Store Cupboard Staples James Martin: Home Comforts

Sometimes there is no place like home, and few things

are more comforting and delicious than real home cooking.

Living in this beautiful country with great produce

right on our doorstep, we really are spoilt for choice.

So in this series, I'm inviting you into my kitchen to share with you

some of my tasty home-cooked treats.

The dishes I turn to,

whether entertaining friends and family or just relaxing on my own.

Cooking for me is one of life's great pleasures, whether I am

at work in my busy restaurant or cooking at home, here in Hampshire.

One thing being a chef has taught me is how to enrich wonderful,

fresh produce with everyday ingredients that any cook

worth their salt should have at close hand.

I don't know about you, but my food just wouldn't be the same

without some store-cupboard staples.

No longer will the pantry be a place where tins,

jars and packets gather dust.

I want to get you excited about elevating the everyday contents

from a can into a meal to remember.

Or turning the flavours from jars and bars into serious puds.

We'll be discovering recipes from the medieval store cupboard

and meeting some of our generation's finest artisan food producers -

from a new kid on the block from the Southern Hemisphere

to a South Downs artisan with much more mature tastes.

When I am in the mood for making magical meals out of almost nothing,

I turn to my Spanish-style chicken-and-chorizo bean stew.

I think it is the beans in the stew that makes this dish

really fantastic.

Now, certainly one of the things that

I have in the store cupboard are these.

These are white haricot beans. They are delicious.

So first of all, we need to get the chicken cooking.

Now, I'm going to use chicken thighs and chicken legs

cos I'm a great believer

that they've got the most amount of flavour.

A little bit of oil in the pan.

A touch of butter. And then really start to colour the chicken.

Now, this is a great dish because it's really quick.

The whole thing takes the same amount of time

as these chickens take to cook.

To enrich the stew's flavour, I'm adding lemon, garlic

and a good handful of rosemary and thyme.

But that's not all.

What I love with this is we can take a whole shallot,

slice it through, pop that in the pan as well.

You can eat the shallot when it comes out of the oven,

it really tastes fantastic.

The pan goes into a hot oven at 220 for ten minutes,

leaving me time to flavour a jar of simple beans with a real

staple of the Spanish store cupboard.

But this is really the key to it.

This is chorizo, or as my sister calls it, still,

after all these years, coritzio.

Chorizo.

But it is the picante one, which is the really spicy one,

and that's the one that I've got here.

It contains a real amount... a good amount of paprika,

which lends itself really well with this dish.

And because I've got things like the chorizo and the garlic

and the tomatoes and the beans,

there is no real need to serve any veg with this.

It's kind of, sort of, one-pot cooking

for quick and easy meals out of your store cupboard.

To get this Spanish-style stew under way, get a pan nice and hot

and add some good olive oil.

But not oil from just anywhere.

Now, I'm going to upset the Italians to say that, I think,

the Spanish produce as good an olive oil as anybody.

But also what the Spanish are fantastic at is pork,

and that is why the chorizo that you get in Spain

and you get in supermarkets nowadays is really, really fabulous.

With the chorizo starting to release those wonderful smoky paprika oils,

I can add some tomatoes, diced shallots and garlic.

If you don't have fresh tomatoes, you can use good tinned ones.

It will still taste great.

Although it is all out of store-cupboard ingredients,

it really packs a punch.

You could, of course, if you wanted to,

use dried rosemary or thyme if you haven't got fresh.

Which go brilliant with chicken.

What we're going to do is just wilt down the tomatoes.

What will help that, a little bit, is the addition of stock.

Just a little bit of chicken stock.

Just to help break down the tomatoes.

All I need to do is bring these colours

and flavours of Spain to a simmer.

And then I can turn a haricot bean from the cupboard shelf

into something really delicious.

You can almost eat them as a snack, they are so good.

They're just delicious.

Lovely, rich.

They are kind of like the best baked beans you'll ever have in your life.

You just pour them straight in.

The great thing about these beans is they are already cooked,

so they just need warming through.

So in very little time, we are almost ready.

