A Taste of My Travels James Martin: Home Comforts

The heart of MY home is the kitchen.

And it's here that I love to cook delicious meals for my

nearest and dearest.

-Cheers.

-Cheers!

There's no better way to celebrate everything good in life

than sharing some great food with the people you love.

These are the dishes that I cook

when I want to bring people together.

These are MY Home Comforts.

For me, travelling is one of the joys of modern life.

I love experiencing different cultures,

meeting amazing people, and eating incredible food.

Over the years, it's given me so much inspiration in the kitchen.

I'm going to take you on a culinary road trip,

making pit stops all over the world,

to pick up ideas that can easily be transported into your own home.

Like this amazing seafood dish that I reeled in on a fishing trip.

It's a very quick and simple dish this, but one that tastes amazing.

I'm also taking a gourmet gamble on a fiery dish I picked up in Spain.

One in every ten are hot and spicy.

And sharing food ideas with my friend and fellow globetrotter,

Antonio Carluccio.

-So, what got you into food in the first place then?

-Greed!

-Greed!

I'm starting off with a dish I discovered on

a recent fishing break.

For me, nothing beats bringing home a good catch and netting

a fantastic recipe too.

This one is aubergine with halibut and miso.

Now, this is only about sort of five or six months ago I spotted this

dish and it's when I went fishing for this amazing seafood and

serious fishing as well, where they strap you in to a seat,

and I remember catching this tuna.

It was about that sort of big, a Bonito tuna,

I was chuffed to bits with it, but you could tell the fisherman

wasn't too impressed really at the size of my catch.

So he decided to use this fish, that big, as live bait.

We caught some amazing fish.

And then brought it back and on the island,

this chef created this amazing dish, using this miso paste.

There's so many different types of miso paste out there,

but particularly the white one is you want for this.

Start off by putting a whole packet of the paste,

which is made from fermented soya beans, into a pan.

And then, to turn this into the sauce, I'll just use caster sugar.

Equal quantities of sugar and white miso.

So, there's quite a bit of sugar in here and this is where this

dish is kind of unique, I think, in terms of the sweetness with fish.

Very unusual to put this amount of sugar with halibut,

but one that works really well together.

Next, add a splash of water and put on the stove.

Now, what happens to the mixture, as it cooks, the sugar caramelises

and mixed together with that miso paste, creates this amazing sauce.

Be quite careful with this as well.

Because you've got that amount of sugar in, it can burn quite quickly,

so once you've come to the boil like this,

just turn it down slightly and that just wants to gently cook now

for about ten minutes.

Now, you can tell when the mixture's ready.

The colour changes and also the texture changes.

You get this nice, light caramel,

almost like banoffee style sauce really.

Now, I like to pop it in these little squeezy bottles.

It's much easier to keep.

The great thing about this is you can keep it in the fridge and

as and when you want it, just heat this up in a hot pan.

Try to get most of it into the bottle though!

It's so fantastic, this sauce.

It's lovely and sweet.

It's very unusual to go with fish, but with this dish,

it just tastes superb.

Take some aubergine and cut into decent size chunks.

Now, it's time to bring out the star of the meal.

Halibut grows to be huge. It's a massive flatfish.

Can be about half the size of this stove.

Huge, massive fish, you take big chunks of.

But I've got a diddly one. This nice little halibut.

You can buy this from the supermarket as well now.

It's a wonderful flatfish.

A lot of the time, this is actually farmed as well,

but it really does taste delicious and one that is highly prized.

Once you've cut your fish into decent size chunks,

start shallow frying them in butter.

At the same time, you need to deep fry the aubergine in oil.

Now, what you'll find, if the oil is not hot enough,

the aubergines are like a sponge - they soak in all that oil and

then just dump it out on the plate,

so you've got to make sure the oil is really, really hot.

And if you're doing on a pan like this, just be really careful.

Use a thermometer. This wants to be about 180 degrees.

Just fry them very, very quickly.

Just before the halibut has cooked,

add some shelled edamame beans and heat them through.

