Times of Plenty Hairy Bikers' Best of British

We believe that Britain has the best food in the world.

Not only can we boast fantastic ingredients...

Piece de resistance!

-Which is which?

-Lamb. Mutton.

Baa!

'..outstanding food producers...'

It's brilliant!

'..and innovative chefs,

'but we also have an amazing food history.'

-Oh, wow!

-Don't eat them like that. You'll break your teeth.

'During this series, we're taking you on a journey into our culinary past.'

Everything's ready. Let's get cracking.

'We'll explore its revealing stories.'

Wow!

'And meet the heroes who keep our culinary past alive.'

Pontefract liquorice has been my life and I've loved every minute.

'And be cooking up a load of dishes that reveal our foodie evolution.'

Look at that! That's a proper British treat.

We have a taste of history.

Quite simply...

BOTH: The best of British!

'Today, we're looking at our favourite indulgent foods.

'From a little bit of luxury to a taste of the high life,

'the story of how we've treated ourselves in plentiful times of old through to today.'

Ah! Harvest! It's my favourite time of the year.

There's a freshness in the air and the leaves are starting to turn.

From a foodie point of view, it's loads and loads of fresh produce.

It's heaven, isn't it? A real time to indulge.

-I love a good indulge.

-Well, a little bit of what you fancy does you good.

-What about a lot of what you fancy?

-It probably doesn't do you good.

-Sometimes, you've got to do it anyway.

-You're not wrong, dude.

'With that in mind, we're in our Best Of British kitchen

'to show you a dish that epitomises the spirit of decadence.'

There comes a time in your life, you have to have a treat,

have a little time of plenty on your own, push the boat out.

-There's nothing really more decadent...

-No.

..more indulgent

than a Scottish lobster.

And this is the little beauty. His name's Caesar.

We're going to turn this upmarket ingredient

into a beautifully smooth and very lavish lobster mousse.

Interesting thing about lobsters.

The bigger claw is the crushing claw.

This one here is the cutting claw. Crush, cut. Cut, crush.

-My dad got his thumb broken by a lobster.

-You're joking?

He was crabbing and he put his hand down there like that...

Pulled out a lobster. It broke his thumb! He didn't let go of the lobster.

-In 40 years of crabbing, his only lobster.

-Caught with his thumb!

-He sat there with his thumb in splints.

-Ooh.

-Enjoying it.

We're going to make something very lovely with him.

-This will enable us to feed four people out of one lobster.

-Yes.

It's not that plentiful. We haven't got your three brothers, have we?

First, we use gelatine with which to set the mousse.

I put five leaves of gelatine to soak in cold water.

So just put one, two,

three, four, five in cold water

and wait for it just to go like a spineless jellyfish.

That will take about five minutes.

'Gently heat 100 mil of water,

'add two teaspoons of lemon juice and the softened gelatine.

'Once the gelatine has dissolved,

'put it aside to cool, but don't let it set.'

-Should I crack on with the lobster?

-BOTH LAUGH

Give it a right good...crack.

'Now, carefully remove all the precious meat,

'making sure not to get any shell into the mix.'

-It's like a parrot's beak!

-Little chop there. Little chop there.

Ooh! Look at that! Nice one!

That's crustacean ecstasy.

There's a sense of occasion with lobster, like champagne as opposed to white wine.

Which is why we are going to be serving this with a champagne sauce.

Ooh.

I absolutely cannot get anything else out of that, Si.

-Shall we start to build?

-Mousse it up.

'To the lobster add four king prawns and a whole jar of mayonnaise.

-'Then blitz it up to make a smooth paste.

-A WHOLE jar!

'After all, it's a time of plenty!'

-Looking good.

-It is, isn't it?

Here, I've got the water, lemon juice

and I've dissolved those leaves of gelatine and it's quite cool.

I'm just going to trickle this in.

200 mils of cream. Double.

We need to whip this till it's solid.

I'm going to put a TOUCH of salt in.

It's interesting, Dave, how in times of plenty,

we developed...well, just fantastic dishes for celebration

and for opulence and for a kind of status, didn't we?

I remember, if your dad had had a bonus at work

-or you had a raise, you'd often treat the family with food, which is a lovely thing to do.

-Yeah.

I remember my Uncle Norman turning up on Christmas Eve

-and he had two wild salmon steaks.

-Ooh.

I must have been seven years old. Salmon, in my head, came in tins.

