This Vegetable Saves Cheese Sauce From Being Too Heavy

Cheese sauce: you want to pour it on just about everything. Pasta, tortilla chips, burritos — the world is your oyster. But sometimes, cheese sauce can really weigh down the food you add it to. While there's nothing wrong with something robust and rich, what about those days when you're craving something cheesy but don't want it to sit in your stomach like a lead balloon? Well, here's where one veggie comes in. It's the very same vegetable that doesn't get nearly enough love in egg salad, the veggie that people have been turning into everything from rice to pizza crust: it's cauliflower.

Before you get up in arms over yet another way of adding cauliflower to your food, hear me out. When you boil it and blend it down, it becomes velvety smooth and perfectly suited for sauces. On top of that, cauliflower itself loses a lot of its flavor when boiled, giving you a super mild base to work with. You can add basically anything to it (like spices, aromatics, and cheese) and you'll hardly taste the cauliflower at all, if you even do. An easy, good sauce base includes some milk, a cheese of your choice that melts down easily, chicken stock, salt, pepper, and garlic. If you want to make it totally vegan, you can use plant based cheese and non-dairy milks, too. Just boil the cauliflower until soft and give it a good blend. Once you have your blended cauliflower, just add it to a pan, mix in your liquids, toss in your seasonings, add your cheese, and melt until it's all warm and combined. Then you just pour it over your dish of choice and serve.

Now that you have this big ol' pot of cauliflower cheese sauce, what do you do with it? You can add in some elbow macaroni for an elevated take on mac and cheese, especially if you make a version of this smoked gouda cheese sauce. Really, you can serve cheese sauce on any pasta you want. I personally love it with pasta that really soaks up and holds a lot of the sauce like penne, served with crusty, hearty bread so all that excess sauce gets soaked up without a drop going to waste.

Cauliflower cheese sauce is also great in homemade taco or burrito bowls, or as an addition to regular tacos, burritos, or quesadillas. It can take your pizza up to gourmet levels and add an extra layer of cheesy goodness in addition to whatever you choose to sprinkle over the top. You can also use it in between the layers of a lasagna. The great thing about this is that even though it's still flavorful and delicious, it's not going to make you feel overly full. Give it a try. You might just find yourself becoming a cauliflower convert, too.