Crazy For Cauliflower? Me Too!

Are you crazy for cauliflower? I am AND I know I’m not the only one. Cauliflower has been rising to popularity over the last few years. With good reason! This nutrient-rich vegetable is so versatile + full of potential. Don’t pass this one up as just a bland, low-carb substitute. This cruciferous wonder belongs in every kitchen, vegetarian or not!

Tara’s Tuesday Tips:

Why Are We All Crazy For Cauliflower?

How Did Cauliflower Become So Popular?

With the emergence of low-carb and grain-free diet trends, the avoidance of gluten and grains quickly became the trendy thing to do.  Millions of Americans jumped on the low-carb/no-carb/gluten-free train.  Shortly thereafter, people began to miss things like rice, potatoes, and pizza crust (shocker!).

The allowable foods on these anti-grain diets were not giving people a feeling of fullness and satiety (funny thing that happens when you take the fiber out of your food!).  Enter cauliflower.  Rice it, mash it, put it in pizza crust, bake it into a cracker or a tortilla, fry it, puree it, and even make it look like a steak.  There you have it, how cauliflower became the superhero of the decade.

What Is Cauliflower?

A cruciferous vegetable from the family of broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, and arugula to name a few. The word cauliflower comes from the term “flowers of cabbage” in Latin. When eaten raw it tends to have a bitter taste but blends well with any flavor it is cooked with or dipped into. Typically, cauliflower is grown with winter crops, will taste sweeter, and will be less expensive in the winter months. However, you can find a head of cauliflower in the grocery store year-round.

Different Types of Cauliflower

• White: the cauliflower we are most accustomed to seeing in our grocery stores. Extremely versatile and most used in recipes.
• Orange: similar in taste to white cauliflower but higher in vitamin A.
• Green: aka Romanesco, has beautiful green spirals, often mistaken for broccoli.
• Purple: again, not much difference than white cauliflower in taste and texture.  Given the purple hue, this one is higher in phytochemicals which boosts the nutritional profile to the level of grapes and purple cabbage.

Cauliflower Nutrition Information

• Calories: With only 27 calories in every one cup serving, it is no wonder cauliflower has skyrocketed to popularity in the last few years.  Having a whopping 3 grams of fiber, 2 grams of protein, and less than ½ gram of fat with each serving, it is not surprising that this wonder-vegetable is eaten for any and every meal of the day.
• Vitamins: Don’t mistake its pale color for lack of nutrients. Quite the opposite as all of the cauliflower varieties are packed with good-for-you nutrients and vitamins! Cauliflower is extremely high in vitamin C.  Also high in its nutritional profile are vitamin K, calcium, folate, and B6.
• Antioxidants: Sulforaphane, glucosinolates, and isothiocyanates.  All powerful antioxidants helping to reduce inflammation. Thereby, when we eat cauliflower, we are getting help with fighting off cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

• Choline: An essential nutrient for our brain and nervous system. Helping improve memory and mood.  There are not many ways to eat choline but broccoli and cauliflower are excellent plant-based sources. Choline also helps prevent cholesterol from accumulating in the liver so eat up!
• Sulfur: Helps maintain a healthy gut lining and helps improves our immune systems.  Sulfur is also an antioxidant.  When we eat things with a high sulfur content, like cauliflower, we are protecting our cells from inflammatory changes.
• Fiber: Oh I just love talking about fiber.  Such an easy way to improve our health! Eat more fiber! Eating more foods high in fiber (such as cauliflower) helps us fight off diabetes, obesity, improves satiety/helps us feel full, wards off hunger, improves gut health, reduces constipation, reduces our risk of heart disease, and I could go on and on and on!

Crazy For Cauliflower Comparisons

White rice has 9 times the amount of carbohydrates as cauliflower! Not to mention, the fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, and protein content in cauliflower totally outweighs that of white rice.  Super easy to swap cauliflower rice in some of your favorite rice dishes!  Swapping potatoes for cauliflower gives you 84% less carbs and 79% fewer calories per serving!! No wonder cauliflower has been labeled as the ultimate low-carb replacement food.