This was the real thing, and that,

-that kicked Christmas off to a...

-Absolutely.

It's beautiful. What we do now is we fold that into the cream.

-I love the colour of this.

-Lovely, isn't it?

I've got these little moulds, ones for steak and kidney pudding.

If you were being very frugal, you could have eight small ones.

But I want a decadent, time of plenty lobster mousse.

Put a little bit of oil in each mould.

Cos remember, once this is set, we've got to get it out.

Just wipe that oil around the mould.

Like so. Nice thin coating.

-Big spoon!

-Yes.

-And we'll start by filling the moulds.

-Oooh!

'Next, it's into the fridge to chill for six hours or so.'

-Let's make champagne sauce!

-Yess! What a good idea, Ssonny!

This is a shallot.

And this is a saucepan.

First off, melt some butter.

About 25 grams.

And chop this shallot very finely.

-Chop it finer than a humming bird's hairpiece, Mr King!

-I will.

Garlic. This is fine food.

I love posh food. I was born to it. I just ended up in the wrong womb!

SI CRACKS UP

Mustn't burn the garlic.

-You've got delusions of grandeur.

-No.

You have delusions of grandeur.

-You call the people on Twitter disciples.

-Ssh!

Now, tell me that that's not fine.

That's worthy of this sauce. Now this needs to be sweated gently.

The garlic and that immaculately chopped shallot, just sweated down.

It's time for the big one now, the champagne.

Like so.

'Add 225 mil, or half a pint in old money, to the shallots.

'Add one bay leaf and a few sprigs of thyme,

'and simmer for about four minutes.'

Champagne sauces can be a little tart,

so we're going to put in a right good pinch of caster sugar

and 200 mil of double cream.

The big one!

Then we're going to simmer this away for about four minutes.

It's going to be a hot champagne sauce with chilled mousse.

Don't forget, in times of plenty, opulence, fats, calories...

clean out the window.

'Strain the sauce into a clean pan and finely chop some chives.'

This'll bring the sauce to life.

We use white pepper in sauces like this

cos we don't want them to look all speckled in black.

'When it has set, remove the mousse from the fridge

'and hold in boiling water for three seconds.'

Give it a go.

Dude, do you remember Sooty? Izzy wizzy, let's get busy.

'Now, ever so carefully, release it from the moulds,

'smoothing the sides where the mousse has melted.'

You've got to melt it a bit or you'd never get it out of there.

I've got a little crown for you. Top it with salmon roe.

Salmon roe's great.

They're not expensive. You sometimes get it on sushi, the gunboat sushi.

They're really sticky and tangy and lovely.

We're just going to put some air through that sauce.

WHIRRING

Not foam. It's not that pretentious. Just to make the sauce lighter.

-That's lovely, isn't it?

-Lush.

'Gently spoon the sauce around the mousse

'and add a dainty sprinkling of chopped chives.'

'Look at that!

'Lobster mousse with a warm champagne and chive sauce

'served with crisp Melba toasts and a salmon caviar garnish.

'Wah! Class on a plate!

'It certainly is, but food doesn't have to be expensive to be decadent.

'There's one food we love more than any other.'

# The closer you get, the better you look, baby... #

It's official. We are a nation of chocoholics, eating more of it

'than any other European country -

'one and a half times as much as the second-biggest chocolate lovers, the Germans.

'Finally, there's something we do better than the Germans!'

Does anybody not like chocolate?

'So how did the seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree

'become Britain's favourite indulgence?

'Cocoa has been cultivated for at least 3,000 years,

'but spent much of its early life as a drink.

'The Mayans and Aztecs were the first chocolate aficionados,

'grinding up cocoa beans, adding water, spices and chillies

'to create a bitter brew called xocolatl.

'In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors brought chocolate back to Europe,

'where it was immediately popular.

'But there was one nation that took to it like no other.

'It reached England in the 1650s. Chocolate houses opened in London,

'peddling the exotic new drink to the aristocracy.

'Then a Bristol company changed the way chocolate was consumed forever.

'In 1847, a physician called Joseph Fry

'discovered if you mix cocoa butter with cocoa powder and sugar,

'it made a paste that could be pressed into a mould. Bingo!

-'The chocolate bar was born.

-And it really took off!'

The chocolate distinguished with a glass and a half of milk

in every lovely half pound.

'In 1905, John Cadbury created Dairy Milk.