It's a very quick and simple dish this, but one that tastes amazing.

The aubergine chunks just take a couple of minutes to cook.

After that, scoop them out and place onto kitchen paper to soak up

any excess oil.

Add a pinch of salt and then some chopped coriander.

Now, you're ready to plate up.

Couldn't be easier.

I cook this dish so much here at home, I love it for dinner parties.

It's one of my favourite,

favourite dishes cos it's just so simple and yet so effective.

I mean, already this dish looks really nice as it is.

To make it look even better,

sprinkle both black and white sesame seeds over the top.

And then of course, you've got your fish, simply cooked.

And then just a drizzle

of this hot sauce

over the top.

Finally, I like to add a couple of exciting garnish -

some fennel fronds

and red amaranth, which has a beet flavour.

I love this stuff.

Sounds a little bit fancy, but you can grow this at home.

These seeds just come from a local garden centre.

Really intense flavour. Just drizzle these over the top.

Add a nice bit of colour.

How good does that look?

It's one of my favourites.

This one's a real taste of my travels, to be honest.

Mm!

And all these ingredients can be found in the supermarket.

That's the great thing about it.

It tastes so fantastic.

I've travelled thousands of miles to discover this dish,

but increasingly, I'm finding exotic inspiration right here at home.

That's because of the people who've come from all corners of the

world to live in Britain,

bringing the fantastic flavours of their homelands with them.

People like Tina Stone, who is from Indonesia.

12 years ago, she met her husband Jeremy in Jakarta,

where he was teaching. After getting married,

the couple decided to settle their young family in Birmingham.

For the first two years, when we move here to the UK, I was

really missing my family, as well as my mum's cooking.

Anyone who lives on the other side of the world from your

relatives, you miss your family, so by sustaining the cooking,

the memory of her mum's recipes,

it's almost like a way of curing her homesickness.

And what started off in Tina's kitchen as a way of capturing

the smells and tastes of home soon developed into a business.

The idea of having my own brand

of Indonesian cooking paste,

it started last year, actually.

My husband loves Indonesian cooking and then I love cooking,

so why don't we turn a hobby to be a business?

Tina uses authentic recipes that have been handed down from her mum

and can be used to create a real taste of Indonesia.

They're packed with the finest ingredients,

but many of these can be hard to find.

I come here because it's so many different spices and

ingredients, which is very specific.

Turmeric, lemongrass, galangal,

which is quite difficult to find from supermarket.

Like, for example, turmeric, I can get it from the shop,

but it's usually powder or dry, so that's very important for me.

Fresh ingredients taste better.

And Tina's trips to the food market can take her even further

down memory lane.

When I was small,

my grandad has the sugar cane farm and I remember my grandma

used to cut like quarter and then I suck it, when I was small,

you suck it, so sweet, and it's nice.

So I'm amazed just to find sugar cane here,

in Birmingham wholesale market.

Tina's going to use the spices she's bought to cook up an

Indonesian curry, called beef rendang.

She'll serve this with a range of other dishes to

a group of friends who are due to visit.

The curry, I'm going to make tonight, kind of secret recipe.

Well, OK, without revealing absolutely everything,

her rendang paste is a blend of herbs and spices,

mixed with other ingredients, including candle nut.

Candle nut is very important. We use a lot to make the paste thicken.

These flavours and the way in which they're used can differ greatly,

depending on which part of Indonesia you visit.

We are a country with lots and lots of islands.

Every region has different, unique recipes.

And they all influence.

Tina's drive to share the flavours from her corner of Indonesia

began under tragic circumstances.

Suddenly, my dad passed away

when I was only 16.

And my mum has to look after

four of us on her own.

She started to have a small business, which is selling food.

My sisters and I prepared four o'clock in the morning every

day before we go to school just to, you know, keep us alive.

To show my respect to my mum for being

so strong and hard work for us,

I name my brand after my mum.

The other day, she mentioned to her mum about what we're doing,

her mum was in tears with pride, the fact that, you know,

we're introducing Indonesian flavours to people in this country.

