Episode 88 Saturday Kitchen Best Bites

Good morning!

It's time to get your taste buds tingling,

because we've got some great cooking coming up on today's Best Bites.

Welcome to the show.

We've got some amazing chefs and ravenous celebrity guests

for you this morning, including Footballer's Wife turned

EastEnder Zoe Lucker and '80s singing sensation Nik Kershaw.

And Sat Bains brings pork to the table.

He slow cooks it before frying it off with a teriyaki glaze

and serving it with piccalilli

and some delicious cubes of salted apple.

Allegra McEvedy bakes monkfish with fragrant couscous.

She flavours it with coriander, onions, tomatoes,

and preserved lemons, and bakes it all in a tinfoil bag,

and serves it with a radish, cucumber, and yoghurt salad.

The wok-meister, Ken Hom, stir-fries fillet of beef.

He cuts it into strips, then serves it with onions

and mint, as well as some delicious spicy noodles.

And Nik Kershaw faces Food Heaven or Food Hell.

Will he get Food Heaven?

Duck, that pan-roasted duck, with home-made ginger chutney,

asparagus, and Tenderstem broccoli.

Or will he get his dreaded Food Hell, squid?

He could be eating crispy breadcrumbed squid with

a creamy ponzu dressing and Chinese leaf salad.

Find out what he gets to eat at the end of the show.

But first, one of the finest Italian chefs in the world is

Francesco Mazzei.

And he shares with this a taste of his childhood.

-Great to have you.

-Ciao. How are you?

-Very good.

Now, something from your childhood here.

Yeah, I've got this spicy chicken Calabrese,

something that your mum will cook for you. Because of this beautiful

-stuff called 'Nduja.

-'Nduja?

Now, they have similar to this in Ibiza, don't they?

In Spain, they call it Sobrasada,

but we don't use any smoked paprika in Calabria, as they do.

-And this one is really spicy stuff.

-Who makes the best? The Italians?

-Of course the Italians!

-All right.

-Do you want me to chop the veg?

-Chop the veg for me, thank you.

Now, you just take the bones out of these little thighs.

Yeah, take the bones out, and of course, please, always use chicken

thighs because they are much more juicy and succulent when you cook it.

So, I've got this very hot pan here, I'm going to put some olive oil

and I'm going to sear these beautiful chicken thighs.

Now, this dish itself, your restaurant...

It's not changing, but you're adding to it by this cafe.

Is this one of the sort of...?

Yes, I'm working at the moment on opening my cafe,

and basically I want to do, I want to be able, for these times to

sell a great pasta dish, great pizza, at a very reasonable price.

So that is what the cafe will be.

And being in the City of London, it looks like there is a market for it.

This is at the back of your restaurant?

It's the back of my restaurant, yeah. Going to wash my hands, one sec.

OK, so the back of the restaurant is going to go all day

and we'll try to do some deliveries.

Another great thing I'm going to do in September,

to which you guys are all invited,

I'm doing a promotion with Davide Oldani, which is

a great chef from the North,

so we love this kind of North-South Italian cooking in London.

-Is he the two-star Michelin chef from Italy?

-It is, exactly, exactly.

He is a great, great, great man.

So we love, you know, a medley between the north and south of Italy.

Now, you've got, this is Calabria, this dish.

-This kind of dish is Calabrian, that's why Calabrese...

-Why is that?

Is that the ingredients, or the style of cooking?

It's mainly the ingredients, because people usually do not

-associate Italian cooking with spicy food.

-Right.

Calabria, Calabrian food is very, very spicy,

so, that's why 'Nduja, that's why the chillies, and all the rest.

OK, we're going to sweat the onion, the shallots,

with a little bit more olive oil.

And then I'm going to add this beautiful stuff, 'Nduja,

which you will basically melt.

Now, tell us about this 'Nduja, because I've had in Spain.

-It's a spreadable salami, isn't it?

-It's a spreadable salami.

It's very versatile, and it's great for...

Just to show you, see, look, you can squeeze it.

You can squeeze it.

Pizza margarita, all right?

A few flops of this on top, in the oven, it melts.

