Cauliflower Cheese
Undercook the cauliflower and dry it before the sauce goes on. Every drop of water left on it ends up thinning the sauce in the dish.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 40 min
- Resting
- 5 min
- Total
- 1 hr
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Milk
- Mustard
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Cauliflower
Sauce
Topping
Method
Cauliflower
Break the cauliflower into large florets, keeping the tender inner leaves and the sliced stalk, which are both good and usually thrown away.
Boil in well-salted water for 4 to 5 minutes only, until a knife meets slight resistance.
Undercook it deliberately. It gets another 25 minutes in the oven, and cauliflower boiled until tender first comes out of the dish as a wet grey mush.
Drain it and leave it in the colander for 5 minutes, shaking it, then pat it dry with a tea towel.
Water clinging to the florets is the reason cauliflower cheese so often has a thin pool of liquid under it. Drying is worth the two minutes.
Sauce
Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes until it smells of biscuit.
Off the heat, beat in the warm milk a third at a time until smooth, then return it with the bay leaf.
Cook, stirring, for 8 to 10 minutes until thick enough to coat a spoon.
Take the pan off the heat, let it stop steaming, and stir in the mustard, nutmeg, salt and Cheddar.
Off the heat again: cheese added above about 80C tightens and squeezes out its fat, giving a grainy oily sauce.
Topping
Heat the oven to 200C fan. Sit the dried cauliflower in a baking dish and pour the sauce over, making sure it gets into the gaps.
Mix the Parmesan and breadcrumbs and scatter over the top.
Bake for 25 minutes, until deep gold and bubbling at the edges, and rest for 5 minutes before serving.
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What to expect
- Taste
Mild and creamy, with mustard and nutmeg doing invisible work — neither is identifiable in the finished dish and both are missed when absent. The cauliflower's own faint sweetness comes through.
- Aroma
Toasted cheese and nutmeg.
- Texture
Soft florets and smooth sauce with a crisp top. Watery is the failure and grainy is the other one.
- Sound
The crumb top under a spoon.
- How the flavour moves
Cheese and crumb first, then a mild creamy middle, then the faint sweetness of the cauliflower.
- Serve it
Very hot; the five-minute rest is a burn precaution as much as anything.
- Goes with
A roast, especially beef or a gammon. On its own with bread and a sharp salad.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner, with two rules that are both about water and heat.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A large pan and a baking dish.
- When to make it
Sunday, or any cold evening.
- Best season
British cauliflower runs from late spring into winter, with a genuine peak in autumn.
- You know it is done when
Deep gold on top and bubbling at the edges of the dish, with the cauliflower florets still distinct rather than collapsed.
- And it feels like
Florets soft with a little structure left, in a sauce that clings rather than runs.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. Cool leftovers within two hours.
- Where it goes wrong
- Boiling the cauliflower until tender, so it is mush after the oven.
- Not drying it, which thins the sauce in the dish.
- Cheese into a hot sauce, which goes grainy.
- An undercooked béchamel, which tastes of raw flour.
- Throwing away the leaves and stalk.
- Cold milk into a hot roux, which lumps.
- If it does go wrong
Watery: it was not dried, and tipping the dish and spooning the liquid off is the only remedy now. Grainy: too hot when the cheese went in; a stick blender with a splash of cold milk often rescues it. Bland: salt and more mustard. Mushy: overboiled at the start.
- Making it ahead
Assemble a day ahead unbaked and add 10 minutes to the bake.
- Keeping it
Three days in the fridge.
- Reheating
Covered at 180C fan for 20 minutes, then uncovered for 5.
- Freezing
Freezes acceptably assembled and unbaked, though the cauliflower softens further on thawing.
- Leftovers
Blitzed with stock into a soup, which is very good.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly in a wider dish rather than a deeper one.
- Substitutions
Broccoli, or a mix. Gluten-free flour makes an acceptable béchamel with two extra minutes of cooking.
- Dietary swaps
Contains milk, gluten and mustard. Vegetarian only if the Parmesan is replaced with a rennet-free hard cheese — Parmigiano Reggiano is made with animal rennet, which surprises people every time. Egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
A cauliflower with its leaves still on, which is both fresher and gives you more to cook.
- Keeping the cost down
A cauliflower and some milk. Using the leaves and stalk gets about a fifth more out of the same vegetable.
- Sustainability
Cauliflower grows well in Britain across a long season and has a low footprint; the cheese and milk are the heavy part. This dish is unusually good at absorbing a reduction — 140g of a strong mature Cheddar delivers as much flavour as 180g of a mild one. Using the leaves and the stalk is the clearest waste saving in the collection: they are a fifth of the plant, they are good to eat, and almost every recipe tells you to discard them.
- Nutrition
A lot of vegetable, with the sauce carrying the fat and salt.
- Worth it?
Four minutes and a tea towel. Both feel like corners being cut and both are the recipe.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Britain.
- Also called
Cauliflower cheese; chou-fleur au gratin in French.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Descriptive.
- History
Béchamel — one of the French mother sauces — entered English domestic cooking through Victorian household manuals, and cauliflower baked under a cheese-enriched version of it becomes a standard British side over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cheese-enriched béchamel has its own name in French cooking, Mornay, and the dish is essentially chou-fleur Mornay with a British accent and Cheddar instead of Gruyère.
- Why it matters
A Sunday roast fixture and, in a great many households, the only way anybody eats cauliflower.
- When it is eaten
Sunday lunch, Christmas, and a meat-free supper.
- The traditional way
Béchamel, enriched with cheese off the heat, over a par-cooked vegetable, browned in the oven.
- How it changed
Gruyère became Cheddar, and it moved from a course to a side dish.
- Regional variations
With leeks, with bacon, or with a mix of cauliflower and broccoli.
- How this version differs
The four-minute boil and the drying, which most recipes do not specify, and the leaves and stalk kept rather than binned.
- Sources and credit
None.
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Side dishes
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Vegetarian