'It became the company's best-seller.

'At last, a luxury the masses could afford. British production boomed.

'Recipes for new bars would be carefully researched

'and kept firmly under wraps.'

REPORTER: Every big industry has its back-room boys,

where research and science take over.

The confectioners and chefs prepare not for today, but for tomorrow.

'No matter what went into it,

'we couldn't get enough of the brown stuff.'

I never get tired of KitKat.

'And in the '60s, chocolate even became sexy.

-'Careful, Dave. You know it's a family show.

-Sorry.'

Flake, Cadbury's Flake.

A heaven all of your own.

'The appeal of chocolate was so great

'people confessed to being addicted to it.'

I decided I would have some death by chocolate cake, 36 portions.

When I'd eaten all of it, I felt it was a bit piggish, really,

but it's so moreish, you just can't stop.

'Ah! And a new word entered the dictionary.'

Chocoholic.

'Chocolate has come a long way from the Central American cocoa drink.

'Our love affair with the stuff shows no sign of dwindling.

'To Victorian Britain next, where we were first introduced to another indulgent treat us Brits adore,

'ice cream.

'We're off to the Lake District

'to see a man who knows about bygone times of plenty,

'Best Of British food historian and chef, Ivan Day.'

We're going to make some ice cream.

-Isn't that gonna take ages?

-No. We'll use the original method.

In the 17th century in Italy, in the 18th century in England and France,

they made superb ice creams and didn't have electrical freezers.

They understood that if you mix chemicals like sodium chloride, common salt, into ice,

it makes the temperature go down.

-A mystery we've been thinking about.

-How did they get the ice?

Right, well, in the winter, even in a hot country like Italy,

Naples, big mountains.

They would collect the snow, bring it down,

and they stored it in huge underground pits called ice houses.

The technique they used in the 17th century is this one.

The temperature in that is about minus ten. Put your hand in.

-You're going into the Arctic for a moment.

-Yeah. That is very cold.

-Wow!

-It's a miniature freezer.

-That cream you brought.

-Yes.

-What we're going to do with it is... Half a pint of single cream?

-Yeah.

I've got some syrup that I've made.

The earliest name for an ice dessert in Europe was a sorbetto,

an Italian name.

One of the key ingredients was a sugar syrup.

So I put that into the cream.

And here, I've got the juice of three lemons.

We're going to make a lemon sherbet.

We're going to grate the peel of an orange.

If you could put it into our mixture.

I'll just pour a small amount in to begin with.

-You can see a freezing already.

-It is. Up the sides of the vessel.

Even after a couple of seconds it's beginning to congeal.

If I spin this around in the ice, it'll agitate the mixture.

By the 18th century, every major country house had an ice house.

Everybody wanted ice cream, but it was very much an upper-class thing.

'It was the Italians who introduced ice cream to the masses

'in the mid 19th century.

'Italian immigrants had their own tradition of ice cream making

'and made a living by selling it on the streets from painted handcarts.'

The most popular way of serving it was in one of these glasses.

This is a ha'penny lick.

-That's a penny lick.

-Beautiful.

They're made of pressed glass. The bit the ice cream was in was tiny.

You get an optical illusion and think you've got more than you have.

You don't have a spoon, you literally...

lick it, you see.

Italian emigres were getting blamed for cholera and typhoid epidemics

because people thought that this was unhygienic.

These glasses were then replaced by...?

Ice cream cones. You ate the container. There was no infection.

'For the upper classes, there was a more refined way

'of presenting iced desserts.'

One of the things that starts to happen is they start using moulds

-in the form of fruits.

-Is that a fig?

-That's a fig.

You could put a fig flavoured ice cream in it.

Sometimes, they would even paint them with edible colourings

to make them look realistic.

I've already done that with some.

Including...

-..this monster.

-Wow!

This is not an ice cream. This is a water ice.

Lemon water ice flavoured with bergamot,

the oil they put in Earl Grey tea.

This is the difference between an ice cream penny lick or cone

-and a lolly.

-Yeah.

This is a very, very posh lolly.

-We're going to dip this in here.

-That's cold.

If you put it in warm water, it's a disaster.

Isn't it lovely seeing that mould used for the purpose for which it was intended?

If I'm very careful, I can prise it open...

-BOTH:

-Wow!

-Oh, hey!

-This is the tricky bit.

We've got to get it out.

It's a nightmare.

-Yes!

-Well done, that man!