You have got pieces of chorizo in there. You've got the tomatoes.

It is like the ultimate stew, but without all the hassle.

And then all we do now, just to almost finish this off now, is grab

some parsley, just roughly chop it.

And throw that in.

It looks good enough to eat on its own,

but after just ten minutes in a really hot oven,

the chicken is ready to dish up.

You get your lovely beans, a piece of each chicken.

The roasted shallots.

All the caramelisation you've got on the sliced bit,

you can eat that.

But then not forgetting that you've got a lovely bit of roast garlic

to dive into as well.

It tastes fantastic.

It's brilliant. It's so quick and easy.

So there you have it - my chicken-and-chorizo bean stew,

a dish that elevates a store cupboard supper

into a meal fit for a king.

And in fact, these days, wherever you live in the UK, there is

no excuse for not combining the building blocks

from your store cupboard with the best top-quality local produce

you can find.

Here in Hampshire, I'm always amazed by the award-winning meat,

fish, fruit, veg and dairy products right here on my doorstep.

Just down the road from me is local cheese producer Mike Smales.

He makes one of the very best hard cheeses around.

My name is Mike Smales, and we have been here since 1969.

We run about 170 cows, make a tonne of cheese a week.

We found a little place in the market for ourselves.

And ours is a hard yellow cheese that can be

used as a substitute for Parmesan

for those who want a 100% English ingredient.

Behold the Old Winchester - a sturdy vintage cheese that has been

turning heads all over the UK and beyond.

Bronze-award winner at the World Cheese Awards, which is no mean feat.

And ours was the only British cheese to pick up a prize.

The rest were all Manchegos

and Parmesans from other parts of the world.

And this exciting product is the result of years of careful

planning by Mike, starting with his herd of cows.

When we started cheese-making, it was all about adding value

to our milk that the cows produce on this farm.

We bred them quite specifically,

so we have got that quality of milk to work with.

And inevitably, the general topography, the soil type,

the sward and the grass that they all eat

during the course of the summer period all makes a contribution.

But now he is reaping the rewards.

And the first stage of production is remarkably quick,

but it does involve an early start.

The cows are milked at 5:30 in the morning.

I bring the milk around at seven o'clock

and we pasteurise the milk straightaway.

We add a starter, we add a rennet.

We then leave the milk for about an hour.

# The look of love... #

The process might be scientific,

but to make a truly great cheese requires a more tender approach.

This is where the skill of the cheese-maker comes in.

He has to know exactly when to use the curd knife

and to cut the curd.

The company produces around 50 tonnes of cheese a year,

and all of it is lovingly done by hand.

First, the curd and whey need to be separated

and the cheese-maker's individual touch is essential

to achieve the best quality.

Once it is drained, the curd is popped into the mould.

Remarkably, the milk, from being in the cow at 5:30 in the morning,

it is then in moulds and looking like cheese at about one o'clock.

Really a remarkably short journey in a short time period.

And the milk has only had to travel 70 yards.

This door here leads to the ripening room,

of which there is about four or five on the farm here.

After soaking in a brine solution for 24 hours,

the wheels of cheese are sent to the drying room

for a week before they end up here in the maturing room.

It is here the real magic happens and the waiting begins.

These will be turned twice a week.

And when I say turned, you just pull them out, turn them up the other way.

And we do that to balance the whey within the cheese.

This is the youngest cheese that is in here at the moment,

so this is what we've brought in in the last week.

And then right at the end here, actually,

we've got some Old Winchester.

That is about 18 months.

But they are not ready to be sold yet.

We will sell those in about probably another two to three months' time.

You can see the difference in colour. These are now much darker.

They have dried out.

They have gone from being quite yellow to really quite

a fawny colour. And are much harder.

You lob one of those at the window

and it will go straight through the window,

it certainly won't bounce off.

But a more traditional way to test its strength

might be to taste it.

-Oh, it smells nice.

-Mm.

-That is actually spot-on.

-Absolutely.

Old Winchester certainly looks like it will be around

for a long time to come.

A local success story that is making

a real mark on the culinary landscape.

