Leave Well Enough Alone: Roasted Cauliflower, Manchurian Style

Manchurian-Style Cauliflower is an involved recipe that involved frying cauliflower and then tossing it in a ketchup based mixture. It’s based on a street food popular in Calcutta’s Chinatown, and it looks great! I made the easier, faster, healthier Roasted Cauliflower, Manchurian Style variation, which just seems like a way to ruin perfectly good roasted caulifliower.

That there in the background is an awesome pasta dish my brother makes: turkey sausage, mushrooms, and basil tossed with pasta and a lot of parmesan cheese. He calls it “The Shit 2.0” (version 1.0 was turkey sausage with a jar of tomato sauce on top) and it’s quite good.

Anyway, back to the cauliflower. You just roast it, then toss it in the ketchup mixture. That’s ketchup, garlic, salt, pepper and a bit of cayenne (I used sriracha instead). It tastes like garlicky ketchup, really tasty, but then when you toss it with the cauliflower all you can taste is the ketchup. I ended up wishing I’d just made roasted cauliflower. See, here it is before it got all that ketchup all over it:

Doesn’t that look good? Oh, well.