Homemade Takeouts James Martin: Home Comforts

Sometimes there's 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 am 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.

We Brits love a great takeaway.

And even though I'm a chef, like everyone else

I am sometimes tempted to grab one on my way home.

If you've got the ingredients and a little bit of know-how it is simple

to create your takeout favourites in the comfort of your own home.

And when you cook them yourself your taste buds will rediscover

how great these fast-food classics can be.

It's crunchy, it's sticky, it's spicy.

They're old favourites, given a new twist

so they burst with fresh flavour, texture and colour...

..dishes which are quicker, healthier and cheaper to cook than deliver.

British tastes in takeaways are adventurous

and we seem to have endless appetite for new flavours.

So it's time to ditch the takeaway menu

and take a home-cooked look at the takeaway.

Sometimes I love my job.

Apparently each and every Brit forks out £110 a month on takeaways

and eating out and a Chinese is one of the most popular.

So if you have a yen for a Chinese but are short of cash,

my home-cooked Oriental dinner will satisfy your hunger as well

as your wallet.

I am serving up chicken in a fragrant black bean sauce,

a Chinese classic with a few secrets to its culinary success.

And I am pairing it with crunchy stir-fried bok choy

and home-made egg fried rice.

So, first thing we're going to do is velvet our chicken.

For that we use chicken breasts.

Cut these into decent-sized pieces.

Velveting is a technique in Chinese cuisine for preserving

the moisture of the meat while it's cooking.

It helps give it a distinctive velvety texture.

And then we actually just leave it to marinade a little bit

and we are going to use some of this xiao xing wine.

And two tablespoons of sesame oil.

And then this is the velveting part of this which is done with

cornflour and this is where you get the distinct texture

with chicken that you can't quite understand how they do it.

This is the secret.

Just allow this to sit in this mixture...

..for about ten, 15 minutes really.

While the chicken sits in its marinade, chop lots of garlic,

chilli, ginger and spring onion. You're going to need it.

I think this is what puts a lot of people off Chinese food.

When you break it down, the actual cooking of it is

one of the fastest forms of cooking out there.

Now we are going to cook the chicken and to do that

we don't grab sesame oil, we grab some of this,

normal vegetable oil, sunflower oil, groundnut oil, something like that.

Just use a small amount.

Get the wok nice and hot.

And then throw the chicken in.

You just get a little bit of colour on it. That is all we want.

CHICKEN SIZZLES

Almost seal it on the outside.

What this cornflour will also do is actually thicken our sauce

slightly as well. You can then tip it out.

Turn our attention to the black beans.

These are unusual little fellows.

These are actually soft as well. These have been fermented

so rather than being dried you can squeeze them, they break open.

They've got a unique flavour

but it's the smell that you will instantly think of black bean sauce.

You can find black beans and other Asian ingredients

by visiting your nearest Chinese supermarket

or simply order them online.

Now to make this you want some garlic.

You want some ginger.

You want some chilli. The three essential ingredients

in Chinese food. At the same time we can throw in our black beans.

We start to bring all those flavours together.

Keep the heat on high, especially when using a wok.

This metal's really thin on this which enables it to get very

hot but also it will lose its temperature extremely quickly

if you turn it down so keep it on as high as you possibly can.

At the same time we'll add some of this.

This is this xiao xing wine again. Just a little bit.

Some soy sauce...

I use a light soy sauce for this one. And then some chicken stock.

We take our chicken,

pop that back in.

Remember we have got that cornflour in there which will start to

sort of thicken our sauce while it cooks as well.

While that is cooking, we can turn our attention to the bok choy

and these are fantastic. They grow really well in my garden.

They really are delicious but we take the same ingredients again,

ginger, garlic...

chilli...

Again in the oil.

Fry these off.

In we go straightaway with this.

A common mistake when you're doing this at home is to add oil to this.

It starts to dry out. What you now do is add water.

And this actually partly steams it as well.

If we keep adding oil to

this the garlic will actually burn and go very bitter,

so a little bit of water will help it nicely. And then our chicken.

