Speaker: 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, Gratin, man they were expensive and man they were small and 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 Bechamel sauce, we are 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 florets. I got the bags they already 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 there is our beautiful Bechamel 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 Bechamel, now here is another tip, just chop up your cheese into cubes, add it to the hot sauce, turn off the heat, you can't cook cheese. It will separate, get grainy.
So the heat goes off, the cheese will melt nicely. Again why shred you are going to lose a knuckle. Just cut it up in small cubes, it will melt in five or six minutes and then taste that for seasoning please, it should be fine. Alright the broccoli florets here are going hot boiling salted water. It gets hot boiling as you are done in. But anyway boiling water , now here is where you got to just trust me, two-and-a-half minutes, three maximum. You are not going to cook this broccoli, you are just going to make it nice and dark green, it just kind of starts the cooking process. This is going to bake in the oven, so I don't want to you to boil this to death, I just want you to go two or three minutes and that's all that's going to be necessary.
Fish it out and drain it really well. I don't want a watery Broccoli Gratin here. Pour in your hot sauce cheese mixture and again you taste that for seasoning, a little more pepper, a little more salt, you just, remember that broccoli is not really seasoned, except for the salted water. Give it a toss with your spatula, alright just make sure it's all well coated and see I am using that traditional gentle folding motion, don't get too rough with this. All those little beautiful broccoli flowers just start falling apart and then put in your baking dish, your Gratin dish. Now in a perfect word, how big a dish to use. You want the broccoli to come perfectly up to the top. You don't want to go in too much higher than the top, it might leak out and if it's too big of a pan, it might get over cooked and dry out. So that is just beautiful from me. Of course I need the big stem ends I kind of turn them upside down. I want the flowers facing up.
Okay you have to go too nuts there and then at the top of this really, really simple, I am going to give it just a really fine 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 are going to do, we are going to take some nice Reggiano Parmesan and we are going to just sprinkle some grated Reggiano and just cover the top. So thats about a-third of a cup of grated Parmesan maybe half cup, that was like more than a-third. Pop that into a 400 degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes and that is just gorgeous.
Now, plain broccoli is nice, it's good, it's healthy and all that, but that with some delicious cheese sauce we made with our home made Bechamel, just on a whole another level. So again I admit it that just a Bechamel, that was kind of boring, wasn't too exciting, but what you can do with that Bechamel sauce is you can make so many classic dishes and that was it, two cups of that Bechamel with our half pound of cheese, some broccoli, man thats beautiful anyway enjoy!
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