Sunday Brunch James Martin: Home Comforts

If there's one thing I look forward to at the end of a busy day,

it's the thought of getting back to my kitchen at home.

'For me, nothing beats cooking some simple, heart-warming, food.'

Oh-oh-oh! It is so good.

'The kind of no-nonsense grub that brings people together.'

Cheers, everyone.

'The dishes I turn to when I want to put a big smile on everyone's face.'

These are my home comforts.

I really love my job, but there's nothing better at the end of a busy

week, than heading home to my house in Hampshire and just kicking back.

And, for me, a lazy Sunday brunch is the highlight of my weekend.

Sunday is definitely my day for unwinding at home,

and let's face it, none of us want to be spending hours in the kitchen.

So today's show is packed with dishes that

I like to tuck in to when I unwind.

It's food like this that really gets me excited.

We'll be getting the low down on my favourite brunch ingredient.

Best part of the day, sitting down with a big pile of asparagus.

And meeting a Manchester coffee-maker

whose job is a real grind.

Learning to roast coffee is hell!

Before I work up an appetite for the perfect Sunday brunch.

Check that out.

A mainstay of my Sunday brunches is a good old British fry-up.

But on days when I'm feeling extra lazy,

I go for a less labour intensive pick-me-up.

It's my pan-fried gruyere and pancetta brioche sandwich.

Now Brits love a good fry-up but it's the Americans who I think are

real masters at this.

Anybody that's been over to the States will know that the

American bacon is really spectacular.

You've got like a hickory smoke with it.

But you can get away with using this stuff. This is pancetta.

'Pancetta is Italian dry-cured pork belly

'and for this recipe you fry it in a warm pan.'

The temptation is to add oil to this.

You don't want to do that.

You're just going to basically render down the fat a little bit.

This is the secret of the pancetta really, because it's lovely

and thin, you can get it lovely and crisp.

To me, it's like the ultimate brunch.

The thing is with English breakfasts are great,

but you do create a lot of washing up and a lot of grief,

whereas this is kind of just all cooked in one pan.

'When the pancetta is cooked

'add two tablespoons of maple syrup to the pan.'

If anybody's been and had breakfast in America, you know,

you have about a litre of this per portion.

'I'm going to serve this between twice slices of eggy bread.

'For this, you'll need to mix two eggs and 150ml of full fat milk into a bowl.'

Then to follow on with that sort of American style,

we add a bit of sweetness.

It's quite an unusual thing for us to do in the UK, to add sugar,

but it really does work.

'Cut the brioche into thin slices.

'Then make the sandwiches with gruyere cheese

'and the cooked pancetta.'

Now you've got to work quite quickly,

so you want to make sure you've got the pan nice and warm.

Plenty of butter.

Now this is probably the reason why I liked this in the first place.

The brioche will absorb most of this butter anyway.

Now all you do if, you just take the sandwich,

dunk it in egg,

pop that in there.

Now whenever I do this at home, and it's generally on a Sunday,

the smell of this sort of permeates throughout the entire house

and literally it's like the Pied Piper and all my mates,

who are the mice, just sort of appear from nowhere, wherever

they've fallen asleep, and descend on the kitchen to have one of these.

You want to pan-fry it so the brioche is nice and toasted,

but you want to melt the cheese at the same time.

It's food like this that really gets me excited.

It's like the best toasted sandwich, the best breakfast, all in one.

'You may find it hard to believe

'that I could ever be lost for words.'

Do I really have to say anything?

'This kind of simple home-cooked Sunday brunch really is my idea of food heaven.'

Not many veg are tasty enough to be the centrepiece of

a delicious Sunday brunch.

But asparagus is definitely one of them.

With a drizzle of melted butter, and a sprinkle of pepper

and Parmesan, it's one of my absolute favourites.

And less than ten miles from the Yorkshire town I grew up in,

arable farmers Ronda and Richard Morritt are producing

some of the best asparagus money can buy.

It all started 15 years ago,

when they needed to find a business to fit in with family life.

I needed to work and, but having a baby, I had to work from home

and so you said, "Let's do a pick your own strawberry patch."

So we contacted our advisor.

And he started digging.

He said, "How far down does this sand go?"

And he said, "Well actually,"

he said, "you've got perfect soil for asparagus."

They took a chance and planted one acre,

which took two years to establish.

The day came when it sprouted out off the ground and we thought,

right, what do we do with it? And so we very quickly just made

a board, do you remember, just a little board with Asparagus written

on it, £2.50 and an arrow and we were always sold out by lunchtime.