What we will do is finish this off with spring onions.

Of course, just a little sprinkle.

Some coriander...

And now, keeping the pace up, we can do our egg fried rice.

Same oil...

garlic, chilli...

..in. At the same time, we've got

some cooked, cool basmati rice.

One egg.

Straight in the centre. Now the same time you can season this.

This needs a little bit of sesame oil, this is the only time

you use sesame oil, just to season it right at the end.

Spring onions go in.

Coriander in.

Mix this together.

Keep the rice on the heat and as you're mixing together this egg will

actually cook while the rice warms up as well.

But almost the rice chars on the edge of the wok as well

which gives it a unique taste.

So easy to cook egg fried rice.

Onto the plate.

And it just tastes so different.

Then you have got this lovely black bean sauce with the chicken...

..that we're all sort of familiar with.

And those black beans and that cornflour...

..thicken up that wonderful sauce.

So there you have it.

A harmonious dish of Oriental tastes

and textures that's easy to prepare and even quicker to cook.

Take that, takeaway.

It's been done for hundreds of years, thousands of years,

probably, but it's just that double cooking of it.

Makes all the difference.

So next time, think about it before you pick up the phone

and order that Chinese.

Well, the phone number many of us

have on speed dial is our local Indian takeaway.

Our palates have grown to love the heat of chillies

and now this far-flung flavour is being home-grown in the UK too.

This might look like your classic English countryside but on this

farm, James Sythes grows a bumper crop of this exotic fiery fruit.

I own the Wiltshire Chilli Farm.

We grow over 30 different varieties

and harvest around five to six tonnes of chillies.

We sell fresh chillies, we sell dried chillies and we process the chillies

and turn them into chilli sauces, chilli jams and chilli chocolate.

I love the flavour of chillies.

There are thousands of varieties of chillies,

so I thought I'll have a go at growing some myself.

I grew some, had a bumper harvest and I thought, "What do I do

"with these chillies?" We made some sauces

and they seemed to work quite well.

Over the last several years we have won various prizes.

We've won the Perpetual Challenge Award at the Bath and West.

We recently entered the Taste of the West, we entered four products

and we got four awards, so we're very pleased with that.

And for success like that you need a real

understanding of the ingredients.

There are so many different colours,

flavours, varieties, heat levels.

You can change your food so much.

So chillies are measured in Scoville units.

The basics of it is you mix one part chilli and one part water

and you taste it. If you can still taste the chilli,

then you add more water.

A jalapeno for example, which is 5,000 on the Scoville units,

means you need 5,000 parts water to one part chilli

so you can't taste the chilli.

So here we have a traditional Scotch bonnet.

These are around 300,000 on the Scoville scale. Pretty hot.

If you don't like your heat too much... But these have a lovely flavour.

A little tip to cooking with these is stab it with a knife,

a couple of pinpricks, and put it into the cooking whole,

and before you serve up, take it out of the cooking.

There you get not all of the heat of it,

but you will get the flavour of it.

Here we have a Trinidad Moruga scorpion,

the hottest chilli in the world at the moment. These measure two million

-on the Scoville scale.

-Ouch!

You take your life in your hands with that one!

But with so many others to choose from, it's picking

the perfect chilli that gets James fired up.

This is the very last of the season.

We've had some frost and the chillies are a tropical

plant and the frosts come and kill them, basically.

They just can't handle anything below five, ten degrees.

We've got enough chillies here for what we want? What's that?

-You've got a seven pot there. We need some more ghost peppers.

-Yeah.

And some more seven pots. We'll get them dried.

Once harvested, the chillies are graded and sorted.

Some are dried, some sold fresh

and some go into James' famous chilli jam.

He uses surprisingly few ingredients.

Just chillies, fruit, sugar and vinegar.

We've picked the habaneros.

We've added some apricots, some other ingredients

and we're cooking one of our bestselling habanero gold

chilli jams. It's got a lovely sweetness, it's got a nice flavour

and then a bit of heat comes in afterwards and builds gradually.

