Midweek Snack // Pork Fried Cauliflower Rice

Kimberly Schoenauer
Mar 2, 2016
4 min read

The ultimate one-pot-wonder, for anyone who loves Asian inspired food as much as I do. This dish can easily be made paleo simply by exchanging coconut aminos for the soy sauce. The rest is just high protein meat plus veggies. High in protein, high in fiber, low in fat, high in flavor. Perfection. The recipe will be sent out to my newsletter subscribers, so if you'd like to receive it please make sure you're signed up for emails!

But first! The most important part of the recipe, and the base for many recipes I make around here that call for rice, is the substitute of cauliflower for rice. It easily absorbs the flavor of the food you are cooking it with, just as white rice does. I've used cauliflower in place of rice for Asian dishes such as this one, Indian dishes - it tastes great as saffron rice, and rice jollof.

The only downside that I've noted is that cauliflower, as a vegetable, contains a lot of water - and so, in dishes where it is cooked, you may need to strain some of the water away so that it maintains a certain density that you would expect from a dish cooked with rice (which absorbs water and stays hearty). It's a texture battle, not a flavor one. My tips for that are to strain excess water away, and to not overcook it (it should always be almost the last ingredient in the pot and stay in just long enough to be heated through and absorb some of the flavor).

So onto the ricing technique. Cauliflower will naturally disintegrate when chopped. So, if you have no tools but a knife, you could just chop it finely and it will mostly rice itself - but it will make a ridiculous mess. You can also separate it into a few chunks and grate it on a medium sized cheese grater. Also a huge mess- I recommend lining your sink with plastic wrap, tin foil, or the like, and grating away in there so that it's all contained somewhere easy to scoop up and use.

But, if you are fortunate enough to have a food processor, or food processing attachment to a blender of some sort, you're in luck. Less mess, more ease.

The food processing attachment I personally like the most is the ricer. Fitting! This grating attachment disk comes with most standard food processors with a narrow cylindrical attachment to put on the bottom. If you DO NOT have this attachment, no worries!! The regular spinning blade will rice your cauliflower too, just put the pieces directly into the bowl and pulse. It just doesn't give it the same hearty texture. I find both ways take about the same amount of time, and neither way spares you from having to wash the whole contraption as the lid will still need a full washing.

The plastic attachment allows the disk to be controlled by the spinning motor, and locates the grater right at the top of the processing container. So, in action, nothing moves except for the disk.

The top of the food processor looks like this, and has a round narrow opening for any food to be pushed through and grated on the ricer. Attach it, and lock it into place.

Now, we have to get the cauliflower into chunks that will fit into the circular opening of the food processor. I start at the base, pull off all of the excess green stalks from the bottom to expose the base of the cauliflower florets. A typical misconception is that only the top of the cauliflower florets can be used for ricing. Not true - the stalks also shred very nicely, and instead of crumbling into micro-beads, they actually form more of the rice-like texture we're looking for. So, use as much of it as possible! Don't let any go to waste.

I cut off the large stalks first, as close to the base as possible to use as much of the head as I can.

Once I have manageable sized pieces separated out, I break them up by hand (or cut in half with the knife) so that they're down to the size that will fit in the food processor.

The top of the food processor comes with a "tamper" - that's what I call it, anyways - to tamp down the food in the hole so that it has pressure applied to it as it moves through the grater.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. I usually use the "pulse" option so that I have control over when the ricer spins and when it doesn't. Leaving it on the whole time is fine, but can make a mess if the tamper isn't in there holding the little bits that escape down. I usually have to detach everything and dump into a bowl about half way through a medium sized head of cauliflower. So, it can be done in about 2 batches. And Ta Da!

Once I start chopping stuff, Levi always comes to check on me, you know, in case I drop anything delicious on the ground. He's not a fan of cauliflower though.