In this instructional video, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, demonstrates three practical methods for turning a whole organic cauliflower into cauliflower "rice" using common kitchen tools. She begins by explaining why making your own cauliflower rice is cheaper and ensures organic quality compared to pre‑packaged options. After cutting the cauliflower into large chunks and removing the stem, she walks through each method: 1. Food processor – using either the regular blade (pulsing) or the shredder blade. She emphasizes processing in small batches for even texture, explains how over‑filling leads to uneven pulverization, and shows the resulting rice‑like versus shredded consistency. 2. Hand grater/shredder – employing a kitchen grater (Cuisinart) to shred the cauliflower. She notes this is more labor‑intensive but yields a fine rice‑like texture when the appropriate side of the grater is used. 3. Knife‑chopping – a manual rocking‑knife technique that she finds therapeutic. This method takes longer but requires no special equipment; the texture can be coarse or fine depending on how long you continue chopping. Cheryl compares the textures, cleanup effort, and time required for each approach, ultimately recommending the food‑processor pulse method with small florets as her preferred balance of speed and texture. She directs viewers to a detailed article on her website for further guidance.
Chapters
Hi everyone, it's Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and today I want to show you 3 different ways to prepare cauliflower rice. So you might be thinking, well, I can get that at the grocery store already done. Yes, you can, but what I've found is it's definitely more expensive and it's also hard to find ones that are organic. So if you really like to use organic produce, and I think you should whenever possible, then it would be much easier to just buy a cauliflower. So this is a pretty giant organic cauliflower that I got, and the amount of cauliflower rice this will make is a lot more than anything that you would buy kind of already pre-riced at the store. So anyway, I'll show you 3 methods. They're all relatively easy, but some take longer than others. You want to start by cutting your cauliflower into large chunks and just, you know, remove the stem part as you normally would. I like to just do a little V-cut there to get that out of the way. And so again, you cut them in rather large hunks to get started, using my lovely Wusthof that I'm just in love with. I've had this knife for like well over 20 years. Okay, so you've got your cauliflower ready to go. So the first method is in the food processor, and that's really probably the quickest and easiest. It'll probably take you longer to clean up the food processor than it actually does to make it. So first, you can use one of two blades. You can pulse using the regular blade like this, or you can also kind of shave the cauliflower using your shredder blade. So I'll show you this one first. You put one of your chunks of cauliflower, and I found it is better to work in kind of smaller batches. That gives you a little bit better consistency. So we have that one in there. We'll just pulse a few times. And you just keep pulsing until the cauliflower is the consistency of rice. And the reason I think smaller batches work better is because when you get too much in there and you start pulsing, the bottom kind of gets erased and then there's still a lot of pieces that are bigger. And so part of it becomes more pulverized, but you want to try to make it relatively even. So that looks about finished there.. And I will show you close up what this actually looks like. So again, that's kind of the quickest method. You could do all of your batch in probably, you know, just about a minute or so using the food processor. So here's the consistency of this rice. You can see it's pretty even and maybe even got a little too small there. So you just have to keep an eye on it on how many pulses that you do. So that's the first one. Now we'll try with the shredder blade, and you can see what that consistency looks like. It definitely looks more like shreds when you use this method. So again, using smaller pieces and run it into the blade. Kind of always end up with these little goofy pieces on top here. This consistency is much more like a shred, so depending on what kind of recipe you're making with your cauliflower rice, you may prefer to use the shredder blade. And here we've got this consistency, so So that's the shredder blade from the Cuisinart. Okay, so now we're done with the Cuisinart for the moment. I'll show you the other couple of methods that you can use. So the other one, this one is definitely more labor-intensive, but it still works, is to use your kitchen shredder. So probably everybody has one of these. Maybe not everybody has a Cuisinart, but if you don't, I I do recommend it. It took me years to get one, but now I love it. So you could theoretically use any of the sides of this grater depending on how fine you want it to be, but this side's definitely the easiest and makes the consistency most like rice. So you simply just start shredding the cauliflower. Again, this is probably the most laborious method and takes the longest, but it works just fine. And you can kind of see them losing some of the cauliflower, kind of spreading around. See, you can keep your hand around it, it keeps most of it in the, in the bowl. So again, this consistency is really more like cauliflower shreds. It does have some that are more like rice, but depending on your recipe, this may or may not be the best method for you. And then the final method is probably the one that takes the longest, but it can actually be I find chopping very therapeutic, so for me this one doesn't bother me too much, but it's really just chopping your cauliflower into small pieces. And so then once you get going, you can kind of use the rocking motion to start to— and I've got all this kind of other cauliflower that was from the other pieces— but you just do the rocking motion to get your cauliflower into pieces. And you just keep doing that until it's the size that you like. So this one does take a little longer, but I find it less labor-intensive than actually, um, doing the shredding on the cheese grater. That one to me is the hardest, although I could probably use a little more arm muscle exercise, truth be told, so that might not be the worst thing in the world. But you just continue rocking your knife over the cauliflower. And here I'll show you the consistency of this one. These are definitely more inconsistent and has, you know, the ability though to be more coarse if that's what you're looking for for your recipe. So you can see here there's some that are definitely very rice-shaped and then others that are bigger in other parts of the stem. But you could keep rocking your knife for quite a while and get that all much more consistent. So just for the sake of, uh, the video, I did a little bit more experimentation here at the end. Uh, in the past when I've made cauliflower rice myself, just kind of looking to do it quickly in the interest of time, but then I kind of thought about the texture of some of these and I wondered if we can get it a little bit closer to what you get at the store. So the method that I think is working the best is putting the pieces in the food processor in these small little florets and kind of spreading it around the bowl. And then we pulse it just a few times. And I should have set the tripod back up, but I just have the camera in my hand, so apologize for that. We'll pulse here a couple times. That was pulsing, just quick pulse about 10 times, and you can see that this has a little bit more texture to it, a little bit more even. So I'm thinking that's the method that I like the best now, other than the chopping, still liking that. So go over to the site, check it out, there's a whole article about this. It basically tells you what I just showed you though, but hopefully if you're trying to make cauliflower rice at home, save a little money, these are the 3 easy methods that you can use.