I am completely obsessed. This is completely a hobby gone wrong.

I love growing the plants, I love looking at the different

coloured chillies, the varieties and flavours as well.

It's become overwhelming, I suppose. It's taken over.

But it's not just us Brits who have a taste for the hot stuff.

# When the moon hits your eye

# Like a big pizza pie

# That's amore... #

The Italians have got a kick out of chilli for hundreds of years

so I am going to heat up one of my favourite takeaways - the pizza.

My classic margherita comes via Naples,

but I am spicing things up with a little chilli.

And for the poshest pizza around I'm stuffing one

with fresh lobster too.

So I have invited Simon and Jamie round to my home

so they can help me pick out which chilli to use.

You brought with you a selection of chillies over here.

Now I was intrigued to know the hottest chilli in the world.

-It's a Trinidad scorpion.

-Which one?

-Like this one here.

-That's the one we stay out of.

We don't really want to eat that one. It's all crinkly

and pretty hot.

So what do you do with this? What's the point of it?

So the guys in Trinidad, the way they cook with them

is they put some pinpricks in them

and they use one chilli to spice seven pots of stew.

You would never eat this as is.

I've tried it. It's not something I'd do again.

JAMES LAUGHS

We are going to cook an authentic margherita pizza

but with the addition of some of your chillies,

and then do a nice little lobster calzone,

with whatever you fancy putting in really.

The first thing I want to do is make that pizza dough.

I use 00 flour for this. It's a combination...

The best pizzas come from a place called San Michele, which is

in Naples. It's an amazing pizzeria. There's a queue a mile long.

They do about 2,000 pizzas.

They only do two different types of pizzas. They do with cheese

and without cheese. That's it.

This is the pizza dough that I got from there. 00 flour, 800g.

200g of semolina flour. A pinch of sugar. A pinch of salt.

Then, they use dried yeast as well.

So basically what you do is you take the dried yeast and chuck it in.

So, for this one, there's about 14g of dried yeast.

The key to this really - it's a bit like the stove behind me -

you need to prepare this in advance. So what you need to do is

stick it onto a machine and in we go with the warm water.

You need to make this into a dough.

What you are creating is a little sort of sourdough really, for this.

If you don't have a fancy mixer,

this dough is easily kneaded by hand. And that is the sort of

texture that we're looking at for our dough.

Mould it up into little balls

and then we're going to make our sauce to go with this.

Now, many people, when they're making pizzas,

cook tomatoes down with onions and garlic and things like that.

But when you actually see this made properly and for real,

in Italy, they use San Marzano tomatoes.

San Marzano are a type of Italian plum tomato, sweeter flavoured

and less seeds than other varieties.

You don't need to add anything else to make your margherita sauce.

Just blitz this into a puree and you've got your finished article.

Then what you need to do with the dough is leave it to prove

and leave it to prove in the fridge.

This is where you get that sort of sourness, crisp on the outside.

It will be nice and crispy but also soft in the middle.

I need you to pick a chilli then.

What are we going to go for with this? This one's a little margherita.

-How hot do you like it?

-Not that hot really.

I'll give you a choice of two here.

You've got a lovely Caribbean flavoured habanero,

quite hot, or a standard garden centre Apache.

I will try one of your habanero ones then. We'll try that one.

Tell me about the seeds in chilli then.

Do we take these out or leave them in?

The seeds give a kind of bitterness taste.

In terms of the heat, the heat's in the tissue surrounding the seeds.

When you take the seeds out, you're taking that tissue out as well.

It's making the chilli slightly less hot, more bearable

and you get much more of the flavour of the chilli than just the heat.

'A classic margherita pizza needs mozzarella

'but I like to add another great Italian cheese

'to the mix, pecorino.'

It's like a salted Parmesan really.

It's quite unusual but you can buy it from the supermarket.

It is unusual but it's actually... It's the salt

that benefits the pizza, I think, more than anything else.

