Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Well, what else would you call this stuff?

I know, I know. It’s really called Romanesco, not alien brains. And it’s tough to see in this photo, but it’s really cool-looking, with sort of fractal cones all over it (much better photo here). I’ve been thinking that I really ought to do something with this stuff one of these days, and since it was at the farmer’s market this weekend, this was my day to try it.

It’s a lot like cauliflower, in that it’s tightly bunched with a corelike thing going on at the bottom from which the stalks/cones radiate. You have to sort of cut away the leaves and the core in order to snap off or cut off the cones, but be careful not to smash the tips of the cones, or you’ve pretty much just destroyed the main reason for trying Romanesco. Because it sure ain’t the taste, as I’ll get into later.

I steamed mine for 10 minutes and then served with the cheezy sauce from here (though I accidentally put in too much turmeric, hence the dark color).

I can’t say I’d make this again. I didn’t really care for it. It was sort of half-assed, both in looks (specifically color) and flavor. Maybe I was expecting too much of it — maybe I was expecting it to have some characteristics that I like in broccoli, and some that I like in cauliflower — but it didn’t really have the best of either. Not enough green to make it broccoli-like, and the steaming method just brought out the characteristics of cauliflower that make that method not my favorite for cauliflower. It might do okay with roasting, which, along with spicing the crap out of it as the Indians do, is really the only way to eat cauliflower. But I think that you’d wind up losing the whole fractal-spiral thing, and since that’s about the only thing this vegetable has to recommend it, you might as well just hang it up and have cauliflower in that case.

Speaking of which, I have some purple cauliflower. I think it might be a good roasting day tomorrow.