-So amateurish to start with.

-Yeah, but...

All by the seat of our pants.

From one acre and now we're on to 14.

-We've got 14 acres in the ground.

-Cutting from about ten or 11.

-Yeah.

We're just cutting the asparagus that's long enough to cut.

The rule of thumb is that it's at least as long as the knife.

If it's not as long as the knife, you can't take it.

The root knows that we've actually cut it and it sends

a message down and says, "Oh something's happened upstairs, let's

"send another one up." And that's what it keeps doing the whole season.

If it's a hot day like today, 20, 25 degrees, we can get four,

six inches of growth in a day.

In Britain, asparagus is one of the first veg to appear each spring.

The asparagus season starts generally the last

week in April, first week in May, but that can really vary with

the weather and so it's a very short season, what, six or eight

weeks maximum and in that time, our workload goes from here to here.

It's just absolutely massive.

Once picked, the asparagus is sorted into bundles, according to size.

And at the height of the season that's anything up

to 1,500 bundles a day.

We grade it into thin spears, medium-size spears and fat spears

and the choice is the customer's.

Depends what they're doing with it, really.

You can buy it in shops but it's all,

all different sizes and you can overcook some spears

and undercook others but here you can get it just right.

I've been coming here for asparagus for years

and I'm informed when it's first ready.

I would never eat asparagus out of season.

It's one of those things that has got to be eaten in season.

From working on my own, managing the whole farm,

doing everything myself, to suddenly managing staff and having customers

as well to deal with, I think that was the big turning point.

And having to put a smile on my face.

Yeah, yeah. Rather than just being an isolated miserable farmer.

And there are a few other benefits to having more asparagus

than you can shake a stick at.

I think we probably eat it five or six times

a week in the asparagus season.

I like mine just slightly softer than al dente, I would say.

Three or four minutes and it'll be ready.

Best part of the day, sitting down with a big pile of asparagus,

tastes like nothing else, you can't compare it to anything else,

just absolutely delicious.

For me, asparagus is the taste of summertime Sunday brunches.

And I'm really keen to try some that's been grown in my home

county of Yorkshire.

So I've invited Ronda

and Richard over to sample one of my favourite asparagus recipes.

Now, I've got to say, I love asparagus,

but not the easiest crop to produce. It sits there in the land,

you can't have anything, what is it, two years?

-At least, yeah.

-At least two years.

-Two to three years, yeah.

I mean, it's a big risk, isn't it or...?

Well, we only put an acre in, so the risk wasn't huge to start with.

-We didn't know what we were doing really, did we?

-No.

You didn't? Isn't that farming anyway, in general, you don't

know what you're doing until you try it.

Because as a crop goes, it's kind of unique in terms of how it grows.

When the climate's right, I mean, no other crop grows like it, does it?

You can almost hear it growing.

Fresh British asparagus deserves special treatment, so I'm going

to serve it with cured ham, poached duck egg and hollandaise sauce.

So the first thing I'm going to do is cook the duck eggs.

Now for that, you need some salted boiling water, with a touch

of vinegar and the vinegar will actually seal in the whites as well.

Particularly with duck eggs, this is quite important,

so, throw a little bit of vinegar in and then the duck eggs

here are just spectacular, with this wonderful asparagus.

'When your pan of water comes to the boil,

'whisk it to create a whirlpool and then drop the eggs in, one by one.'

And the eggs you crack into a bowl because the shells of a duck

egg are quite solid and they do need a little helping hand.

As soon as this comes to the boil, just gently simmer this

and then we can cook it for about two to three minutes.

Now I didn't know that there was loads of different

types of asparagus as well.

Do you produce an earlier crop, I mean, what...?

No, the variety we use is Mondeo, that's the predominant one.

And where did asparagus come from in the first place because...?

-I believe it's Italian.

-Italian?

-Mediterranean shores, yeah.

Yeah, first found on the sea shores,

because it really likes sandy, salty land.

-It's kind of like samphire really

-Yes, probably similar.

-I suppose, that kind of.

-Yes, yeah.

-You can see why when you look at it,

-it's that appearance as well.

-Exactly.

When you've finished the season, what happens to the crop?

I mean how, how do you keep it for the following year?

We stop harvest and then we let the asparagus grow

and it grows into the fern, a metre and a half, two metres high

and that's really important for, in the summer, to have that fern,

because that's the working, putting all the goodness

and the storage back into the roots for the following season.