We need to grate a little bit of this.

'Lightly cover your pizza base with the tomato sauce,

'roughly torn mozzarella and some of that habanero chilli.

'Grated Pecorino and fresh basil next.

'Finally, finish with some peanut oil. Why peanut?

'Well, that's what the old guy used in the Naples restaurants

'so who am I to argue?'

So, you get plenty of flour on your pizza shovel.

You can do this at home.

You don't need a fancy pizza oven that I've got

but a pizza stone is really good.

Put that on the pizza shovel. This is a bit of DIY, this,

and I learnt this from that old boy in that Italian restaurant.

It means when you throw it in the oven, you just pull it back

and the pizza should, in theory, just slide off.

I mean, this oven is hotter than hell, trust me.

You think those chillies are hot, this is about 500 degrees

and when it's fully hot, this will cook in about 20 to 30 seconds.

At home, use a pizza stone, put your oven on as high as possible,

as hot as it will possibly go.

Pizza done, it's time to cut a slice and I have the perfect tool.

This is the random sort of gift... When you get a chef that has

got all the gadgets in the world... Thanks, sis.

I get a pizza cutter in the shape of a car.

You can use it for the very first time.

Unlike a lot of things I get from my sister for Christmas,

this actually works, which is a first for me.

Dive in. Tell us what you think.

That tastes good. You can really taste that cheese.

The cheese is really good. What about your chilli?

Lovely flavour of the habanero,

a little bit of afterheat coming in. Definitely worth a try.

'My next pizza is a calzone, a folded pizza which you can

'stuff with different fillings.

'And the boys have a perfect sauce to go in it.'

For fish dishes, I'd pick my mango sauce. It's quite sweet.

We've got some mustard in there. We've got some onion and vinegar.

We've got some yellow habaneros. Very good flavour.

-Works very well with fish.

-I'm going to have a bit.

You can actually taste this as it is really.

-It's not going to blow my head off, is it?

-No, no, not at all.

It's about a moderate heat. You'll be fine.

-It's quite hot though, isn't it?

-You wouldn't use too much.

Then we've got the lobster here which we are going to chop up.

You put lobster, lobster tail.

You see, this is a fancy calzone. And then grab loads of basil.

Get in some of this peanut oil

because I think this makes a difference as well.

Then we will put more of this pecorino cheese...

over the top. That is quite warm, isn't it?

You don't need too much of it.

JAMES COUGHS

-That's as hot as I go.

-Now you tell me! Now I've put it in here.

'Once all the ingredients are on the pizza, fold it in half

'and pinch around the edges to seal.'

Hot oven. In there.

About five minutes. I need a drink.

Look at that. For anybody that's just turned on...a Cornish pasty.

'Now, will this one be too hot to handle?'

You are wary now, you see!

The mango works really well with that, doesn't it?

-Lobster in there as well.

-Lovely.

Tastes really good though, doesn't it?

'I think those two pizzas with the chilli kick could grace

'the menu of any pizza restaurant in Napoli.

'And they definitely knock the crusts off any takeaway.

'Just remember to avoid that Trinidad scorpion,

'because it's got a bit of a sting.'

Don't go near it. You've been warned. Trust me.

But of all the takeaway dishes, there is one

that has a special place in our hearts, the curry.

And this love affair has been going on through the ages.

Food historian Dr Annie Grey

runs traditional English cookery workshops at Essex stately home

Audley End, the perfect place to explore how this spicy dish

got 19th-century cooks all fired up.

Curry is phenomenally popular in Victorian England.

Queen Victoria declares herself Empress of India in 1877

and has curry for breakfast. She even has her own Indian chefs cooking it.

But we've eaten it for far longer than that and it goes back at

least as far back as the 18th century in terms of our history with it.

There's at least one curry house in Britain by the 1820s.

'The Empire had a huge influence on our taste buds and soon,

'every home cook had their own version of a curry.'

The recipe that I'm cooking today comes from a manuscript cookbook.

I don't know who wrote it.

