, for a while now. so hunker down, and satisfy that winter hunger with this. It's worth your time. Promesso.
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