-So then you leave it, let it grow.

-Leave it.

-It does its fern stuff.

And then about, what, October, it dies off.

Yeah, it starts dying off, going brown, golden brown, October.

Once it's brown it's done its job and we just cut it off.

And that's it.

And you've got an empty muddy field for about five, six months.

Until it warms up again.

Mm, absolutely.

And when your egg is ready, you can just lift it out,

pop it into ice-cold water.

Now what this is going to do is just set the cooking of it.

It's a great way to actually to make these beforehand,

particularly if you've got a load of people around for brunch.

You can just have all this lot done and then they only take

about 20 seconds to re-heat, so just repeat the process with another egg.

Where do you start when you want to plant a new crop?

Where do you go, do you...?

We could propagate our own, but we don't,

we give that to somebody else. And we just buy them in.

Somebody propagates them for us and we order.

How many did we order this year?

-18,000 crowns.

-So 18,000 plants.

-18,000 plants.

And how long does a plant last for, because I've got some in the bottom

of my garden that I've waited and waited and waited and it's produced

for the first time this year, but if I let the ferns go and die down

and cut it back, how long can I expect to keep that going?

Commercially, we'd be looking at eight years, roughly harvest,

of harvest.

In your garden, you'd get 16, 20 years, perhaps.

HE SCOFFS

Might not be here in 16 to 20 years either.

'Next thing to do is make the hollandaise.

'Start by adding two egg yolks to the mixer

'and with the motor running slowly, pour in the cooled melted butter.'

Now traditionally, this would be whisked over a bain-marie,

which is a, to us three here, a pan of 'at watter.'

Which is basically just a bowl over hot water.

But the secret of hollandaise is to allow the butter to cool down.

Now this has been clarified

and quite simply all you do is you just put a block of butter in a pan,

bring it to a gentle simmer and turn it off.

And all the solid parts of the butter,

the salts and everything else, sink to the bottom of the pan.

So when you do this, what you don't want to do is basically stir it,

because all the impurities sit in the bottom of the pan.

So the hollandaise is now lovely and thick, like that,

going to leave that to one side.

Now how do people store asparagus, because do you put it in the fridge?

How do you keep it, once you have it?

I would put it in a container, a tall container,

and stand it, a little bit of water in the bottom.

-Like you would keep cut flowers.

-Really? OK.

Like, you know, pop it in a little bit of water

and just put it where your milk lives.

Is it quite a hard sell really?

I don't suppose it is any more, is it?

I don't think it is, no.

I think it sells itself in that we only sell today's or

yesterday's and it's really, really fresh.

Kind of, it's word of mouth, more than anything else.

It is, but the seasonality of it also sells itself.

It's such a short season

and it really is that first taste of summer.

For a chef, you look forward to the asparagus

because you know the next thing that's going to hit you is

Jersey royal potatoes and, you know, the crab are starting to come

through, and everything just marries together.

Yeah, it's one of the first. It's like, that's what we say, don't we?

We say, "Rhubarb, asparagus, new potatoes and we're off."

'The hollandaise is flavoured with a reduction of shallots,

'black peppercorns and white wine vinegar.

'It's made by putting all three ingredients in a pan,

'and bringing to the boil before reducing by half.

'The liquid is then cooled and added to the egg and butter mixture.'

Now this is quite strong stuff and this is what flavours the

hollandaise sauce and gives it its unique sort of taste, in my opinion.

Sometimes this is flavoured with a little bit of lemon juice

as well and all I really do to cook the asparagus

after that, is just drop it into a bit of salted boiling water.

I don't think it needs anything else.

Nothing else, straight in.

'The asparagus should take three to four minutes,

'and while it's cooking trim your poached eggs.

'And when the asparagus is done,

'pop them in the pan to heat through for 20 seconds or so.

'That way, everyone gets a perfectly poached egg.'

I'm going to serve this with some fantastic ham.

So often you can do this with Serrano and Parma

and particularly with asparagus being sort of a Mediterranean crop,

that's why the two things work really well together.

'This is a dish that's full of the flavours of summer.

'Beautifully fresh asparagus, perfectly poached eggs,

'fantastically creamy hollandaise and of course that delicious ham.'

Well, hopefully this has done asparagus justice.

-Looks good, doesn't it?

-So dive in.

Thank you.

-Oh, gorgeous, isn't it?

-Mm.

The thing is with asparagus, don't ruin it, don't put loads of different things with it.

Nice and simple. What more do you want?

It's great, really nice.