And it feeds the pasta, I mean, the pizza dough.

-So, you could just have that on some toast?

-Yeah.

The way I eat, you can't believe.

If I get home late, after service, I'll have a glass of red wine,

I put a nice loaf of sourdough on the toaster,

and then I spread 'Nduja on top.

It's great to, you know, if you do a small, simple tomato sauce,

just put a spoon of it in, it makes it kind of melt.

And then, you dress your pasta with a lot of basil. Right.

The 'Nduja is here, the shallots are here, and we'll add some peppers now.

OK, they're going to just sweat a bit. A little bit more salt again.

Lovely, lovely, the smell.

It's got this kind of aromatic stuff, because there is inside 70% fat

but there is also fennel seeds, and a bit of offal as well.

-So, chicken back in. Some peppers, thank you.

-Put some green ones in.

Yeah.

See? Nice, lovely. It's a bit like... You know, a lovely stew, but spicy.

-Oregano?

-Are you using dried oregano?

-Yeah, dried oregano.

The real ones, they get it fresh, and put it upside down,

and they let it dry, really. Look at that. Nice, lovely colour.

This is where you get the spice. These chillies.

Chilli, but also 'Nduja. The 'Nduja is very spicy as well.

So, I've got this chicken here now,

peppers, shallots, I'm going to add a little bit more

beautiful stuff, which is marjoram, I love it.

It gives the kind of... Sweet taste to these already pungent ingredients.

-Now, you want me to pass the potatoes?

-Yes, please.

I'm going to do something, James, that will

probably change your life.

-What do you think, Paul?

-Don't do it! Don't do it.

He's not going to come to the show any more.

I can't believe, when I read the recipe for this,

you're actually going to do this

-with mashed potato.

-I keep it secret until the last minute.

I mean, I forgive you for putting olive oil in mashed potato,

but I can't forgive you for doing this next bit.

Right, this one is going to go in the oven for about 20, 25 minutes, OK?

Until nice and tender and, as I said,

the chicken thighs keep the moisture inside, so it's nice.

Right, in the oven.

Is this...? Your version of this dish, or is this kind of exactly...

It's a kind of version of the dish, the one Mama does is a bit...

..Thank you very much.

It's kind of rustic, the way Mama does, and to be honest with you,

she uses only dried peppers, dried chillies, really nice.

It's a bit like when you leave your chicken on a hotpot

in a Chinese restaurant, with all of the stuff.

Fantastic stuff.

Now, what we're going to do here,

I'm going to add some fantastic olive oil.

You believe or not.

It's not because I want to use it, but we finished all the butter.

So, this is where it all goes wrong. What are you doing now?

-Look.

-You're putting veg stock in a potato.

You should try this with grilled fish, oily fish. Fantastic.

-Or salmon.

-You might need to put some herbs in, dill...

I think James is about to have a heart attack.

-Just at the thought of stock instead of butter.

-Yeah.

Honestly, it's really, really good with fish and stuff, or if you

-do like a simple grilled shrimps or langoustine, it will do well.

-Really?

-We can put butter in if you want.

-OK.

-No, no, leave it.

All right, OK. So, lovely.

I'm going to taste it now and then we're going to serve the dish.

-A bit more salt.

-You just stopped my hand going in...

-Yeah. OK, so.

A lovely olive oil mash on the bed of the plate.

Not too much, but you know. You can have as much as you like.

And... A bit more.

Chop a little bit of herbs to add to the chicken,

give us a bit of freshness.

So, the herbs you've got are some chives and some parsley, yeah?

Chives and parsley inside, and I put some marjoram

and dried oregano before, so they have a chance to release flavour.

Now, you mention this would be a dish that you'd serve at

the restaurant, at the back of your place, more of a cafe.

To be honest with you, this one is going now,

because what I'm doing, of course we charge little money

because of the chicken thighs, but what we do is we try,

we taste some of the dish, and we give some to our guests,

and we had a very special guest last night,

having dinner, in my restaurant,

-called Paul Rankin. Have you ever heard of him?

-Yes.

So, we cooked this one for him.