So I'm looking forward to welcoming Mike into my kitchen

to use his celebrated cheese

in my twice-baked souffle with dandelion and walnut salad -

a superb savoury meal with some unique flavours.

Now, everybody has got cheese in their store cupboard,

but none so special as this.

Mike, you have brought along some of this fine Old Winchester.

-How old is this one, then?

-It'll be about 20 months old.

The textures, as I'm cutting it,

it's kind of similar to Parmesan in terms of the way it flakes.

Would you class it as sort of a Parmesan-style cheese or what?

It's getting that way,

but technically it's not made the same way as a Parmesan.

So effectively, this is a hybrid, if you like.

-It's not a cheddar, it's not a Parmesan.

-A hybrid?!

-Yeah.

-OK.

-It's a bit like you and your recipes, if you like.

You start somewhere and then you progress

and get to the stage where you think, "Yeah, like that."

-We make it up, don't we?

-Yeah, make it up as you go along.

The starting point for this recipe is a white sauce, or roux,

made up of three classic staples - butter, flour and then milk.

Gradually add the milk and keep stirring to avoid any lumps forming.

Why cheese for you, then?

Why particularly hard cheese? You could have done soft.

I started with an agenda that was "not cheddar".

The world makes cheddar, so we need to keep clear of that.

We needed to make something that wasn't too niche,

so it had quite a broad appeal.

And for me, its appeal is it's fantastic to cook with.

So I am using it with some Dijon in the roux base for my souffle.

So, with the farmers, it's something that's...

Particularly the movement from dairy production

to cheese-making, is that something that has sort of taken over for you?

Inevitably, I have changed really from being a muddy-boots farmer

to a kind of van-driving cheese salesman.

Yeah.

And it has, it has taken over,

whereas my elder son now tends to do all the muddy-boots bit

and I tend to do the white-boots bit, really.

Any souffle needs eggs to give it that all-important rise.

In a clean, grease-free bowl, separate three eggs

and whisk up the whites until they're stiff,

then mix in the egg yolks into the roux,

which by now has slightly cooled.

What we do is we just pop our mixture into the bowl.

Really, when you're doing souffle, don't namby-pamby with it,

chuck it in.

Too many times with souffle, people mess around

and follow ye old cookbooks that tell you to fold, figure of eight,

fold, figure of eight, and you are still stood here

about two hours' time, still doing that same process.

Because it is a souffle,

the egg whites will actually start collapsing the longer we keep it

out of that oven, so get it in the oven as fast as possible.

Divide the mixture and pour into four buttered ramekins.

They are almost ready for the oven.

So what I am going to do now is basically just take

a little bit of water in the tray.

Now, the reason for a tray of water is to actually stop

the outside of the souffle from burning or overcooking.

It's technically a bain-marie,

but for us farmers, it's a tray of hot water, you see?

These souffles go into the oven at 180 for 20 minutes

to work their magic. How do you eat yours, then?

Probably just plain on a cheeseboard, don't you?

The cheese in general will come in many forms,

but that is my wife's jurisdiction, I don't get involved in the kitchen.

I'll stick to making it.

Now, what would you say the taste of this is similar to?

A lot of people will say nuts

and other people say there is a little smoky background.

It is a flavour that just evolves naturally.

And that's the thing about making artisan products.

That is our job in life,

to make things that are just that little bit different.

But it has got a lovely creaminess with it as well.

When you make a Parmesan, they will actually strip some of the cream off.

That is made from full-cream milk, compared with the Parmesan cheese,

where they use effectively almost a semi-skimmed milk.

Semi-skimmed milk is a swear word in this house.

There is nothing semi-skimmed about the sauce for these souffles -

it's rich and so simple.

It's basically just this.

Double cream.

A bit of black pepper.

Black pepper is obviously a spice, so technically it is a herb,

which is a veg, which is part of your five a day!

-Yep.

-Same thing with salt.

-I'll buy that.

-You buy that one?

-I'll buy that.

-And then some Kirsch.

Now, Kirsch is that well-known German cherry liqueur.

And that's it.