And while Tina is working hard to raise the profile of

Indonesian food in the UK, tonight is all about sharing the

taste and memories of home with family and friends.

I always grateful to be able to cook my mum's recipes and share it

-with my friends.

-Reminds me of my mum's cooking.

I was brought up with spicy food. Always full of flavour.

-I love it.

-I think every time,

especially when we have get-togethers with Indonesian

people, the smells of the food, the sound of the language, it

always takes you back to, you know, the time when we lived in Indonesia.

Today has been a really good day and everybody's happy.

I think Mum will be so proud of me.

I love travelling to countries with a vibrant food culture.

And one such place is Spain.

And it's where I got the inspiration for my next dish,

chicken and Serrano ham croquettas with a side of padron peppers.

They have an amazing market in Barcelona called La Boqueria Market.

It's right on the Las Ramblas, right in the centre of Barcelona,

and inside that market,

you have some of the greatest food I've ever seen in my life.

And there's loads of different tapas bars, all dotted around the

market, and this dish comes from one of those places.

I go to the same place all the time and have this. Little croquettas.

And often, they do it with fish, they do it with chicken.

Whatever you want really, you can add to this.

Now, the basis of croquettas is a simple white sauce.

But it's a thickened white sauce.

It's a different texture to a normal sort of cheese sauce that we

have over here, but it all starts with a touch of butter and

a little bit of flour.

Mix this together.

So, at this stage, it'll be slightly thick, almost like choux pastry

in the pot here.

Keep the pan on the heat.

You just need to cook this for about 30 seconds.

And then slowly add the milk.

Just a little at a time.

Too much to start off with and you get lumps in the sauce.

Keep on mixing until it's got the texture of mashed potato.

I suppose it's kind of like that really.

That's the ideal texture for this.

So if it's too liquid at this stage,

it's just going to be a big mess in your fryer.

And if it's too solid, they become a little bit chewy to eat.

The mixture is a blank canvas. You can add to it whatever you want.

But I'm going to use the ingredients that remind me of that market

in Barcelona, Serrano ham, chicken, and chopped parsley.

A quick taste.

Needs a bit more salt.

Then one other thing that Spain is famous for,

I'm going to add to this as well.

It's almonds.

Flaked almonds.

So you've got this delicious mixture.

You take the entire lot and pop it in the fridge,

just to cool slightly.

While it's doing that, I'm preparing three plates.

One containing soft breadcrumbs, another with seasoned flour,

and a third with a couple of beaten eggs.

These will act as a coating for the croquettas,

once the mixture has finished cooling in the fridge.

It's a good idea really to wet your hands at this point to stop

the mixture from sticking to your fingers.

But what you're looking for is just, I suppose,

like a golf ball sort of size, really.

Into the flour.

Roll them around until they're completely covered.

Then into the eggs and finish off with the breadcrumbs.

After that, you can start to shape the croquettas ready for cooking.

Now, before we cook these, we're going to cook our padron

peppers, so everything comes together.

Some really good quality Spanish olive oil.

Spain produces so many great ingredients and olives and

olive oil are one of them.

Get the pan nice and hot, the padron peppers, throw them in.

You want to fry them for no more than about a minute.

Now, these are amazing peppers,

but it's a bit like Russian roulette when you're eating them.

One in every ten are hot and spicy.

So as they cook, they start to puff up a little bit,

as the skin colours and discolours a little bit. Keep them on the heat.

At that point, a nice pinch of salt, and a decent size pinch as well.

That's why it's a good idea to use sea salt for this, not table salt.

They're ready. Take them off.

And just pop them into your bowl.

The last thing to do is deep fry the croquettas for a couple of minutes.

When they've turned a lovely golden colour,

take them out of the oil, a pinch of salt over the top,

and pile them onto the plate and eat them while they're still hot.

And the key to this, when you grab one of your croquettas,

and just open it up, you end up with this texture inside.

That's exactly what you're looking for, that runny sort of texture.

Chunks of meat in there as well.

Such a simple dish to recreate.