-He doesn't eat much though, have you seen him?

-I do!

It was funny, he nearly killed us with kindness.

So much food that my guests were going, "We can't eat any more,"

-and I said, "You have to eat it, you have to."

-There's nothing on him.

Stood up, he looks like a Twiglet.

All right, OK. We've got this very nice and simple dish,

and just to make it look pretty, make James upset a bit more...

-Your mum didn't do that though, did she?

-Some more.

-Yes, she does all the time.

-Does she?

And we've got this. There we go, guys.

-We've got spicy chicken Calabrese with olive oil mash.

-Easy as that.

-That's what it is. There we go. You get to dive into this one.

-Wow.

-The food just keeps coming, you see.

-Brunch, this is, isn't it?

-I have eaten this.

-That looks really healthy, actually, doesn't it?

That was really healthy.

So, we've gone from the sticky toffee pudding...

-This show could transform James's life.

-What d'you mean?

You know, we had the beautiful, healthy, salmon dish.

And then we had the beautiful, healthy,

rustic chicken dish with the beautiful vegetable and stock mash.

-Actually, the mash is gorgeous.

-Is it?

-Yeah. Just so you know.

Needs butter, but that's about it.

I can't believe we didn't re-edit that to include butter in the mash.

Coming up, I'll be making red wine

and macaroon chocolate mousse for Zoe Lucker, but first,

Rick Stein takes inspiration from a rural fishing lodge in Ireland.

20 miles out of Cork is Ballymaloe House, filled with peat fires

and wellies and children.

Here, food's the thing, inspired by Myrtle Allen.

How do you see future of Irish cooking shaping up, then?

Well, and I'm worried about it, because I'm worried about the future

of Irish materials, the same as everybody else.

I mean, the raw materials.

Because, now, people are not thinking about flavour at all

or the sort of goodness of food.

It has to be cheap, it's got to be safe.

Cheap and safe, and that is all anybody wants.

-And that's not good.

-I mean, take carrageen.

It's got a very subtle flavour.

It's a seaweed which grows in profusion around here,

and Myrtle makes a brilliant pudding.

But it's a bit stiff and prickly to start with,

so it has to be soaked in cold water first.

Then it's added to milk and brought to simmering point

and as the milk simmers, so the carrageen thickens the milk.

We had lunch together and she insisted on preparing a turbot.

First of all, she cut around the outside of the top of the turbot.

This was to free up the skin when it was cooked.

She seasoned it with pepper and a little salt.

Then she prepared a roasting tray into which she'd put some water,

not much, but enough to keep the flesh moist

while she baked in the oven for about 35 minutes.

With the turbot on the go,

Myrtle went back to finishing the seaweed pudding.

The milk was now thick and she passed it through

a sieve into a bowl underneath,

scraping off as much of that thick carrageen jelly as she could.

Then, she whisked it all together,

and added about half a cupful of vanilla essence.

Next, in went about four ounces caster sugar.

And then, a single egg yolk.

Myrtle told me, when she was little girl,

carrageen pudding was eaten as a cure for coughs and colds.

Finally, some egg white.

She whisked that into soft peaks and folded it into the pudding.

It reminds me of junket. We used to have that as kids.

Everybody just eats yoghurt now.

She chilled it for a couple of hours and that really thickened it up.

It had a lovely consistency and a definite taste of the sea.

And then she served it on a lovely, damp, warm,

Irish afternoon in the garden.

She added soft brown sugar, which I loved with it,

and a spoonful of stewed gooseberries from her garden and a little cream.

Just a matter of common sense.

But as Myrtle always says,

"Common sense isn't that common any more."

I don't think people are half careful enough of the fish.

There's really... It's a sin to waste fish.

In fact, I hate promoting fish, it's a terrible thing to tell you!

The fewer people that eat fish, the better.

I hate it when the doctors say it's good for you.

Because everybody will just eat too much fish

and it'll be gone, the wild fish.

They should say, "Just eat a little, it's special."

It's so satisfying to see that skin removed so effortlessly,

and showing the lovely flakes underneath.

And then it's just chopped herbs, chives, parsley, thyme,

and some melted butter, to pour over the turbot.

