How to grow and cook cauliflower, 2015's trendiest veg

Anyone who has asked me about growing cauliflowers in recent years has been unlucky enough to hear me misappropriate Eddie Izzard’s famous skit about pears: essentially, you nurture them devotedly and give them all your time and space, and they conspire to reach their fleeting instant of perfection between immaturity and past-their-best while you are out of sight for half a minute making a coffee.

And even if you get to your cauliflower at its peak, half a year or more after sowing, the day before its perfect globe blows, you only get one meal for your trouble. Yet here I am, planning to grow plenty of cauliflowers this year. It's partly ego – I’m not going to be beaten by a vegetable – but mostly my stomach has brought me to this point. I’m eating more cauliflower than ever, and in increasingly different ways. A number of friends (along with half the country, it seems) are on low-carb diets, reducing their intake of wheat and sugar-heavy foods such as bread and (saints preserve us) cake, as well as looking for alternatives to pasta and rice. Cauliflower rice is one I’ve grown to love.

The Telegraph food channel’s latest signing, John Whaite, hit the nail on the head with his online recipe: sauté a finely grated cauliflower in olive oil, over a moderate heat, for five minutes, stirring a little, adding plenty of salt and pepper and a splash of double cream if you fancy, and use as you would rice.

Once you start experimenting with cauliflower in the kitchen, it reveals itself as something quite different from the sort of anaemic, blandish calabrese many take it for. Fine as it is steamed, I prefer it roasted. Its superb texture and gentle flavour have many fine partners; cumin, chilli, garlic and lemon are great places to start. Fry finely chopped chilli and garlic in olive oil, add freshly ground cumin and cook for a minute or so; coat the cauliflower florets and roast for about 30 minutes at 200C, squeezing the juice of half a lemon over before serving. An anchovy or two melted in the oil with the chilli and garlic works wonders and a sprinkling of flaked almonds on serving finishes things off perfectly.

As with roasting, frying inch-thick “steaks” of cauliflower with any of those partner flavours makes for a delicious, surprisingly meaty lunch alongside steamed green veg. Puréed cauliflower is about the loveliest accompaniment to seared scallops or grilled lamb chops I can think of and if you lay an anchovy or two over each chop as it grills, it not only emphasises the lamb’s richness, it joins hands with the cauliflower purée even more beautifully.

I am assured that even the green leaves make a fine soup, but I’ve yet to get around to making it before my wife scoots the leaves off to the compost.

How’s this for starters?

Romanesco was my gateway cauli and I’ve never stopped growing it. Not a variety as much as its own thing, Romanesco is a cauliflower to the French, a calabrese to the Italians. To this Devonian, it sits perfectly between the two, happy to be treated as either while retaining its distinctiveness. Visually, it may be the most remarkable thing you can grow: it is made up of lime-green mini-spirals that coil around themselves in fractal formation.

Romanesco is slow to blow and more forgiving to grow than most cauliflowers, while being perhaps the most delicious and certainly the nuttiest-flavoured of the lot. Treat as you might any cauliflower, or simmer for a couple of minutes before roughly chopping and sautéing in olive oil with chilli (fresh or dried works) and garlic for a quick midweek pasta supper.

My early experiences of cauliflowers tell me they are hungry and do best in soil that’s well prepared with compost and/or manure, and ideally follow peas and beans so they can soak up the nitrogen left by the legumes.

They need watering through dry spells and enjoy a fortnightly liquid feed, too, with seaweed feed or similar. Any slight setback will check their growth, meaning that the heads don’t develop perfectly.

Three wise counsellors

In my quest for the perfect cauliflower, I’ve bent the ear of three wise gardeners, in an attempt to maximise my chance of success. Anne-Marie Owens, Raymond Blanc’s head gardener at the astonishing kitchen garden at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saison, recommends 'All Year Round’ as fine-flavoured and the most reliable. She swears by really firming the soil around the plant to secure it as, for whatever reason, it seems to result in better head formation.

Like me, Alys Fowler loves Romanesco and grows them and any other cauliflowers as baby veg, sowing early caulis undercover and later ones in a seedbed to transplant. She picks them when young, to shorten their time in the veg patch and reduce the likelihood of bolting. This way she gets earlier-than-usual harvests and can plan them more closely.

Toby Buckland assures me a roll of fleece is the magic carpet to success. Although most rolls aren’t wide enough to span a prize-winning monster cauli, fleece will work perfectly for growing small cauliflowers. Toby assures me: “Fleece also acts as a factor 50 sunscreen stopping the curds from drying in the heat and works best in cheek-by-jowl blocks with caulis a foot apart each way. You get perfect, meal-size pickings.”

So, I’m going to try half the cauli patch as mini-cauli, planted closely under fleece as Alys and Toby suggest, and the rest at the usual spacing, treading down well as Anne-Marie recommends. If it works, I’m a genius; if not, I can blame Anne-Marie, Alys and Toby. Perfect.

With the non-fleeced fully sized crop, to make up for all that soil being taken up for so long, I intend to do as I do for most brassicas: sow nasturtiums between as a living carpet. These help to smother out weeds, retain soil moisture and act as a companion plant to attract cabbage-white butterflies away from the brassicas. They also give me an ongoing supply of delicious nasturtium leaves and flowers.

_{^{'Purple Graffiti' creates a lovely splash of colour (Tim Gainey / Alamy)}}

Best varieties to grow

As with most vegetables, choice of variety is crucial.

- Romanesco can be sown undercover from March until April. I start off all my cauliflowers undercover, two seeds to a module, planting them out when they are 3in (8cm) or so tall. The spiralled heads will be ready from late summer into March. There is an early variety, known either as 'Ottobrino’ or 'Early Romanesco’, which can be sown from early February and harvested from July.

- 'All Year Round’ is, as you’d hope, capable of producing at any time of year depending when you sow it. Sown in modules undercover now, you can expect to harvest mature cauliflowers from July with late-summer sowings overwintering well for spring picking. It has the happy habit of growing its leaves closely around the large milk-white head, protecting it from the elements. It’s a very good keeper and freezes well too. Steam or blanch whole heads briefly and allow them to cool before freezing.

- If it’s colour you are after, then the purple heads of 'Sicilia Violetta’ and 'Purple Graffiti’ or the lime-green of 'Trevi’ are just the thing. Start them off through spring for a summer or early autumn harvest; the summer sun intensifies their colour.

- All coloured cauliflowers retain their colour best when roasted or steamed; boiling removes most of their bright pizzaz. 'Sicilia Violetta’, with its compact head and sweet nuttiness, is perhaps my favourite of these.

- Spring is the core sowing season, when cauliflowers can be sown in a seedbed as well as undercover, but many varieties are suitable for sowing in late summer/early autumn for a spring harvest the following year. Some varieties don’t like being sown earlier than March – it causes them to bolt – but 'Early Romanesco’ and 'All Year Round’ can all be started undercover now.

- For a little colourful randomness, some suppliers (Pennard Plants included) do packs of seed of cauliflowers that mature at different times and in mixed colours, giving you a steady supply of different varieties.