The flavour is fantastic.

For me, this sums up Spain, in my opinion.

Croquettas and padron peppers.

One in every ten, remember.

It's not that one!

Cooking this dish transports me right back to Barcelona and

reminds me of all those amazing food producers that Spain has.

But we have them closer to home too. And their ingredients are helping

us make our own cuisine more and more adventurous.

Cindy O'Brien farms an unusual sea creature called abalone,

off the west coast of Ireland.

Her journey to the wild and spectacular shores of Galway

has been a long one.

I grew up in Southern California,

which is completely different from here.

Very little rain, lots of sun. We lived close by the sea.

We would always go with my mom and dad and my sisters and we'd

be looking for shells and that's where the interest started.

Cindy trained as a marine biologist and met her Irish-born

husband whilst working in Florida.

But it was her dilemma about where to raise their future family

that prompted their move to Ireland.

I wanted to settle in California and my husband wanted to settle

in Miami.

And so we decided to compromise and go to Ireland.

Luckily, warm weather wasn't a must have for the couple.

It's changeable and you can have all four seasons in one day and

that's the nice thing about it.

You kind of get sick and tired of just sunshine.

I'm not sure about that.

But Galway Bay did prove a great place to start the business

that Cindy had long dreamed of.

I had always wanted to run an aquaculture farm,

from the age of about 17, 18 years old.

The interest for abalone came in when I was working in Miami.

I was in an experimental fish hatchery there and one of the

professors there was talking about abalone and I did more research

on it and that's where I decided that abalone was the one for me.

An abalone is a type of sea snail,

found mainly in cold waters around the world.

It's considered a delicacy in many countries,

particularly China and the Far East.

The abalone raw will have a very subtle taste,

more like the sea taste. Think of a mushroom.

When it's raw, you have a certain taste and when it's dried,

it has a much stronger flavour and it's the same with the abalone.

Aqua farms like Cindy's are springing up in places as diverse as

South Africa, Australia, and Iceland.

Whilst the demand for abalone has rocketed,

stocks in the wild have depleted.

If you're actually sustainable,

then you're helping the wild population come back.

And that's part of what we hope to achieve.

Cindy farms the abalone in 20 onshore tanks,

filled with Galway Bay seawater.

This is constantly filtered and cleaned,

providing the perfect environment for the creatures to grow and breed.

This is our hatchery,

so we will actually spawn the abalone in these buckets.

The abalone will release their eggs,

we get them to fertilise and we put them in egg trays.

That's a really good female. Her eggs are dark. You can see them.

This is the part that everyone loves doing - getting the abalone

to spawn and producing more abalone. It's like any farmer.

You want to see the new crop coming in.

They hatch from their eggs in under 24 hours and live on

a diet of micro algae, but as they grow, their diet changes.

These are the weanies and they've been weaned off micro algae,

on to the kelp.

This is what they're eating now.

Luckily, Cindy has a free supply of kelp right on her doorstep.

We actually collect it locally, it's good,

clean seaweed that we get, and that is all that our abalones are fed.

We normally get the seaweed at low tide.

So you just kind of depend on when low tide is, whether it's

eight o'clock in the morning or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Even with all this food, the creatures are slow growing.

They won't reach market size for another three to four years.

But once they do, there's a world of ways to eat them.

The Japanese often consume them raw, in sushi.

And in California, you can even find them on pizza toppings.

But today, Cindy is preparing a variety of abalone dishes

like pancakes.

It'll be an interesting way to introduce this unusual

ingredient to her daughter's friends.

The younger people are the ones that have a more adventurous palate.

It's amazing to see really young

kids who are willing to try anything.

It's really nice, yeah. It's like nice and moist. It's delicious.

It's very tasty. Absolutely.

I hadn't tried it before, so it was lovely.

All this exotic looking seafood has reminded me

of one of my favourite fishy dishes.

So I've invited a good friend of mine over to share it.

He's a chef who's brought his fair share of modern Italian

cooking to the UK -

Antonio Carluccio.

