I have been having some good luck recently making my own home-cooked cauliflower pizza. It begins with squeezing all of the moisture out of a package of defrosted cauliflower rice through cheesecloth. This does the trick, but it’s time-consuming and seems endless. They put more water in those packages, it seems, than cauliflower. While squeezing water this morning, I wondered if there’s a good device (maybe one I already own?) that could make it less strenuous and time-consuming.
Possibly a centrifuge.
Have you used this?
How do others wring moisture out of food, generally? I squeeze and squeeze the cheesecloth, but the water never seems to stop coming out of the thawed vegetables. I just stop when my hands get too tired.
How much weight do you need? Could you line a colander with cheese cloth, put your cauliflower rice in it, another layer of cheese cloth on top, then put something heavy on top of it and let gravity do the rest?
Didn’t even know for sure the product category of food centrifuge existed until I googled for it. I thought they used to advertise a cheap one called a salad shooter, but that wasn’t the right thing. I just now realize it was a salad spinner:
A salad spinner is definitely too weak to get most of the moisture out of thawed cauliflower rice. That water is BONDED to the cauliflower.
How are you doing the squeezing? If you’re squeezing the cloth-wrapped bundle with your hands/fingers, you might be running up against the problem (most common in small batch cheese-making) where the even pressure you are applying will wring out a certain amount of surface moisture, but is also compressing the material immediately inside the cloth, which can inhibit further drainage.
For cheese curds, the way to overcome this is to tighten the cloth around the material to be drained, tie it up tight and place in a colander or other freely draining vessel, then put a plate on it and weigh it down with heavy objects such as books or rocks or cans of food and leave it a while.
I’ve tried the “gravity and time” method, but like I say the water is positively bonded. After a day or two, the cheesecloth will still flow with water if I give it a good squeeze. I can imagine some sort of machine that applies pressure but I’ve never seen what I’m imagining.
Can you show us the whole recipe? I wonder if you could just dehydrate the cauliflower in the oven without impacting the final product.
As for salad spinners, they’re only for removing surface water from freshly washed veggies. They won’t do any squeezing.
Again something I haven’t tried, I just assumed there was a product category for “food press”:
I improvise, so no. But the instructions said to squeeze all of the moisture out of thawed cauliflower rice, and then mix it with one egg, some shredded cheese, and knead that into a dough-like substance, I find that it’s still too sticky so I add a little unbleached flour as I roll it out until the dough is of the right consistency.
Try throwing the rice on a baking sheet and cooking for a few hours at your oven’s lowest setting.
I use a potato ricer to ring out the moisture from raw grated potatoes when making hash browns. It works a treat for that purpose. Don’t know if it would work with riced cauliflower, or if it will just push it through the holes.
This gets close to what I was going to suggest. Tie the cheesecloth to the handle of a wooden spaghetti spoon or something similar and twist the handle. This is the method I use to get the excess liquid out of chopped Roma tomatoes when I’m making my own sauce, and it’s very effective.
Do you have to use frozen cauliflower? Can you rice your own? Perhaps you should be looking for a ricing tool.
Might be an option. Does seem a little crazy, though, that there’s no efficent moisture-removing device on the market.
Dehydrators, presses, and juicers are all devices for efficiently removing moisture from a product. I think any of them would work for your purpose, just depends on how much time you’re willing to spend.
You can also buy cauliflower flour, which seems like it would save quite a lot of time and hassle.
Yeah, I’d go for that - if you have a food processor, lightly-steamed cauliflower (still a bit firm and slightly crisp) processes down to rice-sized pieces in a couple of seconds and it doesn’t exude water because most of the cells are still intact (or at least are not shredded like what freezing does to cells).
You’d be consuming more water with the meal this way, but I assume that’s not undesirable, if the cauliflower-rice is a substitute for actual rice.
The only thing I’ve really found frozen cauliflower good for is to serve as cauliflower cheese (slathered in cheese sauce and baked)
What if you wrap it in cheesecloth, secure one end to a point (like a vise, if you have one in your kitchen), and actually wring it like you were tightening a tourniquet?