There is nothing else that goes in the sauce, other than that.

The souffles are almost ready for that sauce,

which means I can assemble my twist on a solid garnish -

candied walnuts.

Boil up sugar in water, and simmer until it is slightly thickened

and then in with a handful of walnuts for two to three minutes.

Remove from the syrup and deep-fry in veg oil until golden brown.

These taste fantastic.

Try one of those.

A perfect garnish for a cheeseboard for your cheese, you see?

-Mmm. Spot on.

-They're great, aren't they?

-Lovely.

After about 15 minutes,

they are OK to eat, but we're not going to cook them too long

and let them rise too much cos these are double-baked souffles.

So I am going to turn my oven to a grill now.

Just turn these out. Just lift them out.

They will be nice and light.

You can actually keep these in the fridge or you can freeze them.

They freeze brilliantly. Carefully lift them up.

That sits in the dish. And then you have got this lovely mixture.

You just know it is going to be good when something has got cream

and alcohol in it.

-Can't go wrong. Can't go wrong.

-Just pour this over the top.

Now, I was actually wondering what I was going to do

with your fantastic cheese.

I thought, do I just leave it, do something simple?

Or do something a little bit elaborate?

I think souffle is one of those dishes that just kind of have

misconceptions really with it.

People have never tried making them

so they don't actually realise how easy they are.

Particularly a double-baked souffle like this, it's nice and simple.

So, cheese over the top.

What we do now is take this

and pop it under the grill for about two minutes.

As a healthy accompaniment to my souffle,

I'm using something people may think of as a garden invader.

Now I'm going to do a little salad with this,

and I'm going to use some dandelion leaves.

As good for you as kale, you can

buy them from some farmers markets or health food shops.

They make a great addition to this simple salad.

Chopped chives. Just roughly chopped.

Throw that in. I've always got some of this to hand.

This is a little bit of my own sort of home-made dressing.

Mix that together...

..with this. And of course,

you've got these candied walnuts.

Now, when you try these when they're... Go on, try those.

They've got a lovely crunch to these.

-It's the sugar in there as well. I just love these.

-Sweet.

I think they're delicious.

And then you have got a nice little salad.

And then, you see, it actually puffs up again.

So this is where you get this idea...

Hold it, hold it, Michael, hold it!

-That's hot.

-He's diving in!

I think this is a little more elaborate than just chucking

your cheese on a cheeseboard, but dive in, tell us what you think.

That's pretty good.

-Pretty good.

-Tastes good, doesn't it?

-That is good.

What's great about this is there is so much flavour in there,

which comes through the souffle as well.

Often when you do souffles, you need to use a cheese like this,

which has got a decent amount of flavour to it.

-That's yummy.

-I like that.

And you have made good use of the weeds in the garden as well.

I think I'll take that as a compliment.

It's amazing how the more unusual forage ingredients

are changing the way we cook today.

One thing that has really stood the test of time

is the real hub of the kitchen.

For centuries, the store cupboard has stashed away

ingredients for a wealth of amazing home-cooked recipes.

In his Yorkshire kitchen-cum-food-laboratory,

Gerard Baker is rustling up a home-cooked treat

from the medieval store cupboard.

We might think of medieval food as being quite bland,

but in actual fact, medieval cooks drew on a wide variety of spices.

I've got some spices that would have been commonly

used in the wealthiest of households.

Here, we have got ginger, cloves - lovely and aromatic.

Saffron, which is one of the few spices

that could've been grown in England.

And of course, Saffron Walden bears testament to that.

Cinnamon. The medieval spice that we now use very widely... Sugar -

a rarity in the medieval kitchen.

It didn't come into prominence widely till 1600 or 1700.

Today, Gerard is cooking farced partridge, which means stuffed.

And he is going to be delving into his medieval store cupboard

to make a flavoursome filling based around one of the staple

main ingredients of the day - salted pork.

The medieval store cupboard would have contained salted meat,

because that was one way the medieval cook could've preserved meat

for use in the winter. Pigs would be killed in the autumn

and would keep a family going all the winter, provided the meat was salted.