Myrtle has just been made an honorary doctor. She deserves it.

No-one has been more influential in reminding people

the joy of local ingredients and the simple cooking of them.

This is Cobh Island, a few miles south of Cork. Once upon a time,

the big transatlantic liners used to come here on their way to America.

It's now home to a fellow seafood lover and a good friend of mine,

Frank Headiman.

Last time I was over here, I had these wonderful smoked eels,

eaten hot from the smokehouse.

It's one of those gastronomic memories that stay with you always.

You just get a lovely layer of fat...

just under the skin, you can see it.

This is all flavour, this is all just absolutely lovely.

-And slice across the surface of the fish...

-Oh! Gosh, it's good.

I've just got to say this.

I think there's a sort of top ten of world-class delicacies.

I mean, this has got to be one of them,

along with things like Tuscan virgin olive oil

and the ham from those black pigs in Spain, Iberico ham, and caviar.

It's just got that sort of tingling taste. When you taste it,

you just think, this is the sort of thing I'm looking for wherever I go.

Smoked salmon is so varied. It ranges from the dreadful stuff

that's got the taste and consistency of soap

and has never seen the inside of the smokehouse in its life, to this.

Sides of wild, prime quality salmon,

gently absorbing the smoke from beech shavings, over an 18-hour period.

I had worked out that it was just keeping the fish in an area

and filling that area with smoke.

So, there wasn't an awful lot that could go wrong with it.

And when I took it out and tasted it, I thought,

"I have something here."

And it's probably been the only thing I've ever got right

in my life consistently. So, I get a great buzz out of this.

You are making something.

You are taking a raw material and making a finished product,

and I find that very personally fulfilling.

We have this wonderful raw material here in Ireland,

absolutely outstanding raw material,

and we must get that into the niche markets.

We mustn't be sending it out live to be processed elsewhere, sending out

fish on ice, sending cattle out on the hoof, we must add value here.

We're not making nuts and bolts here.

This is beautiful, wild, Irish smoked salmon.

Same with the wild Irish eel and the wild Irish mussels.

Smoke those products as well.

And creating markets for them.

That's a great buzz, that's a great drive.

And getting people to understand that Irish food

is like Swiss engineering,

it's like French wine. That's our raw material,

that's our product, and that's what we should be selling.

It's really good to meet someone who feels as passionately

about the quality of fish as I do.

We talked for ages about seafood and we went from pub to pub,

all the time rattling on about fishing, and way fish are caught,

and what we can do to try and conserve them.

Ireland's a good place to talk about these things.

I travelled up north, miles in fact, to Connemara, to see

an old friend of mine, Peter Mantle, who's made his dream come true

at his now-famous fishing lodge at Delphi.

The Delphi Valley is one of the last sort of unspoilt

valleys in the whole of Ireland.

Above the house, in 20 square miles,

there are only five human beings living.

It's as close to raw nature as you're going to get anywhere.

The sea trout are in serious decline.

And Peter blames the intensity of salmon farming.

Well, basically, this proliferation of sea lice, this natural

parasite of salmon and sea trout, the population of which has just

exploded since the arrival of these farmed salmon in our estuary...

It's the sea lice that are eating the young sea trout alive

when they go down into the estuary to become a sea fish for the first time in the spring.

So, it was very, very depressing, we very nearly went bankrupt

in '89 and '90 and '91.

And the only way we've been able to survive, ironically,

is by breeding more salmon in our hatchery in order to try

and compensate for the missing sea trout.

Well, I can't stand any more of this depression, Peter.

Just tell me, I mean, it's lovely fishing and it's a beautiful place,

just tell me how much you love Delphi Lodge and the fishing.

Well, I obviously really do,

I mean, I've chucked out my career to come and do this.

My father thinks it's a minor form of lunacy.

But, if you're mad about fishing, as I am, then you're mad about it.

There's no half measures.

There's nothing nicer to me than a little finnoch,

a half or three-quarter pound sea trout, wrapped in a bit of bacon

and stuffed with a bit of butter in the frying pan for breakfast.