I don't know anything about where it comes from.

But it was obviously written by somebody with

a connection to the Raj. I presume it's mid 19th century.

The recipe I'm doing is called bhaji curry and it involves shrimps,

spinach, onion and curry powder, along with ginger and cayenne.

It really is dead easy, very simple and absolutely delicious -

perfect for your Victorian middle-class family to cook at home.

So, we are going to start this recipe with shrimps.

You can use prawns, anything you want, if you're doing it at home.

'When Victorians fancied something quick

'and convenient, reaching for takeaways was not the done thing.

'Street food was seen as the preserve of the working classes

'and in polite circles, it was all about home cooking.'

Normally, Victorian recipe books are quite specific about how you

cook spinach.

They suggest that once you've rinsed it,

you should cook it with simply the water that hangs about the leaves.

'Cookery writing really took off in the Victorian era

'but just like today, each home cook had their own secrets.'

I think one of the really nice things about books like this,

especially when they are books that have been written by somebody

and aren't just part of the printed repertoire of books,

is that they are a written record of someone's experience

and what we're doing here is bringing it back to life,

literally tasting somebody in the past's experience.

There is something a little bit magical, I always think,

about that as well.

Once my butter has melted and it's starting to bubble away,

I'm going to fry my onion.

So, there we go.

'Once they are softened, it's time to add the all-important spices.'

In a kitchen like this, quite a big country house,

spices would have been used quite frequently and even

among the middling sorts, they weren't that expensive by this era.

You could buy mass-produced curry powder, which was very popular

in the Victorian era, and that is what I've got here.

So I'm going to add in a bit of that.

Looks about right, doesn't it? Then I'm going to grab some cayenne.

Cayenne is a spice which is phenomenally popular

in Victorian England. It adds a really nice, spicy back note.

The last spice I'm going to use is ginger.

I'm just going to use a little bit of that.

This is a really quick dish to prepare

and it's one of the reasons that these dishes were so popular,

because you could just turn them out in minutes.

They are one of those things that comes under the heading of made

dishes, so something that's a bit fancier than just a lump of meat,

something to show off the skill of your cook,

but they also have this strange position of leftover dishes.

They are one of those dishes that actually could have been served

at any time of day, for any meal and any occasion.

The final ingredient is coconut.

I'm using desiccated coconut which was extremely

popular for the Victorians.

They put it in everything, including cakes.

Now, obviously, we could just schlep this on a plate,

but that would not be terribly Victorian.

The Victorian middle classes tend to regard dinner

as a form of warfare, so just chucking this on a plate and putting it

in front of your honoured guests,

you're not going to win any battles like that.

So, of course, we are going to decorate the hell out of it.

'And Annie's weapons of choice are a ring of rice,

'topped with chopped spinach and a ring of walnuts.

'I think I'd rather have a poppadom.

'And there you have it.

'An authentic Anglo-Indian curry,

'exotic convenience food Victorian style.'

You can have this throughout the day, throughout the night,

no matter what you are doing, any time, any place,

any ingredient, anything in a cupboard, chuck it in.

Lovely!

'Well, if Indian curries are one of the oldest exotic dishes

'we now enjoy as a takeaway, then Thai is a relative newcomer.

'Although famous for their red and green curries,

'Thai cuisine often takes food from its neighbours

'and adapts it using their own unique flavours.

'And I'm going to do the same with my next takeaway treat,

'as I add my own Thai twist on that classic Chinese dish,

'crispy chilli beef, served with my sticky rice omelette.'

I use fillet of beef for this but you could use sirloin. You can use rump.

It's entirely up to you. The meat needs to be nice and tender.

So, the first thing we are going to do with our fillet is cut it

into thin strips. To do that, use a really sharp knife,

and the idea of this is obviously deep-fried crispy chilli beef.

You get that when you cut it quite thin.

It's important with this that you take your time

and get this nice and thin.

So the crispy part of this comes in the form of a mixture

of several ingredients really, Szechuan pepper being one.