This is the really... Could you grab that for me, Si?

Fantastic. OK, so there is our basket of flowers.

That's beautiful.

There's fruit juices in there, strawberry and raspberry.

And saffron for the yellow.

You just mix a little bit of the colours

in with the semi-melted water ice, and filled up part of the mould.

For centuries, us Brits have created magnificent food in times of plenty.

How fabulous.

Can you feel it coming? Perfect.

Stand it up next to the pineapple.

Can you imagine a Victorian child's face

being presented with that on the table for the birthday tea?

-It would be magic.

-This is advanced stuff.

I'm giving you two swan moulds.

So dip it in.

One, two, three.

-OK?

-Yeah.

If you can get these out in one piece, I'll be really impressed. This is tricky. Gently, Si.

-Beautiful.

-Oh, wow!

Just tip it out onto your hand. Hold it by the body.

Ah! I've lost the neck! I failed.

-Never mind. I've got a stumpy swan.

-There's no way you can stick it on.

A gentle flick with it. Do you feel it moving?

-Yes.

-Now, very carefully,

turn it round and gently...

-Yes!

-Well done.

That is so satisfying!

-Now put it...

-At the front.

..over the ugly duckling!

A vision, eh?

'That's one up to you, Si, but Ivan was about to outdo us both

'with a recreation of an exotic dish

'that has all but disappeared from our culinary repertoire.'

This is made with cream, milk,

a flavouring called maraschino, which is Marasca cherries.

Let's hope it just comes out OK.

Oh, wow! That's stunning, Ivan. What a wonderful dessert!

And I think we must have a tasting.

We should start with the one that we made first.

-The creme de la creme ice cream.

-Which you made from scratch.

-Yes.

Let's have a look at it and see whether it's holding up.

-It's not melting.

-It's perfect.

-Tangy, isn't it?

-It's nicely grown-up.

-That's wonderful.

-Not too sweet.

-There is a really acidic tang which is beautifully balanced with sweetness.

-It is tangy.

-That's delicious.

-Absolutely superb.

Now this one, it's not so much a true ice cream

as a kind of Bavarian cream, almost like a frozen blancmange.

And it's got in it bits of lokum, the Turkish delight.

DAVE AND SI GASP

This is an iced pudding, rather than an ice cream.

The taste is amazing. That is a fantastic pudding.

It's interesting because it's a new flavour to us.

But it is a whiff of a bygone era. It's stunning.

You have the pineapple. You got that one out.

-And me swan?

-He's gone!

-Ah! Never mind, never mind!

This, to me, is one of the most refreshing water ices

-that's been invented.

-Ahhhh!

-Isn't it?

-That's a super-charged ice lolly!

-Like a Zoom with attitude.

IVAN LAUGHS

What I've loved about this, I think it sums up what you do, Ivan.

You have the source material.

Without the implements and techniques, you'll never get it right.

It's a fascinating taste of the past.

It's very sophisticated tasty food.

-Thank you for sharing it with us.

-It's been a great pleasure.

Nice to have such good students. LAUGHTER

Mr Whippy and Mr Softee! ALL LAUGH

'Now, we Brits can't get enough of cooking on the telly.

'And we Hairy Bikers owe our love of food to those classic TV chefs

'whose passion and knowhow inspired us all to get into the kitchen.

'So we're going back to 1983,

'to join the Reverend John Eley, aka the Cooking Canon.

'Before our telly schedules were packed with celebrity chefs,

'people like the Cooking Canon

'were expanding our palates on daytime TV.'

-He's funny as well.

-I've never seen this, I don't think.

-Oh! BBC Pebble Mill.

-He was on Pebble Mill for years.

-That's a crocodile.

-Are these the worst titles you've ever seen?

It's out of Birmingham!

Pebble Mill At One!

-This is a bit extravagant for you...

-Because it's times of plenty!

It was common to have pheasants. You'd get them fair means or FOUL!

I thought today we'd do a game pie.

-He had three best-selling books off this series.

-Did he?

-Yeah.

-You're not allowed to cheat.

-I've cheated!

I've filled my nine-inch cake tin with my pastry.

I'm putting a little bit of venison in the bottom of my dish.

Isn't venison not expensive for the ordinary, everyday...?

I was talking to some art students in Carlisle and they were having venison that night.

-Now I'm putting some pheasant breasts on top...

-Wow!

-He's doing well, isn't he?