The salted pork I'm using is going to baste and season

the breast of the partridge.

I'm going to add some more medieval ingredients from my store cupboard.

The first one is a source of sweetness - the currant.

The medieval cook would have had access to dried fruits

from the near continent, so that is grapes.

In the case of currants, from northern Africa.

And then further afield, dates. And later, apricots.

I'm going to add some sage.

And some fresh thyme.

We love our fresh herbs today, and the medieval cook was just the same.

They would have kept this all growing near to the kitchen.

The next addition to the stuffing is spices.

Gerard adds a few sprinkles of ginger and pepper,

ground in a mortar.

They were often used together in medieval cooking

and we will add some spice to the partridge.

The medieval cook was really adventurous.

And I think partly that is explained by the fact that

so much was being discovered.

People rushed to use everything that was new, everything that was novel.

The store cupboard has changed over the centuries

as new ingredients become widely available.

And what we tend to see is the store cupboards

of the wealthiest households leading the way.

They would have used far more spice

and sugar than anybody else in the country.

Wonderful spices were really the preserve of the wealthy.

Edward I's store cupboard was very valuable.

It had everything from almonds, rice and ginger

to saffron, cumin, and in one year, 2,000 pounds of sugar,

which would have cost a king's ransom.

So, my stuffing for the partridge is finished.

It is chopped nice and finely. All that remains for me to do

is to insert some of it under the skin on the breast of the bird.

Partridge, along with many other small birds like quail, larks,

blackbirds, pigeons, were regularly stuffed and roasted in this manner.

So now I have finished stuffing the birds, I need to cook them.

But rather than bake them in a normal oven, which is

what we'd do in a modern kitchen,

I'm going to roast them by the fire.

It's surprising how quickly we can roast these birds

in front of this lovely bed of wood coals.

It will take about 20 to 25 minutes,

about the same time as it would take me to cook in my oven.

In medieval times, of course,

the fire was really the only source of heat, so people would have

learned to cook almost everything on an open fire of some sort.

So it looks to me like the partridges are nearly done.

So what I would like to do now is take them just to one side

to keep warm whilst I prepare a sweet and sour sauce for them.

The sauce is based on red wine, sour verjus, which is made

from un-ripened grapes, exotic cinnamon, a pinch of saffron,

onion and honey to add sweetness.

You may not think a sweet-and-sour sauce sounds very medieval,

but in those days, cooks mixed things up a bit

and the borders between sweet and savoury flavours

were much more blurred.

This might not seem to be the kind of recipe you'd make

from the modern store cupboard,

but what is lovely about it is that so many of the medieval

ingredients from the medieval store cupboard are available to us today,

so there is no reason why we shouldn't try other recipes,

cos they are delicious.

One classic recipe that many of us

will always turn to is a flavour of soup that I'm sure

most of you watching have in your store cupboards.

But hopefully, my take on home-made tomato soup will inspire you

to make your own, especially when it is served with

a kind of garlic bread you won't forget in a hurry.

For me, one of my favourite store cupboard ingredients

has to be these - tinned tomatoes.

But these are really special tomatoes,

these are San Marzano tomatoes.

These are beautiful. Look out for them on the tin.

They are really sweet, less seeds, but they make the most amazing soup,

and that is what I'm going to do now - a tomato soup

with garlic butter.

This really is, in my opinion,

one of the best garlic butters around, really,

cos it's a roasted garlic butter.

To stop the skins from burning, wrap the entire bulb in foil

and roast it at 170 for 45 minutes.

This gives me plenty of time to show you something you can all try -

home-made butter.

It's actually more simple than you think.

All it is, really, is double cream.

Now, we just mix this together until it separates.

Now you whisk this so much that it actually starts to thicken up

the cream and then, all of a sudden, it will split,

and that is when you have got butter.

It may seem like a time-consuming process, but it is a great way

to use up leftover double cream that otherwise may end up in the bin.

If you have got any that is out of date or getting out of date, before

it goes too sort of smelly, stick it in here and make your own butter.

So, when you have got that mixing, we can get together a draining cloth

which we have got in here.

