Cauliflower Fritters
Small cauliflower florets in a spiced batter of flour, egg and cumin, fried until golden and crisp.
Photograph credit: Cauliflower fritters with crushed hazelnuts and greens by veritatem · CC BY 2.0 · Flickr
The Method for Cauliflower Fritters
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Boil the florets in salted water for 3 minutes. Drain well and leave to steam dry for 5 minutes.
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Whisk the flour, egg, milk, cumin, turmeric and salt into a thick batter.
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Heat the oil in a deep frying pan over a medium-high heat. Dip the florets in the batter and lower them into the oil in batches.
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Fry for 3 minutes, turning once, until golden. Drain on kitchen paper and serve hot.
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What Can Go Wrong
- Dry the boiled florets well before dipping.
- Fry in batches so the oil stays hot.
- Test the oil with a drop of batter: it should sizzle at once.
- Serve with a yoghurt dip with herbs.
The Short Version
Par-boil the cauliflower. Raw florets fried in batter stay hard inside, while the batter burns around them. A short dip in boiling water makes them tender enough to finish cooking in the pan.
Cut small florets, about the size of a walnut. They cook evenly and give the fritter more batter surface. Boil them for 3 minutes, drain well and let them steam dry for a couple of minutes. Wet florets spit in the oil and dilute the batter.
The batter is flour, egg, milk, cumin, turmeric and salt. It should coat a spoon thickly without running off. Too thin and the fritter is bare in places; too thick and it is doughy.
Fry in about 1 cm of hot oil, turning once. Drain well, season while hot and eat soon after. Do not skip the draining. Wet florets spit in the hot oil and make the batter slide off, leaving patchy fritters.
On the Table Alongside
Plain yoghurt dip · Sweet chilli sauce · Lemon wedges · Green chutney
Storing Leftovers
Best eaten straight away. Reheat in a hot oven to crisp them again.
The Numbers per Serving
No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (how much frying oil the food takes up cannot be known from the recipe). Why some recipes have none.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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