-That's a well-packed pie.

-It certainly is.

-Something for a special occasion?

-Yes. When the bishop comes to tea!

Or if there's a visiting king. Henry VIII would have enjoyed it.

-That was cooked pheasant on top of raw venison?

-Correct.

-Raw mushrooms then half-boiled eggs?

-Right. Raw lamb's kidney.

'Venison and pheasant were the preserve of the wealthy

'and men of the cloth so it was food of the rich.

-'The poor would have to poach it which, for centuries, was punishable by death.

-Bit harsh.'

..Walnuts round the top like this...

Has he just cleared out the cupboard and thrown what he can in?

Got the hand of God in it. About the only thing it hasn't got.

..One important ingredient which I've kept to do myself,

the man should always handle the port, a little bit of port...

The communion wine will be missing.

.."A little bit of port" and half a bottle goes in!

So you can see it coming through.

I'm going to pop this into the oven

as it is without the lid on yet.

I want to cook the ingredients inside.

Hopefully, we end up with a wonderful pie like this.

-GIGGLING:

-Here's one he made earlier!

-How does that taste? We ought to have a drop of this with it.

-Mm.

Good. Is that nice? Here's a little claret.

He's got a bit of a look in his eye for the old presenter!

Oh, hey! Steady, canon!

-..The crunchiness of the walnuts.

-Splendid.

-You're enjoying that, aren't you?

-I'm enjoying that very much.

That was interesting, times of plenty.

-There was plenty of everything in that pie!

-There was.

'That over-the-top game pie may have been crammed with costly ingredients

'but there's one luxury we Hairy Bikers love, that's among the most expensive on the planet.

'Known to some as "black diamonds", truffles are a type of fungus

'that can fetch over £8,000 per kilo!

'They aren't just the domain of the French or Italians, we grow them,

'right here on British soil.

'Regrettably, our native truffles are a delicacy

'that have almost vanished from our dinner tables.

'Our Best Of British food heroes Marion Dean and Dr Paul Thomas are determined

'to put the British truffle back on the culinary map.'

Truffles are really exciting. I love finding them.

I love eating them.

I love training dogs how to find them.

And I love teaching people on what to look for to find them.

When I was a kid, I used to go out and collect wild food.

I collected mushrooms, then I read about truffles.

In my teenage years, I read about how expensive they were.

I wanted to find them and I couldn't.

Then I did a PhD at the University of Sheffield.

Through a long process, we developed a way to grow them.

I've been absorbed by it ever since.

When you eat a truffle,

you really want to say,

"Wow! THAT's what I'd heard about!"

'They've planted one of the country's first truffle orchards.

'650 trees that have been impregnated with truffle spores.'

The best way to think of a truffle

is it's kind of an underground mushroom,

the size of between a golf ball and a tennis ball.

It's the fruit of the truffle fungus.

It needs the tree to survive and the truffle helps the tree to grow.

It's completely symbiotic.

You need to get the truffle and the tree working together.

'Traditionally, sows would be used to hunt for truffles,

'but there were some disadvantages.'

Truffle releases a pheromone similar to the sex pheromone in pigs

so when a pig's hunting these,

they go crazy, then you've got to get between the pig and the truffle.

It can be quite dangerous. People lose fingers.

Whereas dogs, you can train them to pick up the scent,

they'll run down, stop where the truffle is, mark it, then you just dig it up.

'Marion trained her own dog, an Italian truffle hound, Mufti.

'Even cultivated truffles require an expert nose to find them.

'And to revive that lost art of truffle finding,

'she's set up a truffle dog hunting school.'

The dogs become very confident

and recognise the truffle scent.

Dogs will develop their own special way of communicating with you,

to let you know there's a truffle.

'It may take up to seven years before Marion can harvest

'her cultivated truffles.

'For now, foraging is the only way to get them.

'Marion and Paul head off to a top secret location

'where they hope Mufti might unearth some hidden gems.

'Anything they find will be taken to a hotel in the hope that Marion will become a supplier.

'After only a few minutes, it looks like Mufti's spotted something.'

Wait! Well, Let's see.

Yes. Here. We've got one!

-We've got one!

-Can't actually...

-There! Right under your finger!

-Cool. Well done, Mufti.

See a little damage on top.

To me, it's worth its weight in gold.

I can't wait. Let's dig it up!

Out we come.

-'Looks like a ball of mud to me.

-No wonder they're so hard to find.'

