Alright, here is what inspired today’s clip. I was in the grocery store and the gentleman in front of me had a bunch of these packages frozen, broccoli and cheddar cheese and they were expensive and they were small and you know I thought to myself, this poor, poor gentleman has no idea how easy it is to make this from scratch.
So anyway, yesterday we made some béchamel sauce, we’re going to use that to make this gorgeous broccoli gratin and here we go. You need a pound and a half 24 ounces of broccoli florettes you know I bought a bags there to come like that just to admit it. If you want to get about four heads of broccoli and cut off those yourself, go ahead. That is one block eight ounces of sharp cheddar cheese and that is our beautiful béchamel from yesterday, now that’s only half the batch.
That’s two cups alright, so don’t use the whole core, that’s two cups of béchamel and here’s another tip, just chop up your cheese in the cubes and add to the hot sauce, turn off the heat and you can’t cook cheese, it will separate—so the heat was off, the cheese will now nicely again, why shred? You’re going to lose a knuckle. Just cut it off in small cubes and it will melt in five or six minutes and then taste that for seasoning please, it should be fine. Alright, the broccoli florettes here going hot, boiling, salted water because hot boiling is redundant but anyway, boiling water. Now here’s where you got to just trust me, two and a half minutes, three maximum.
You’re not going to cook this broccoli, you’re just going to make a nice and dark green and you’re just going to start the cooking process, this is going to bake in the oven so I don’t want you to boil this to death, I just want you to go two or three minutes and that’s all going to be necessary – drain it really well. I don’t want a watery you know watery broccoli gratin here.
Pour in your hot sauce cheese mixture and again, you should taste that for seasoning a little more pepper, a little more salt, you know you just remember that broccoli is not really seasoned except for the salted water. Give it a toss to your spatula alright, and just make sure it’s all well coated and see, I’m using that traditional gentle folding motion. Don’t get too rough of this, all of these little beautiful broccoli flower just start falling apart. And then put it into your baking dish or gratin dish. Now in a perfect world, how big a dish to use, you want the broccoli to come perfectly up to the top, you don’t want to go on too much higher than the top, it might leak and it’s too big of a pan you know, it might get over cooked.
So that is just beautiful for me—if it’s on you’ve got the big stem in, I kind of turn them upside down, I want the flowers facing up and again, you don’t want to go too nuts there. And then to top this, really simple, I’m going to give it just a really fined dusting of plain bread crumbs and I said dusting okay so just barely cover it with just a thin layer of plain bread crumbs, you don’t have to do anything to those because what we’re going to do alright, we’re going to take some nice Reggiano-Parmigiano and we’re going to just sprinkle some grated Reggiano and just cover the top and so that’s about a third of a cup of grated Parmigiano and maybe a half cup and that’s like more than a third. Alright, pop that into a 400 degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes and that is just gorgeous.
Now you know, plain broccoli is nice, it’s good, it’s healthy and all that but that was a delicious cheese sauce we made with our homemade béchamel just on a whole amount of level. So again, I made yesterday béchamel that was kind of boring you know and that wasn’t too exciting but what you can do with that béchamel sauce is you can make so many classic dishes and that was it. Two cups of that béchamel with our half pound of cheese and some broccoli and man, that’s beautiful.
Anyway, enjoy!
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