I mean, wonderful. And we used to catch them by the dozen!

Literally.

Well, this is sea trout, and it has a lovely, silvery skin,

just like salmon.

And it's sort of halfway in flavour between salmon and trout.

But, sadly, 15 years ago, this sort of time of year,

in early June,

they would be running up the estuary in their thousands.

And fishermen would be coming in the back door by the bucket load.

They carried buckets in those days.

But, I haven't had a single one this season. This is a farmed sea trout.

I mean, if I had a fresh one, I'd probably just grill it

and serve it with little green sauce, sauce vert.

But the recipe I'm going to do here really suits a farmed fish like this.

It's a red wine sauce,

and I'm going to use some prawns to flavour the red wine sauce.

I'm using shell-on prawns,

because I want the shells to add extra flavour,

so don't buy those peeled ones, these have got much more flavour.

I'm just going to peel a few of these, and then get on to my sauce.

Now, it does take a bit of time, this sauce, but it's well worth making.

You melt some butter in a saucepan, and you add the prawn shells,

and stir them around a bit.

As I said, there's lots of flavour in them.

Next, you add a mirapoix of onions, carrots and celery all chopped up.

Now some porcini or cep mushrooms.

They've got lots of flavour

and you can get them even in supermarkets now.

They're excellent in sauces, the dried ones. A good pinch of chilli.

I like chilli in my red wine sauces just for a subtle background heat.

And star anise.

I got the idea for this from one of Marco Pierre White's recipes.

I add some balsamic vinegar. There's two reasons for putting this in.

First of all, to give a little tartness to this sauce,

but also I'm looking for colour, just to make that red wine colour deeper.

So then, the red wine. About a pint or so.

This might seem absurdly extravagant,

but it's not because I'm looking for that intensity of flavour.

Lastly, about a pint of chicken stock.

And now the reduction and this is so important.

You have to reduce the volume right down to almost nothing.

So that's come down very nicely. Look how dark that is.

It's just fantastic, comparing it with what it was like before.

I'm just going to empty that through this sieve,

which has got a saucepan underneath.

But I'm also going to force as much juice as I can through the sieve with

the back of a ladle cos I don't want to waste a thing

when you think about all the wine that went in there.

Plus those expensive mushrooms and the vinegar and everything else.

Just push as much as I can through.

That's fine. Let's have a look at the sauce underneath.

Well, I wouldn't say it was the most photogenic looking sauce, but it

reminds me, looking into that deep pan, like being on Bodmin Moor

in the dead of night, looking into a sea trout pool.

Anyway, talking of sea trout, let's go on and cook some,

bake it in the oven.

First, you brush the fillets with melted butter

and season very lightly with salt on the cut side.

Sea trout's also called salmon trout because it follows the same

migratory pattern as salmon and also eats prawns out at sea.

Hence its pink colour.

Fold those fillets over and put in a nice ovenproof dish

and season on the outside as well.

Then cover with foil and bake in a hot oven for 20 minutes.

I know I said the sauce was complicated,

but I always believe that cooking a fish should be very simple.

Just heat and seasoning.

Don't lose those juices. They add so much to the sauce.

Now, sprinkle the prawns over the fillets of fish and keep them

warm somewhere while you finish off. Whisk in some chilled butter.

Now, this enriches the sauce, thickens it

and gives it a nice shine.

The French, of course, have a word for this.

It's called monte au beurre.

Now all you need to do is season with a little salt and lemon juice,

a final whisk and it's done.

And now pour right over the prawns and those lovely fillets of fish.

And add a sprinkling of parsley.

Farmed fish really does have its moment.

No, I wouldn't cook this with wild sea trout,

but it's so good with these fillets.

Great stuff from Rick, as always.

You can make lots of great savoury sauces with red wine.

Not only for fish, but you can use them desserts too.

I'm going to show you one right now that goes really well with

one other ingredient, actually two ingredients.

You've got red wine over here. I'm using St Emilion, there is a reason.

Over in St Emilion, which is on the top of a hill, it's a

famous area of France, famous for very good wine,

they have a bakery in the square that sells macaroons.