You just love finding those truffles!

That's in much better condition on one side.

The top has been damaged where rain's got in.

-OK?

-Let's keep going. Good start.

'As luck would have it, Mufti finds another!'

Paul, do you want to feel it?

Mufti, good girl! Wait!

'And another!'

-That's a good one.

-Is it?

-Smells good.

'And another!'

A tiny little one.

'It's like finding buried treasure!'

-In terms of success, I'm thrilled. I'm so happy.

-You should be.

-Yeah.

'With a basket full of top quality wild British truffles,

'Marion has come to Langford Fivehead, an exclusive hotel

'run by celebrity chef and food writer, Orlando Murrin.'

To the truffle season that lies ahead.

'Orlando has a penchant for decadence and is going to put

'Marion's truffles to the test

'by cooking his favourite truffle recipe.'

Such strange and interesting things to cook with.

I think they're the oddest thing in the kitchen.

It's a classic French dish, but a modern take on it.

'Truffles have a flavour not too dissimilar from garlic

'with an earthy, mushroomy taste.'

They do have a strange, haunting flavour that nothing else has.

'They're most often served raw and shaved onto pasta,

'salads or omelettes, or used in sauces,

'like Orlando's doing here.'

That's three slices of truffle per chicken breast,

which I reckon is about 20 quids' worth per chicken breast!

'Orlando starts with some chopped garlic, shallots and mushrooms,

'which he softens in butter, and then adds a good glug of champagne.

'He places the sliced truffle under the chicken's skin,

'strains the sauce and adds the remaining truffle.'

Just leave it off the heat now,

so they get to know each other.

We're going to finish the champagne truffle sauce with creme fraiche.

It smells gorgeous!

'Champagne and truffles - you can't get posher nosh than that!'

Oh, wonderful!

Seriously truffly.

Tuck in!

That's wonderful! Makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it, Marion?

-'So, what's the verdict?'

-Wonderful!

ORLANDO: They're fascinating.

'The truffle is a winner and Orlando agrees to add Marion to his list of suppliers.

'With British truffles making a comeback, aficionados like Marion, Paul and Orlando

'are confident they can keep these little culinary gems on our menus.

'Shame Mufti doesn't get any!

'In times of plenty, there's nothing we Brits love more than showing off with food.

'There have been few ages when we haven't been trying to tickle the tastebuds of our dinner guests.

'Next in our Best Of British kitchen we're cooking

'a classic British mega-treat.'

For our finale, there is no dish that symbolises a time of plenty,

the opulence, the grandeur than a triple crown roast of lamb!

With fruit stuffing bejewelled in the centre

and napped with the most wonderful, beautiful, savoury

red wine minted gravy!

Variations of this centrepiece have been served from mediaeval times,

Victorian times, the 1970s perhaps,

to our present-day tables.

My friend here is going to butcher.

I will make the stuffing.

He'll make the crown. I'll make the jewels.

-Then we'll have the Crown Jewels.

-SI LAUGHS

Now, I'm going to French trim this.

All French trim means is to clean the top end of the bone.

That's all it means. We're going to put a little incision along there.

Stick your knife in.

Don't throw away these trimmings.

What we're going to do is put those in the roasting tin for the gravy.

Then the bits in the middle. Cut them off.

Stuffing starts with an onion in the pan, being sweated down.

Now we need to clean these.

Take the back of a knife and just...

That bone needs to be nice and clean because this is about presentation.

If you've got a good local butcher worth his salt,

say you're going to do a crown roast of lamb,

he'll do this for you, so all you do is stuff it.

He might give you the little white hats.

And don't forget to ask for the leftover trimmings for the gravy.

It's a dish of grandeur in the middle of the table. It looks regal.

That's just about right.

To the onions, add some flaked almonds.

We'll toast these off with the onions for a minute.

In next goes a chopped English russet,

but you can use any dessert apple.

Apple goes in.

It's time to pack me jewels in.

The rubies, that's cranberries.

Dried apricots.

And me opals, sultanas.

The stuffing starts to resemble a Christmas pudding.

-How are you getting on?

-We're getting there.

-Nice work, mate. Look at that!

-Clean as a whistle.

-It is.

Now time for the Spice Girls. A teaspoon of cumin.

A teaspoon of coriander.

Half a teaspoon of cinnamon.

A quarter teaspoon, or a pinch, of cayenne.

Now we get fruity.