Believe me, when asparagus is in season,

this is one of the best Sunday brunches you'll ever have.

For most Brits, a Sunday brunch isn't Sunday brunch

unless it's accompanied by a pot of top-notch coffee.

So, it's good to know a growing band of small-scale artisan

producers are broadening our understanding

and appreciation of the humble coffee bean, by roasting it at home.

In Manchester, James Guard has been roasting beans in his garage

and selling them locally, for the past three years.

I started working in a cafe, after I graduated,

and I truly enjoyed that environment.

So working hands-on, and this is like '96, '97 when people were like,

"What's a latte?" It literally was like quite a new thing.

It was 2004, I remember going to Borough Market in London

and I remember seeing Monmouth Coffee had got an arch,

one of the arches in Borough and it's just this, I just saw it

and it was just this whole beautiful looking arch, all these coffee

beans from different countries, all sort of laid out and these

baristas making fantastic drinks and people sort of gathering around

these big wooden tables and it was just this fantastic experience.

I just thought, "That's what I want to do. I want to do that."

It had to be roasting because that's what connects you to the coffee.

But it is exciting as well and sometimes you just think,

"Well, I could sort of make a living, roasting coffee

"and then selling it to people."

Just like the grapes that go in to making wine, coffee beans

have a unique flavour depending on where they've been grown.

Soil, climate and when the coffee is harvested can all have an

influence on how the roasted coffee beans will eventually taste.

So we've got this beautiful Brazilian coffee which you can

smell the sweetness on it, even as the green coffee,

before you've done anything to it, and you just know when you

roast it, you're going to get some nice brown sugar sort of flavours.

If you roast it right, you're going

to get nice caramels coming through in that coffee.

And then you've got these really prized Kenyan coffees,

sort of precious flavours in these.

Phenomenal flavours, I mean, roasters...

You love getting coffees like these

because it produces such beautiful complex flavours.

I insist you can taste lemon meringue pie in it, all sorts

of really un-coffee-like flavours in a beautiful Kenyan coffee.

So to be able to draw out those flavours is really rewarding

and it's one of the best bits for me as a roaster.

Extracting the desired flavours

and aromas from the beans is an incredibly skilled job

and it's not the sort of thing you can learn overnight.

Learning to roast coffee is hell and I hated it.

Because you know what you want coffee to taste like

and it won't taste like it.

You know, you try roasting it and you think,

I want it to taste like this, and it doesn't.

You just learn and you start to tune into the coffee

and you start to control the heat. It probably took about six months,

probably even a year, to get to the point where

I was really tuning in, saying, "Right, I'm really happy with that.

"I'll put that alongside anyone's espresso and you can have that."

And I think that's nice.

Once the oven's reached the perfect temperature,

James can't hang around.

When you're trying to get the best out of your beans,

timing is everything.

So as soon as the green beans drop into the roaster,

you're starting then on, you know, the development of the flavour.

So the Sumatra Dugong that we're roasting, it's a big, heavy,

weighty sort of chocolaty coffee.

We're going to push it a little bit darker.

The skill of the coffee roaster is in responding to the subtle

changes in the beans as they gradually react to the heat.

You're looking at it, so using your sight.

You're dipping in, smelling it, what's it doing, what's it doing.

You're listening out for it because you want to hear that first

crack point, so you're using all those three senses.

First crack literally is a cracking sound

when the coffee is dried out, that moisture being forced out finally.

So you can start to hear those pops.

COFFEE BEANS POP

And then, from first crack, you can smell it every 30 seconds,

20, 30 seconds, and the flavours will be changing.

There's the nice beginnings of that sort of sweetness,

beginnings of that sort of caramelisation.

So for me, as a roaster, the job is show the bean, you know,

emphasise the bean, the flavour, the quality.

Getting that lovely chocolate aroma coming off that.

We're happy, we know what flavour we want,

we want it to stop developing the flavour there, so we'll drop it out.

Once that's cooled, the flavour, we then can get that sealed up,

get it into bags, preserve the freshness.

Because he's able to pay so much attention to the detail,

James has managed to create a skilfully crafted range of coffees

that maximise the flavour from the beans he chooses to work with.

And because small artisan producers like James can never roast

the kind of volumes your high street chains are after,

impressing independent local baristas with your latest

batch is a very important part of the job.

It's a very nervous moment if you're very responsible as a roaster,

especially if you're putting coffee into cafes and things.

When you've roasted it, you've tried it and then that moment

when you've ground it off and then you hit the button for the

espresso shot and then the shot comes through and then you try it.