What we are going to do with this - you can toast this,

but we are going to grind it down in a pestle and mortar.

Throw in...the Szechuan.

Then we use a combination of fruit for this, really, but the zest of the fruit.

I'm going to use orange and lime for this.

What I'm going to do now is combine this with some of this stuff.

This is rice flour.

It actually almost looks like cornflour but a lot whiter really.

What this is going to do is crisp up in our fryer.

'If you don't have rice flour, cornflour will do the job too.'

Before I add the beef into the mix,

what you do need to do is combine that with a touch of oil.

Take the beef and just roll...the beef in the oil.

What this is going to do is help this rice flour stick to the meat.

Now, this is actually cooked in two parts.

Firstly, it's deep-fried, and then secondly,

a sauce is what you need to finish it off.

What we are going to do is deep-fry these in batches,

because if we deep-fry it too quickly, it's going to reduce

the temperature of the oil, which is really, really hot.

This oil is set at 180 degrees - as hot as it will go.

'Now it's time to get some Thai flavours in this dish.

'Finely chop some lemongrass, chilli, lime leaves and ginger.

'Heat the sugar and rice wine together in a wok

'and add all the chopped ingredients.

'As I like this dish hot, I'm adding chilli flakes for good measure.'

Now, the key to this is bringing this to the boil...

..and reducing it down.

As it reduces, it cooks all the ingredients

but also goes lovely and sticky, almost like a syrup.

Now, what you can see now is actually the texture starts

to change with this, it starts to get sticky.

You can see it's starting to get syrupy.

This is the texture that we want,

and all that sort of rice wine has evaporated away

and reduced it down to a syrup.

So at this point, throw the beef in.

Then you need to work quite quickly really,

and what you do is shake the wok.

Take it off the heat.

What you're doing is coating this in the sauce.

You can see now this beef is almost brought back to life.

Then all we do is pour that...

..into the bowl.

I'm going to serve that with a sort of equally quick rice dish -

even quicker, really, with this one.

This is where you can use any leftover rice.

I've got some sticky rice here.

Sticky rice is made from a glutinous grain that becomes sticky

once it's cooked.

What you need to do is get the wok really hot. A little bit of oil.

And about four eggs. It's more, really, like an omelette.

A little bit of soy sauce. No need for any seasoning in here.

You want to get the wok nice and hot.

Grab some plain oil, not olive oil, just a bit of veg oil in there.

In we go with the eggs, and at the same time, swirl it around.

All around the edge. You've almost got a massive omelette.

Then what you do is you take your rice.

Place that in the centre.

Then gradually... bring the omelette...

..into the centre of the pan. Fold it over quickly like that.

So, really, with this you've got like a massive omelette cake.

Then what we do is we cut this into pieces,

and there you have it, a takeout at home, really.

It's crunchy, it's sticky, it's spicy and it's so simple.

Could you get better from your local takeaway? Don't think so.

If Asian and Mediterranean flavours dominate our takeouts,

thousands of artisan and table-top producers are introducing

brand-new, exciting ingredients to the British palate.

One couple in north London are passionate about bringing

the vibrant flavours of African cuisine to a much wider audience.

I'm Bim, one half of Bim's Kitchen, which is me and my wife Nicola.

We're based in Palmers Green in north London.

We make a range of handmade, African-inspired sauces and condiments.

This little kitchen is where all the magic happens.

We have won eight Great Taste awards,

which are awarded annually by the Guild Of Fine Food.

That gave us the confidence that, look,

if, against all these thousands of products that were submitted

for these awards annually, ours actually stood out as being

good enough to get these, maybe they are as good as people are telling us.

A lot of people I suspect still don't believe this is all made

from a small home kitchen, which is what it is,

especially when we say to them, actually, it isn't just the cooking

that's done at home. We literally do everything.

We're just about to start making some baobab chilli jam,

which involves boiling some hibiscus petals.

It's got a wonderful, vibrant red colour,

which really enhances the look and the taste.