But today, I'm cooking up a taste of my travels from much further afield.

Singapore is where I got the inspiration for this tasty

chilli crab dish.

So I'm going to do some fresh brown crab,

which is just caught from about sort of 40 miles away, down the coast.

-You know the name in Italian?

-What's this?

-Granciporro.

-Granciporro.

-So, what got you into food in the first place?

-Greed!

-Greed!

Was it your parents? Were they cooks?

No, it was very funny because I was brought up in the sense that

we lived in a station, on the railway,

and my mother when I was child,

she was sending me into the office down there to see if the

train would depart on time,

in order to go up and say yes and she would put the pasta into the

water, so that when Papa was coming for the food, the pasta was perfect.

When you grow up like that, you know that food is important.

But what I discovered is that in cooking for somebody else, it

is a sort of sharing of a passion, but sharing of love as well.

And it's lovely to eat together with somebody else.

The meal we're going to share all starts with some finely

chopped ginger, garlic cloves, and red birdseye chillies.

Chuck them in to hot oil and then add the tops of some spring onions.

-We saute this off, like that.

-Lovely.

So you just get them nice and soft, really.

And then I use this tomato sauce, you can use tomato ketchup as well

in there and we use, I don't know, about 150...

But it's a very dark sauce.

-With some...

-It's home-made ketchup.

-Aha!

And then we use a combination of this sweet chilli sauce,

-which I love...

-Yes.

-About 75ml.

-Wonderful.

-I can already imagine the taste of the crab in that sauce.

-Delicious.

First time I came across this was in Singapore in

-a restaurant that was called Crab Under The Bridge.

-Wow!

Before you even got served,

you just put this bib on at this massive bowl of crab arrives

and you can't understand why this bib's here, but you can after

about five minutes cos you're just caked in it, all round your face.

Wonderful!

The key to making a proper mess is the sauce.

For this, add about 75ml of hoisin,

a tablespoon of fish sauce and the juice of a fresh lime.

Now, you need to sweeten this up a touch,

-so we're just going to add a little bit of sugar to this.

-Yep.

That looks very inviting. My goodness!

-It looks all right, doesn't it?

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

I know that people, they don't like it,

but me, I put my little finger in there.

If you do that, I'm going to do it as well.

Mm!

When the sauce has reduced, set one-third of it aside.

Then toss the cooked crab in the remaining two-thirds,

making sure you coat it thoroughly.

-Oh, that's...

-You see?

You know, it's a pleasure from time to time to see that the food

is treated properly.

Not really just, you know... Ah!

I think that's a happy noise,

so I'm going to let that simmer away for about five minutes.

Then combine the remaining sauce with some boiled egg noodles

and the rest of the spring onions.

Finally, add some chopped mint and coriander.

I always try to maintain the classic Italian approach to that,

which first of all is the way it tastes.

-Yeah.

-It never look before taste.

In fact, we have products in Italy called Brutti Ma Buoni,

which means ugly but good.

Ugly but... I like that name! What's that called?

Brutti Ma Buoni.

And it could be anything, even biscuits, you know,

that they look horrible but they taste fantastic.

Well, that doesn't look too bad to me.

It also tastes fantastic and smells divine.

A Far Eastern assault on the senses.

My goodness! Ah!

I can already see me enjoying it a lot. Look at that.

-Shall we eat this, then?

-Oh, yes!

-Come on, then!

-Oh, yes! Oh, yes!

I'll take this one, yes?

-Mm.

-Ah!

This is the key to this dish.

Mm.

Oh, the sauce is wonderful.

-You like it?

-Yeah.

I will make it.

Chin-chin.

-Good health!

-Oh, lovely!

There really is nothing better than finding culinary inspiration

on your travels, then cooking some delicious dishes for your

friends and family when you get home.

You can find all the recipes from the entire series on:

I'll tell you a little secret, there's a little place in

Hampshire that if you ever want Singapore chilli crab...

-In Hampshire?

-Yeah. Give me a ring and I'll cook it here!

THEY LAUGH