Making cauli-rice in a Vita-Mix

Cauli-rice, or cauliflower rice, is a staple food for many on the low-carb, ketogenic way of life. It's a low-carb substitute for things like rice, potatoes or biscuits.

Dana Carpender repeats the basic cauli-rice recipe she uses in many of her cook books. Her versions often call for 1/2 a cauliflower. I weighed my two cauliflower heads and averaged them, and came up with a 12 oz weight for 1/2 a cauliflower. That came to 2.5 cups of cauliflower after the cauli-rice making process. This is 3 servings, each with 5 grams of carbs. (And 2 grams of fiber, if you do the 'net carbs' thing.)

Dana suggests putting the cauliflower through the food processor on the shredding blade. I no longer have a food processor as I never used it, so I make cauli-rice in my Vita-Mix®️, which is kind of like a blender with superpowers. There are two ways to make cauli-rice in your Vita-Mix--- the dry chop method and the wet chop method. I tried the dry chop method first, and it left a lot of unchopped bits of cauliflower.

So I resorted to the wet chop method, as you will find in your owner's manual. I put in enough cauliflower to fill it within an inch or so of the top, and then added water to cover. You only need a few seconds of chopping to get it done. You put it on forward, then reverse, 3 times within your few seconds, and you will have a bunch of well-chopped cauliflower.

I steamed the cauliflower for about 8 minutes in my steamer pot. I first put the water in the pot and brought it to a boil, then put in the steamer insert filled with cauliflower rice.

Since I live alone, I put one serving of the steamed cauli-rice in each freezer bag, and froze them in my big upright freezer out on my porch. I then put the frozen bags into a larger sized freezer bag, so they would be double-bagged.

I also made up Dana Carpender's Fried Rice Recipe from her book 300 15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes. I omitted the cooked meat, since I planned to serve the fried rice with a meat dish. It turned out fairly well, but I thought the 2 eggs called for were a bit much. Next time I think I'll make it with 1 egg only.

Dana Carpender's cookbook also has several other recipes that call for cauli-rice, such as Spanish "Rice", Beef and Bacon "Rice" with Pine Nuts and Chicken-Almond "Rice"--- which is a lot like Rice-a-Roni.

I have a very nice kitchen scale which weighs things in pounds or ounces or also with metric measurements. It also "zeroes out" the weight of a container, so you can weigh food in a container without adding the container weight to the measurement. I find it a very useful item, as when I figured out how much 1/2 cauliflower weighed.

So now I have some home-made cauli-rice in my freezer. I plan usually to thaw it out in my fridge before heating, but I've heated frozen cauli-rice in the microwave before, and it was still OK.

Do you make and eat cauli-rice? What dishes do you make with it? Is it something you might try to add diversity to your diet?

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A book and some products mentioned in this blog post.