Baked Cauliflower Potato curry is hands free and comes with a confession

Inspired by: my bizarre obsession with cauliflower; a spice rub for vegetables

A few months ago I made a very public declaration that I love cauliflower in all forms. I now have to eat my words because I despise cauliflower “rice.”

This so called ‘rice’ is basically all the wrong parts about cauliflower thrown together into a bag pretending to be rice, one of the best tastiest satisfying carbohydrates in my world. Cauliflower is super delicious mainly because of the florets that harbor immense flavor and texture. While it’s unfortunate that cauliflower found in the US is not as flavorful as that found in Asia or Europe, it’s still a million times superior to the fake rice. Have you ever seen any remnant of a cauliflower floret in this faux rice? It’s all stalk. Sadly, I was misguided once. In an effort to be ‘healthy’ and lose weight by cutting out carbs, I also partook in cauliflower ‘rice’ and pretended to ‘like’ my meals with it. After many unsatisfactory daals, curries, and sabjis with cauliflower rice, I have indeed learned my lesson.

Never again will I cheat on real rice and real cauliflower! I humbly apologize to these wonderful real whole foods, my deepest regrets for straying momentarily.

I have also publicly declared that my favorite form of cauliflower is a North Indian dish called Aloo Gobi which translates to Potato Cauliflower, a dry scrumptious curry. You may have tried it at an Indian restaurant before. However, I have personally never found a restaurant that makes this the way I grew up eating it. In the dish I prefer to savor, there is no garlic or ginger or tomato or tomato sauce or tomato gravy (which is how restaurants often serve it). I prefer to keep it super simple and let the cauliflower flavor shine through with the aid of a few spices that sing.

Typically, I follow the appropriate dance sequence to develop the flavors in this dish. But a few days ago, in a true free style home cooking spirit, I experimented with baking it. I was busy in meetings during the day and wanted to make something that was going to be more hands free than this dish would normally be. The hands-on parts were just the initial chopping and stirring it once.

I had received a beautiful large head of organic cauliflower in my weekly produce delivery bag. I chopped it into small florets, peeled a potato (I only had one in the pantry), and chopped half a yellow onion. If you can imagine, I was almost drooling as I did this prep - both because I love cauliflower and because I love chopping! I placed all of these on a sheet pan and drizzled a good amount of olive oil on top.

Next came the spices, which I normally add in a specific sequence to develop flavors in a pot on the stove. Here I experimented with a sort of ‘rub’ you might use when flavoring meats for BBQ. For the seeds, I used cumin, fennel, nigella, and mustard because I like their flavors and also because they look beautiful in the final dish (e.g. yellow white cauliflower dotted with black green brown seeds). For the powders, I used turmeric, coriander, cumin, and mango. Along with some salt, I mixed these spices together and sprinkled them on top of the cauliflower. I went in with my bare hands and massaged and rubbed the chopped cauliflower potato onion thoroughly. I wanted to make sure the flavors would be evenly distributed.

The sheet pan then went into a pre-heated oven at 400C. I let the heat do it’s magic for about 20 mins and then removed the pan mid-bake (left image) to stir and mix it thoroughly once again. This time I used a spatula rather than my hands. The pan went back into the oven for about 15 mins to finish cooking the vegetables and crisp up and char the cauliflower florets (right image).

I currently have a convection oven, which I believe helped the florets to char and caramelize, infusing another layer of flavor into this dish. In a regular oven, I would probably need to cook it longer to get the same effect. Another issue I noticed is that some, not all, of the seeds had a slight burnt taste. I would need to isolate them to figure out which one but I am also thinking about adding the seeds at the mid-bake step to prevent this. I didn’t do it this time because I did not have the ingredients but adding finishing touches like a sprinkle of lemon juice and cilantro leaves at the end would brighten up this dish.

We enjoyed this dish twice, first as soon as it was cooked. For lunch, I paired it with some homemade yogurt and basmati rice. For dinner, I used it as a side to the main chicken potato curry along with roti (Indian whole wheat flatbreads) and homemade yogurt.

The cauliflower was soft and crunchy at the same time, extremely flavorful bursting with warm and tangy spices, accompanied by the softness of the potato (I wish there was more potato!). My experiment with baking this dish, instead of cooking it on the stove, indeed yielded soul satisfying results without much effort.

I will certainly be doing this again and expanding this baking method to other Indian vegetable sabjis (dry curries) like aloo fali (green beans potato), shimla mirch aloo (bell pepper potato), and bhindi (okra).

What about you? Will you give this easy mostly hands-free baked aloo gobi a try? I suspect it will delight your taste buds and elevate any main dish you may be serving.

Dish Debrief

• Is this my winner or disaster? winner

• How would I rate this dish out of 10? 8 out of 10

• What would I change next time? add more potato next time, add seeds later, sprinkle with a splash of lemon juice and chopped cilantro

• Would I make this again? oh yes