Some people say "macaron", some "macaroon".

Some say they are macaron before they're glued together,

then they're macaroons. I don't know. I don't care.

But I can't believe a Yorkshireman's gone out to a shop beginning

with H, a very famous one, and bought these yesterday - 20 quid!

-Look at that, for 12!

-No!

-Yeah.

We're going to use these to make a chocolate mousse.

This is dark chocolate.

Dark chocolate and red wine work fantastically together.

Chocolate mousse is chocolate, cream and egg white.

You can do a chocolate ganache, which is

those two ingredients, you end up with chocolate truffles,

this is going to be a chocolate mousse,

so I'm going to put egg whites in as well.

You're not a great fan of puddings.

I love puddings, but I tend to try and stay away from them really.

And I'm about to put three tonne of cream in!

I love puddings, but once I start eating them

and I get into that thing, that's it, I'm off!

-A Yorkshire lass.

-Yeah.

-How did you get into acting, then?

-Usual.

I went to drama school, so I went to sixth form, then drama school

and then got an agent and went from there really.

Got an agent,

but it was quite a while before you had your big...step...and

move forward when you got Footballers' Wives,

-which was massive at the time.

-Yeah.

It took a long time and there was a lot of rejection,

-as there is with any acting.

-A lot of waiting tables, that kind of stuff.

Absolutely. Leaflet dropping. Cleaning, stuff like that.

And then I was just about to...

My father and I were sitting down one day and I decided that at some

point, I'd have to accept that maybe it just wasn't going to work out.

I was going to apply to go to teacher training college to teach infants,

which would have been a job that I would have loved as well.

And then, literally, within about a week,

I got a call and went for the audition and got

the job in Footballers' Wives, so it turned round really quickly.

It went crazy.

-Footballers' Wives, great show, I have to say, but it went mad.

-Yeah.

The first series went a bit crazy for you.

Yeah, I think it was one of those things that it could have gone

-one way or the other.

-Just going to whip this up. We can still hear you!

We knew that it had all the right ingredients, as it were,

but you never know how people are going to receive it.

But they received it the way that we'd hoped

and so it went off and now it's in loads of different countries,

so people are really enjoying it.

The great thing for you, not only just doing that,

that finishes, you had a feisty character in that, and you go

straight into Bad Girls, which is the same production company.

Yeah, it was the same production company and Brian Park,

the executive producer of Shed.

Go on, I'm just making a bit of noise.

He basically came up with a storyline which meant that my character

got arrested for having possession of too much cocaine and then

I got sent to prison and then arrived in Bad Girls, which was great.

It was the first time that had happened.

It was a really interesting idea.

Again, we didn't know whether that was going to work,

but it did and that was brilliant as well. I was really lucky.

Those five years' work were fab, really enjoyed it.

-And from there, Holby Blue.

-Yes.

I think after I'd done Footballers' Wives, I wanted to

kind of maybe move away from playing that kind of character.

When you're younger, you always think that you want to be able to

play loads of different types of characters and not get typecast.

And so I went off and did a lot of travelling,

I did some presenting, did all sorts of different stuff,

and then played the character in Holby Blue, which was completely the

opposite to the one in Footballers' and that was great as well.

Did two years of that and then met my Jim, got pregnant and had a baby.

And then it suddenly just goes nuts for you again because you've been a

fan of this show that you've been in now, most people have, EastEnders.

That must have been a fantastic phone call when you got that.

Yeah, definitely.

I remember watching the first episode of EastEnders

-and I was a massive Angie Watts and Den fan.

-Dirty Den!

-Oh, yeah!

So, on and off, I've watched it since it started.

Yeah, getting that phone call was quite something, it really was.

It's fair to say that all the characters that you've played,

they've not been Shakespeare, they've been...

I don't know what you mean(!)

They've been pretty hard-hitting, very feisty characters.

Is that something that you look for when you're looking for a part

or is that just what you've been cast anyway?

When I took on the role in Holby Blue, I did that on purpose

because it was a contrast to playing that kind of character,

which really was the main character that I played.

But then I've done a bit of a loop really,

so I pulled away from all that

and now I find myself being drawn back into playing that kind of role.