I'm going to use some of this. A little bit of muslin.

You can use a tea towel.

And this is to get rid of the water or the whey part of it, really.

What we are after is the solids that are left behind.

And that, in actual fact, is our butter.

It's amazing that after five minutes, the liquid

you knew as double cream has taken on a completely new texture.

What you are looking for with this...

It goes from sort of a whipped cream,

and the more you mix it, it ends up looking like pastry,

as sort of the cream separates,

and it basically almost looks like an overcooked scrambled egg.

But I can assure you, when it is done,

it will taste a hell of a lot better.

You end up with this. You see the liquid that is in it?

It may look a long way from being melted on toast,

but after being drained through a muslin

and formed into a shape, it feels great to have been able to

make my own butter - something I get through plenty of.

What you end up with, I think is great when you make it yourself...

..is that.

How cool is that? Your own home-made butter.

With my butter looking truly homespun and the garlic on stand-by,

I want to get my store cupboard soup with tinned tomatoes on the stove.

The tinned tomatoes is really the main flavour of my soup, that is

why it is important, for this,

you get really good-quality tinned tomatoes.

Olive oil, shallots and two tins of these lovely Italian tomatoes -

it couldn't be simpler.

And then all I'm going to do is just grab some fresh basil

and throw that in.

And then we bring this to the boil

and just gently simmer this for two or three minutes.

I think a beautiful, bold Italian soup deserves

the best croutons for my roasted garlic butter.

Now, you are at MY house now.

None of that fancy, small, diced stuff.

Some proper croutons.

Drizzle of oil.

Over the top.

Now, what I'm going to do with these is chargrill them, but

if you haven't got a griddle like this at home, you can

actually use a griddle pan.

But the key to using a griddle pan is to get it really hot.

And always oil the food, never oil the pan.

Now, to finish off the butter.

As you will soon see,

there is a very good reason for roasting the garlic.

The most important thing with this... It's lovely

and soft inside as the garlic roasts.

Mix in the flesh of the garlic and some more fresh basil.

Now, the great thing about making your own butter

or whether you are incorporating just ready-made butter with

roasted garlic or anything like that,

it actually freezes really well.

And then, really, when it comes to the soup, you just blitz it.

Oh, I like my gadgets in my kitchen. Stick blender. Stand back.

Tinned tomatoes from Italy transported in my Hampshire kitchen

into something I can't get enough of.

You've got this simple tomato soup that you have made out of a can,

and it actually tastes

so much better than conventional soup out of a can as well.

And to top it all off, leftover double cream

churned into butter for the ultimate in garlic bread.

Store cupboard food never used to look like that in my house.

It really is fantastic, and it is one of the store cupboard essentials

I think that everybody should have.

Tinned tomatoes - you can transform them

into so many different things.

But when you are out there buying them, look out for the word

San Marzano, cos in this, it makes all the difference.

It's great, that.

Whether it's tinned Italian tomatoes or something completely

original appearing on our shelves,

new foods are popping up everywhere, thanks to the work of a hidden

army of passionate, home-based food producers.

Their home-made delicacies are playing a key role in putting

better food on our tables.

The rolling green hills and warm sunny climate

of the Isle of Wight are famous for producing

everything from garlic to grapes.

But there is a food producer who has brought a little

taste of Africa to this idyllic landscape.

At Newnham Farm, Zimbabwean Nick Greeff and his English wife, Sarah,

are producing an exotic South African store cupboard staple

that is winning awards - biltong.

Biltong is the most important food to my husband,

he couldn't live without it.

I love biltong so much, I have it in the morning for breakfast,

a snack throughout the day.

I even have it, if I'm allowed to, as pudding after meals.

So, I figured the only way for him

to survive in England was to make it ourselves.

Biltong is almost unheard of on these shores,

and Nick thought the examples he did find were terrible.

So to cater for his obsession, they set up a company

and started making their own to a traditional recipe.

But what exactly is it?

What it actually is is air-cured meat.

Air-curing meat was a great way to preserve before the days

of refrigeration

and gives it a distinctive taste.