You will start to see a very nice red colour almost immediately

as it hits the water.

That really intensifies as the water gets hotter.

Hibiscus petals can often be found in fruit tea blends.

They're used to add an extra layer of flavour

and a vibrant colour to the brew.

This is the fruit from the baobab tree,

which grows all over sub-Saharan Africa.

Inside, you have seeds, surrounded by this naturally dry pulp, which,

when rubbed off the seeds, looks like that.

This powder has got more vitamin C than oranges,

more calcium than milk, more antioxidants than goji berries.

It tastes a little bit like old-fashioned sherbet.

Slightly sweet, slightly sour.

We just thought, God, this is such a unique African ingredient,

we had to find something to do with it.

Locally in Africa, the tree itself is most popularly known

as the upside-down tree,

and just such a unique part of the African landscape.

Baobab is very high in pectin, so it's perfect for jam making.

The next ingredient is Demerara sugar,

which acts as a natural preservative as well as sweetening the jam.

I went to live in Nigeria when I was about ten, 11 years old,

and I kind of went from normal English cuisine over here to

being thrust into this completely different cuisine,

things I'd never heard of, never seen before.

I learned how to cook a lot of traditional recipes

and that's how I found out about a lot of the things which may

seem more obscure over here but which we use an awful lot in Africa.

The final ingredients are added to the jam,

including chilli flakes, ginger and salt.

When the consistency is just right,

the jam is ready to put in sterilised jars.

Scientifically, turning it upside down helps

the vacuum in the jar to form more quickly as the product goes down,

and that's what gives you that reassuring pop

when you open the jar for the first time.

You know everything is as it should be.

Superstition has it that if you do make anything with

the baobab fruit that is left over, you should store it upside down,

just like the name of the tree suggests, the upside-down tree.

So whether it's for scientific purposes or superstition,

we're hopefully covered either way.

It's very important for us to do tastes as we like doing them.

Every week, we're somewhere doing a tasting,

or doing something to basically

get people to know more about our products.

Baskervilles Tea Shop is a local business that

stocks Bim's range of sauces.

Bim and Nicola are always keen to introduce customers

to their new flavours.

Even the less spicy one is beautiful,

they've got a lovely kind of delicate flavour to them.

Delicious. And it's got a little sweet tang to it.

Our products complement a lot of very common takeaway food,

be they burgers or sausages -

our ketchup and barbecue sauces work well with that.

I hope some of the things we do

with baobab and all these other ingredients we use

do inspire people to experiment,

to try new things, go and explore the food Africa has to offer as well.

Well, so far our takeaway express has visited Africa, India, China

and Thailand.

So it's about time we headed back home.

They say Britain's most popular takeout meal is curry,

but I don't know what's going on with us all,

it's got to be fish and chips for me.

And that great British takeaway has to regain the top spot

with my take on this classic.

Beer-battered hake with all the trimmings.

Crispy onion rings, home-made mushy peas,

and chunky tartar sauce.

First thing I'm going to do is do our mushy peas.

For these, you need these fellows.

These are little dried marrow-fat peas,

but what you do need to do before you start to cook them

is just soak them. For that, just cold water,

sit them in cold water for about an hour, an hour and a half.

They will just sit there nicely, gradually starting to expand

while we can make our batter.

The batter for this - there's loads of different versions

of batter nowadays, but this one is mine.

I use plain flour, but it is a beer batter. Plain flour first of all.

A pinch of salt and a little pinch of sugar.

Sounds weird, but it's one of the things that feeds the yeast

that I'm going to put in there as well.

And then this is the yeast.

Instead of using dried yeast, I always use fresh yeast.

It's actually quite simple to get hold of.

If you're friendly with your supermarket bakers,

they will use this stuff.

They won't use the dried yeast, they will use the fresh one.

You just want a little bit in the mix.

Although it has less shelf life, fresh yeast for me

is always better than dry. I keep mine stored in the fridge.

A little bit of vinegar, going to use cider vinegar for this,

this helps crisp up the batter.