Now add the zest of an orange and the zest of a lemon.

Stir in your zests and grate in a couple of cloves of garlic.

The atmosphere in the kitchen begins to smell like a party.

To the fruity stuffing mixture, throw in some fresh thyme.

The herb of choice at the minute.

What's nice about thyme is it goes across so many flavours.

You can even use it in puddings. I think that's great.

-Who said the British were dull eaters?

-Never us, mate.

-No.

My father wouldn't eat tinned chicken soup.

He thought it had garlic in it.

It was traditional tastes in those days.

-"I know what I like and I like what I know."

-Aye!

Good old curly parsley.

A good handful. That is all the colours of the bloomin' rainbow.

If it tastes as good as it looks, I'm laughing.

Black pepper and some sea salt flakes.

You see how these pieces of sinew are coming off the bone?

Take the time to take those off.

You want that lovely bone to be really, really clean.

We put an incision along there like that. And then...

Watch what'll happen.

DAVE SINGS FANFARE

-Got it?

-That's magic, mate.

You can see by the amount of work

why these racks are quite expensive.

-The butcher spends a lot of time prepping them.

-Assemblage!

'Now to make the crown shape.

'First, cut a small incision at the base of both ends of each joint.

'Thread kitchen string through the holes and tie the meat together.

'Simple!'

And we maintain that circular shape by tying these cross ribs together.

-That's not wonky.

-That's a minter.

-We need to pop this now...

-Thank you.

-..onto there.

I've put a bit of baking parchment on the bottom of the roasting tin

to make it easier to lift it out.

And now it's time to bejewel, to bedazzle our crown!

SI LAUGHS

All you do is, you fill that crater with the stuffing!

Beautiful!

Cover the stuffing and ends of the bone with foil to stop them burning.

We'll take these off because we've got another little thing.

We're going to put those little white paper chef's hats on!

That's the trimmings that's come off that rack of lamb.

That's gonna make ace gravy.

We pop this into a pre-heated oven,

190, 200 degrees Celsius,

and cook it 45 minutes for rare,

an hour for medium rare, an hour and a quarter for medium,

and beyond that, forget it!

I like this medium rare.

Cooked on the outside. Touch of pink in the middle.

-So let's go for an hour?

-Let's do that.

Goodbye, we will see you later, mon liege.

Ten minutes before the end of cooking time, remove all the foil.

This allows the bones to dry out before it's served.

After an hour...

# Hallelujah! #

..our crown roast is done.

-You could wear that on your head.

-You could.

Now for the gravy. Don't forget to take this out. It's easy to forget.

First thing we need to do is get some flour.

Just put a heat underneath the roasting tin.

About a tablespoon.

This needs to be mixed up with that lovely fat.

Mate, I'm ready for that red wine.

-Couple of good glasses?

-Easy.

-I'll deglaze.

This is going to remove those pearls of taste sensation off the pan.

-That's enough?

-Yeah. Smashing.

This is a red wine lamb mint gravy.

I've got a bunch of mint.

Shred it very fine.

-That's thick, mate.

-It is lovely.

Now we throw a jug of stock into that.

This is chicken stock.

Any stock will do, really.

I love the scent of mint. It's a scent of Britain.

It's an English country garden.

Bit of seasoning, mate.

Bit of pepper. Bit of salt.

We're there on the gravy front. People find making gravy difficult.

That's gravy.

I'll go and get a sieve and a saucepan.

'Finally, sieve the gravy into a clean pan and there it is.'

Look at that! It's a good old pan of gravy!

Our triple crown roast of lamb with a jewelled fruit stuffing

with a minted red wine sauce.

This lamb roast may look impressive but it's worth the effort.

It's a magnificent centrepiece for any special meal.

The leftovers have made it back to the kitchen!

Should I plate it up and make it nice?

No! What goes on in the kitchen stays in the kitchen, dude.

-Lovely. It's sweet and sour, fruity and nutty.

-Almonds! Boom!

-You know, Si.

-What?

I could get used to these times of plenty. Lobster mousse.

Fancy another, seeing as I'm here?

'From dishes we eat when we're pushing the boat out,

'to the most extravagant ingredients,

'the food we've enjoyed in times of plenty throughout history

'really is the best of British

'and it looks as good as it tastes.'

Look at that!

Visit...

..to discover amazing facts about the history of food.

'And to find out how to cook up tonight's recipes.'

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