It works particularly well in hot, dry climates,

and Nick's tradition goes right back to his ancestors' store cupboards.

My family was part of the Voortrekker movement that

came from the Cape, moving into the interior of Africa in the 1860s.

And their way of keeping meat fresh without refrigeration was to

cut it up and hang it.

My earliest memories of biltong

were standing on a stool next to the kitchen table,

laying out the meat or spicing it with my grandfather

on our cattle ranch in Zimbabwe.

So does the Sarah share her husband's love of biltong?

My guilty secret is I have never eaten it because, actually,

I'm a vegetarian.

Of course, the meat available in Zimbabwe is a different world

to the Isle of Wight.

Originally, we'd use every animal from elephant, buffalo,

impala, whatever you were lucky enough to come across

and you could get a shot at them.

We use beef today, and quite a lot of people prefer beef biltong.

The way we are going to make it today

is as close to traditional making biltong that we could do.

This flavour is pepper flavour, it is one of my favourites.

It is the original biltong

and the one that my grandfather showed me many years ago.

After four hours soaking up the flavours of the pepper,

Nick dips the beef in vinegar, which aids the curing process

and helps preserve it better in our damper climate.

It is then hung up to dry for four to six days.

We created this drying room to replicate the temperature

and atmosphere of Africa,

which, as you can see, dries up the biltong to perfection.

Bite into a piece of dry biltong,

suddenly the taste of the beef starts to shine through.

The spices that you use should just be a hint in the background.

The taste of biltong is something most people won't have

experienced in their life before.

And at a shop specialising in Isle of Wight produce,

Nick and Sarah try out their biltong on the locals.

-That's good.

-It does taste like beef more than anything.

You can really taste the meat and it is good-quality beef.

You get that lovely meaty taste. And the herbs that go with it.

It's actually very nice to have something

made on the Isle of Wight that doesn't include garlic

-as the sole ingredient.

-Big improvement to peanuts.

To go out and get a reaction and for people to say,

"No, we love it, keep making it," is just fantastic.

It is lovely to be making a product that is part of our heritage.

And to bring it into a new culture

and introduce it to people who appreciate it as much as I do.

Sharing food with friends and family or a whole new crowd

is what I have always loved.

And the next dish is what I would call part of my culinary heritage -

white chocolate and whisky bread and butter pudding

with honeycomb foam and whisky ice cream.

Created from the contents of my cupboard,

this is a show-stopping dish that always leaves people wanting more.

Now, I am quite fortunate to have

plenty of stuff in my store cupboard,

including white chocolate, a bit of whisky and a few vanilla pods.

This is a dish that has never been off my restaurant menu,

and it is really a fallback dish that I always cook at home.

So we want four decent-sized croissants.

Like that. There's always a little bit left...

leftover as well.

Like all bread and butter puddings,

a handful of sultanas from the store cupboard are followed

by a liberal sprinkling of, yes, you guessed it, butter.

And now for our custard.

For that, this is where we start to get a little bit serious.

Not this much double cream, but not far off.

So we need half double cream to milk.

I'm then going to infuse that with vanilla.

Scrape out the vanilla seeds

and add along with the pods into the rich, creamy milk.

Now for the eggs to make the all-important vanilla custard.

Traditionally, really, you'd use about six whole eggs to set

a litre of liquid, which this is.

But I'm going to use a mixture of whole eggs and egg yolks.

By using six egg yolks and three whole eggs,

this pudding will have more of a sauce

and a slightly lighter texture.

With the milk and the cream nicely warming through,

I add 200g of caster sugar to the eggs, then whisk.

I can't tell you how many times I have made this pudding.

It all came about via a mistake.

It was when I was the pastry chef of Mr Antony Worrall Thompson

in one of his restaurants.

And good old Antony,

instead of ordering sort of three dozen croissants,

33 dozen croissants turned up one day, and I had to use them all up.

And this was a recipe that we both sort of invented, really.

Everybody seems to love it.

And it's only until after they've eaten it,

you tell them exactly how many calories are in it.