Inexpensive!

Swapping cauliflower for chicken will definitely give you a cost savings! Another trick is to buy the whole head of cauliflower instead of the washed and cut florets.  Frozen varieties are even less expensive depending on the time of year and where you live.  You could also rice your own cauliflower to save money (this is not a time saver, so need to weigh your priorities with this one! I buy already riced organic cauliflower in the freezer section at Costco).

Are You Crazy For Cauliflower Fresh or Frozen?

As with all vegetables, fresh-picked, farmers market, or back yard garden-grown vegetables are the preferred way to eat your veggies. But remember, frozen vegetables are better than no vegetables at all.  Especially now during the pandemic, having a few bags of frozen cauliflower in the freezer can be a game changer on any given day.

Vegetables (including cauliflower) are harvested for freezing and typically picked at peak ripeness.  Within a few hours, they are washed, blanched, cut, and frozen. There is a slight loss in nutritional content during the blanching process but not much.  Even better, the antioxidant properties are found to remain intact with blanching.  When comparing nutrient to nutrient with fresh cauliflower, nutrients are lost with the fresh version too. With a long transportation and storage period on the way to our grocery store, more nutrients are lost with these longer transport periods.  Remember, frozen vegetables are better than no vegetable!

Be Wary of ‘Made Of Cauliflower’ Products

Many times, these are trendy products made with just a little bit of real cauliflower.  Sometimes gluten free and sometimes not.  They are often padded with fillers and flours bringing the calorie and carbohydrate content way up. The pretty green packaging might make you believe you are getting a healthier version of something because it has cauliflower somewhere on the ingredient list.  In actuality, you are often getting more refined flours and oils than you signed up for. Some cauliflower pizza crusts are guilty of this.  The white flour is taken out and replaced with eggs, cheese, starches, and oils. Be wary! Check your labels.

A good ‘replacement’ cauliflower product is cauliflower breakfast hot cereals.  There are only a few varieties but the ones I have seen have managed to keep the ingredients to cauliflower, freeze dried fruit, and seeds.  We regularly eat Trader Joe’s Cauliflower Gnocchi.  These are gluten-free and made of cassava flour as the ‘filler’ instead of refined flours.  This one gets my approval especially if you are eating it instead of a refined grain product. We also regularly eat The Ground Up cauliflower pretzels.  Again, cauliflower mixed with cassava flour keeping these gluten-free, free of refined grain/flours, and these pack in a whopping 3 grams of fiber per serving 🙌.   Be careful of fried cauliflower snacks (typically cooked in soybean or safflower oil), cauliflower wraps (typically made with eggs and oils), cauliflower breaded things (small amount of dried cauliflower mixed with lots of refined flour).

Weigh the benefits and see for yourself if replacing some ingredients with cauliflower has actually worsened the nutritional profile of the cauliflower product.

Sounds Too Good To Be True?

By now you might be asking yourself, how is one white vegetable so awesome? It is awesome but some people do get gas and bloating when eating cruciferous vegetables due to the high fiber content.  To help with this, start out eating small amounts and increase the amount over time.  You will build up your tolerance to the fiber content with more exposure and those symptoms will improve.  In addition, you could also eat cooked cauliflower instead of raw, making it easier to digest.

Also use caution with cauliflower if you take blood thinners.  The high vitamin K content works against blood thinners by making it easier for your blood to clot. People with very low iodine levels should also be careful with eating lots of cauliflower as it could lower iodine levels even more.

Hope you loved learning why I am crazy for cauliflower.  I really do use cauliflower as my secret weapon for a low-calorie-density, high-nutrient, filling food that I can jazz up to be awesome as a meal or a snack!

All the best,

Tara 💜💛🧡

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