And then some proper beer.

When I say proper beer, I mean proper beer,

not that fancy lager stuff.

It's got to be really good-quality Yorkshire bitter.

We mix this together.

Now, one thing you do have to do with this is just

put enough beer in it so it's slightly loose.

You're almost looking I suppose like a pancake batter.

Cover it over and just leave it to one side.

That will just gently prove. It wants a good hour,

or something like that, just to gently, as the yeast starts to work

and warms up in the room, it starts to puff up the batter

and create it nice and light.

Now, for our peas, you want to drain these.

A little bit of water in here.

You need some of this stuff, this is bicarb soda.

What will happen is, as that cooks, it will start to puff up and rise.

You need to keep your eye on it, keep stirring it,

and after about 20, 30 minutes, we end up with some mushy peas.

Gives us enough time to make our little tartar sauce.

Start your tartar sauce by making a classic mayonnaise.

First, blend together egg yolks and Dijon mustard.

Then slowly pour in your oil.

I like to use rapeseed oil, which gives it a great colour.

Once it begins to thicken, you can pour the oil in faster.

See how quickly it can be done, like that,

and how lovely it is. You should have a go.

To turn the mayonnaise into tartar sauce, add chopped shallots,

capers and gherkins.

Then add chopped parsley and dill, lemon juice, salt and pepper

and finally mix together.

It doesn't look anything like bought-in tartar sauce.

Believe me, it tastes a lot better. Look at that. Proper chunky.

That's how it should be.

Now, really, after about 20 or 30 minutes,

you end up with the great mushy peas that we all know and love, and

then just finish this off of course with just a little piece of butter.

Just let that sit there.

Our batter, you can see all these lovely bubbles, that is

the yeast and the beer working together as it warms up.

All those bubbles are going to basically explode

when it hits the fryer, and create this lovely crisp batter.

The secret of a great crispy batter

is to make sure your oil is hot enough.

The best way to test it also gives you another treat for the plate.

I know this is a bit weird, putting onion rings in here to go

with fish, but it's actually a good way to test the oil.

Let's face it, who doesn't like onion rings?

This beer batter seems to coat the onion rings really well

and get it nice and crisp.

While those onion rings fry, we turn our attention to the fish.

Now, you can use a variety of different fish out there,

there's loads to choose from. This is one I'm going to use.

It's called hake, and it's often... Particularly in France,

they use it a lot.

I actually find it easier if you do it out of the basket, because

when you drop the fish in you've got to do this quite carefully.

Always do this away from you, a little bit at a time,

because if you drop it in too soon, it will stick to the bottom,

and it certainly will stick to the basket.

If you actually go round the corner and watch the guy

manning the fryers in your local fish and chip shop,

this is how you do it.

Right at the last minute you just drop in the tail.

This next bit really depends on where you come from, but...

You've got to have scraps with it. Scraps should be free.

For some reason, south of Watford, they are 49p a bag,

which is a sin.

Then we take our fish...

Check that out.

A little sprinkle of the old salt over this.

Got to have a wedge of lemon. Cut the lemon.

remove this part of the lemon. Then, when you squeeze the lemon,

it comes out the bottom and doesn't fly into the next person's face.

There is a tip. We've got our mushy peas.

Sometimes I love my job.

Bread and butter, deep-fried fish, mushy peas, tartar sauce,

wedge of lemon.

Proper grub. With this dish, I think I've saved the best for last.

It will definitely save you a trip to the fish and chip shop.

And I'm sure you'll agree, it tastes just as good.

I was always taught as a young kid never to eat anything that is

as big as your face, but this is definitely one exception.

Crew, you've got to try this.

'There's no need to ask this lot twice.

'They are on this fish supper like seagulls following a fishing boat.

'I believe we order so many takeaways

'because we think we can't make them any better at home.

'But with the right ingredients and a little know-how, we easily can.

'So the next time you think of having some takeaway,

'remember you can deliver the goods in the comfort of your own home.'

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: