Buffalo Cauliflower Dip
I may not always have wings when I'm eating pizza, but I always want them. When I decided to do a pizza party Meatwave, there was no questions that Buffalo wings would be on the menu, but I wanted to also provide something that had that distinctly rich Frank's Red Hot Sauce flavor for the vegetarian constituency so no one would miss out on that perfect meal matchup. Cauliflower is a pretty standard way to do this, but to deliver an experience that more closely matches that of wing, the veggie really needs to be battered and fried. Since I was going to be hosting about 40 people and would be busy making them all pizza, adding in a dish that would require me to be indoors frying for long periods of time was a non-starter, so I looked for a different solution and landed on Buafflo cauliflower dip.
The idea here was to create a dish that could mostly be made well ahead of serving time, and I actually grilled the cauliflower the day prior. I've done many successful cauliflower dishes on the grill by now, so I have a process I prefer that begins with cutting the crown into florets large enough that they won't fall between the grates. Those are then oiled and seasoned before being grilled, and for this particular dish, I tossed some cayenne into the salt and pepper combo since it seemed fitting for the overall spicy Buffalo flavor.
I then cooked the cauliflower over indirect heat using a two-zone fire. When making one head of cauliflower, I can usually arrange the florets all close to, but not directly over the fire, but I was cooking two heads on this day which took up the entire half of the grilling area. Once covered, the cauliflower merely needed enough time to get tender, which took about 20 minutes on this day with some moving around of the florets occasionally to make sure everything was cooking evenly.
When seeing what recipes are already out there for Buffalo dips, the base mostly fell into two categories—cream cheese with blue cheese or cream cheese with ranch. I'm not a fan of blue cheese, so went the ranch route, but instead of using bottled ranch, I built up the dip with the ingredients of ranch so I could better fine tune the overall flavor. That may have been a bit of fools errand because once I added in the Frank's, that's mainly what the dip tasted like.
Once I had the saucy part tasting right, I roughly chopped all the cauliflower and added it in, then transferred the dip into a smallish baking dish. This is where I stopped for the first day, storing the dip in the fridge overnight. The next day I topped the dip with a layer of cheddar and baked it in a 375°F oven until hot and the cheese was melted. I wanted a little extra color on the cheese though, so flipped on the broiler and let the dip sit for a few more minutes until the cheese began to brown in spots.
After a short rest to cool, I served up the dip with celery sticks, baby carrots, and crackers. While a pretty different experience than wings, this dip did deliver on a lot of reasons why wings pair so well. First and foremost, it had that ubiquitous Frank's flavor that only had a medium spiciness thanks to all the creams in the dip that dialed back the heat. The seasoning mixture and herbs did give the dip the ranch-y stamp I was after and when eaten with a crunchy celery stick or carrot, the Buffalo equation felt pretty complete. The cauliflower was also key in rendering the dip pretty hearty, making it stretch longer than I was expecting. Still, the crowd spoke when the first dish of this dip was finished off and I had to go inside and bake another, smaller one, that I had waiting just in case that exact scenario played out.