It's got lovely body, lovely sweetness,

very dark chocolate.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, bang on.

When I have a bunch of my mates round for Sunday brunch

they all expect a steady stream of coffee and croissants.

But you won't catch me running to the local bakery for supplies.

If I've got time, I like to rustle my own home-made buttery croissants.

Coffee and croissants go hand in hand.

Now you know how coffee's produced,

now I'm going to teach you how croissants are made

and it uses basically strong flour to start off with.

So this is kind of like an enriched yeast dough.

'Put 625 grams of flour

'and 75 grams of caster sugar into your food mixer.'

And then I like to use French salt,

so a good pinch of French fleur de sel and then fresh yeast.

'You'll need to add 40 grams of the yeast and around 400ml

'of water, before mixing the whole lot into a soft dough.'

And unlike bread, you make it with cold water.

And just mix this for about 30 seconds.

'When your dough is ready, turn it out onto a floured surface

'and knead well.'

I did say you need butter for an all-butter croissant.

That's one.

Two.

Half a kilo of butter makes 16 croissants.

'It's important to use cold butter for this. First of all,

'you'll need to put it between two sheets of grease-proof paper.'

Now give it a good whack.

What I'm trying to do is flatten out the butter

to about a centimetre thick.

And you want it as one big, solid lump.

Once it's nice and thin, like that, about a centimetre thick,

take the entire lot and pop it in the fridge.

You want to make that nice and cold.

Now if you thought that was hard work,

this is where it really starts.

'Your aim here is to roll out the dough into a huge rectangle.

'You should get it to be around 60cm by 30cm.'

It's very easy at first.

But then it gets harder and harder and harder,

as soon as the butter goes in.

Now you can see, as opposed to puff pastry,

this is much more difficult to roll out because the yeast

in there is starting to work, it's starting to pull this together.

So every time you do this, it kind of shrinks back

and it requires more elbow grease.

What gives croissants their unique texture and flavour

is the fact that the butter is layered within the dough.

Nice piece of butter on your toast.

'To do this, start by putting the rolled butter

'into the centre of the dough, then folding the pastry over it.'

What we're doing is creating what they call a book turn.

You see, you fold it one way, fold it the other way.

'Once the dough has been folded over the butter,

'it needs to be rolled thinly into a huge rectangle again.'

But it doesn't stop there, you have fold and roll three times in all.

So next time you go to a shop and you see a croissant for a quid,

don't moan.

'When the dough is ready,

'you need to make sure it doesn't expand too much,

'so pop it into fridge for at least an hour, but preferably overnight.'

I've got one that's been in here for about an hour.

What you've got to do again...

is roll it out even more.

Now what you're looking at doing is a nice even sort of thickness,

sort of half a centimetre thick.

'After the dough has been rolled out for the final time,

'divide it into two rectangles,

'then cut triangles that are about ten centimetres at the base.'

Now to actually shape them,

the best way to do that is imagine it's ears.

You pull its ears apart like that, which I used to do with

my sister when she was a kid, pull her ears and then roll it forward.

And this gets the classic croissant shape.

'Make all your croissants, then lay them on to a baking tray.

'Then brush each one very lightly with egg wash,

'being extra careful not to break them.'

Now the great thing about these, you can actually,

once they're egg-washed, you can freeze them and when you want

them, you've got to take them out the freezer, allow them to defrost.

As they're defrosting the yeast will then come alive again,

start to rise up and you just bake them as normal.

And you kind of know, any dish at all with that

amount of butter in, is going to taste pretty good.

'The croissants will still need to be left to rise for 30 to 40 minutes.

'Then pop them in the oven that's been preheated at

'190 degrees centigrade for 25 minutes.'

You see, it really is worth the effort.

There's nothing better than warm croissants out of the oven.

So even though you've got all this butter on there,

a little bit more over the top and some jam.

Mm.

These are great.

But there's far too much for me, so come on, guys, dive in.

Have some butter on it as well.

Mm, these are so good.

It takes me two hours to make them and two minutes to demolish them.

Look at it.

-They're warm out the oven.

-They're very good.

Lazing around at home on a weekend morning and enjoying some tasty,

comforting grub is one of the simple pleasures in life.

And making it doesn't have to be a hassle.

Whether it's light summer dishes or hearty winter warmers,

there are plenty of simple traditional recipes

that are full of the flavours of the great British Sunday brunch.

You can find all the recipes from the series on...