Maybe it's the...not one, not two, but three bars of white chocolate

that people love, mixed into cream-and-vanilla-infused milk.

Take it off the heat now,

cos otherwise that chocolate is going to burn

to the bottom of our pan.

So give it a quick mix and make sure they are all combined.

And then what we do is we pour this mixture

onto the egg yolks.

Whisk this together.

And now you throw in the whisky.

Just a little bit...more.

Give it a little taste.

Do you know what?

It's at a time like this where I could actually stop now, don't even

put that in there, just get a straw and drink this, it is so good.

It is delicious, this.

Tempting it may be, but with a hungry crew to feed,

I need to pour this mixture into the croissants

and leave it to soak for about 15 minutes.

This is one of those puds that is a real treat,

and I like to elevate it even higher with the addition of a nice

dollop of home-made whisky ice cream.

This is 400ml of double cream gone in here.

About 100ml of milk.

A little bit of vanilla.

So what we are going to do is just warm up the vanilla and the cream,

and then we take almost the same combination of ingredients.

Six egg yolks, 100g of caster sugar,

whisk together and then mix the cream and the milk,

just like a custard.

Now, conventionally, of course, ice cream would be made in exactly

the same way and then churned in an ice cream machine,

which you can do at home.

Ice cream machines are becoming more and more popular.

But I have got one of these fancy gadgets now that enables you

to do ice cream in a slightly different way.

With the eggs and cream combined, add a good dash of whisky

and then warm it gently through.

Keep whisking it.

As the bubbles start to disappear,

you can tell the custard is getting thicker.

It starts to thicken up. We don't want to allow it to boil.

And then at that point, you can take it off the heat.

Sieve the infused liquid into a bowl.

And then transfer it into the freezer.

And then we are just about ready to finish off our pudding.

We can then top this up with the custard.

And then what you can do is just press

the croissants inside.

Now, you do this for two reasons, really -

one, to soak the croissants,

and the other one,

to lick your fingers afterwards.

With the pudding cooking for 25 minutes at 150,

I can transfer the now-frozen custard into my fancy machine,

which churns the mixture in a matter of minutes.

Now it's the difficult bit - the waiting.

I suppose there is still time to show you a final chefy bit

for this pud. Well, we have come this far, so why not?

The word "foam" kind of puts me off whenever I go to a restaurant,

but it is actually really good with this.

And you can actually make it at home really simply.

I do this quite a lot. All it is, really, is just milk warmed up.

So you think of a cappuccino, really, with that foam on the top.

This really is just a step further from that.

The flavourings that we can put in - you can put mint, kaffir lime,

lemongrass into the milk -

but that is going to create our flavour for our foam.

I'm actually going to use some of this, which is

basically just honeycomb.

All you need to do is bring the milk and the honeycomb to the boil,

then add something I bought from a health food shop.

Yes, you did hear me right.

This is supposed to cook down the fat in food.

It is called lecithin.

Basically, what we do is we just add a little bit of this

to this mixture.

What this will do is actually break down the fat,

but most importantly,

it will actually hold the foam

and create a nice, little, light foam.

With this ingredient and the honeycomb dissolved into the liquid,

it is time for a quick spin with the stick blender to get that

all-important coffee-shop cappuccino texture.

I'm almost ready to dive into my all time favourite pud.

After a very, very generous coating of icing sugar

and a blast with my blowtorch, my take on bread and butter pudding

with whisky ice cream and honeycomb foam is ready to take its bow.

For me, really, this is everything that I've got in my store cupboard.

I've always got white chocolate, always got vanilla.

I've always got a bit of butter.

That is a serious, serious pudding.

A little bit of foam on the top.

Just to finish it off.

Let's face it, you couldn't live on that every day, could you?

Well, every two days, possibly.

The proof of this pudding is in the crew tasting.

I think this really hits the high notes.

It just goes to show,

by stocking up your shelves with the right ingredients

for sweet and savoury dishes,

you can make fantastic meals for any occasion.

If you'd like to know more about how to cook any of the recipes

featured on today's show,

you can get all of them on our website at...