-I just love it.

-Love it. Right, just got to quickly run through this.

This is how to make a quick chocolate mousse.

You can either add the chocolate to that, that to that, whatever,

but the idea is you allow this to cool down slightly

and we add the chocolate to your cream.

This is melted chocolate. You can experiment with different flavours.

Add a little butter as well.

Keeping the whisked egg whites, what I do is whisk it with a whisk first

and it starts to come together and then quickly, I add my egg whites.

The reason why I do this is cos it

actually folds in together much quicker.

And we fold that in like that. And that is a chocolate mousse done.

Serve it in a glass, open a restaurant, eight quid!

But nice and simple and the idea is you just keep it nice and light.

If you want it lighter, you can put more whipped egg whites in there.

That's the idea for that.

I've got these little biscuits, these tuiles in the oven,

which are the ingredients we've got there - flour, icing sugar, butter

and egg white, make a biscuit, which I'm going to take out.

When you're going to be on EastEnders,

is it going to be a long contract? It's difficult to tell us.

-Your storyline is obviously going to progress.

-Yeah.

Is it something that's going to go on for a long time?

-You mentioned the fact that typecasting...

-Sure.

Initially, it was seven episodes and then I did those

and then they asked if I'd go back and do another three months.

So at the moment, that's where I'm at.

Yeah, and the storylines are developing and we're starting to see

much more of the character over the next few weeks, but it's

exciting and interesting and I love being part of that whole institution.

It's a brilliant place to work and they're all amazing people.

-Really lucky.

-Absolutely.

I'm just going to show you these little biscuits.

You can take two peppermills, while these biscuits are still warm,

and the idea is you just fold them over the...

While they're warm, they're supple. So you can lift them up.

You can twist them into all different shapes.

But as they cool down, they go solid.

The idea is we've got our chocolate mousse there, the macaroons, the red wine underneath, we've got

a little bit of white chocolate, which we can grate over the top.

You can serve it like that, cherries on the top,

that kind of stuff, but the idea is with this little tuile,

you see it's firmed up, you can

get a bit of icing sugar or cocoa powder over the top.

It just adds a little bit of biscuit to it.

Oh, that's pretty, isn't it?

Oops!

-Oh, no!

-That's only a fiver now! Look at that!

-There you go.

-Wow!

-There you go. Dive into that.

-Thank you.

-Tell me what you think.

It's nice and simple.

That's done literally in five minutes, it's easy.

-It's very chocolate-y!

-That is gorgeous.

I'm so glad she likes her desserts and if you'd like to have a go at

making that chocolate mousse or try your hand at any of the

recipes from today's show, they're only a click away on our website -

bbc.co.uk/recipes.

We're not live today, so instead we're looking back at some

of the classic recipes from the Saturday Kitchen back catalogue.

Next up is Sat Bains.

He's serving up pork that's from a pig

that's fed on smoky bacon crisps.

Yes, you heard it right. Smoky bacon crisps. Tastes good though.

-Now, on the menu today is what, Sat?

-We're going to do belly pork.

It's from a village near Nottingham, near Wellow.

It's about six miles away from the restaurant.

And one of the diets used is crisps. Smoky bacon crisps, in particular.

-And as you can see, it gives it a lovely fat.

-Look at that!

-I haven't seen pork belly like that for a long time.

-It's incredible.

We're going to get some salt.

And this is with a piccalilli which I'm going to be doing now.

Piccalilli is something quite British.

I've also got some teriyaki to put the balance of the two

different...acidity... sweet and sour.

-That needs salting for 24 hours.

-So piccalilli is vinegar, some chilli.

-Some veg, some cauliflower.

-Heated up.

This is going to be what it looks like after around 24 hours

and it's osmosis, it draws the moisture out.

-Osmosis.

-So it's a lot firmer.

I haven't heard that since I was in geography class. With a nettle.

-So I'm going to wash my hands.

-Osmosis.

So basically, we've got the vinegar, two different types of vinegar

and then we've got the chilli, brought to the boil,

and then this is a mixture of turmeric, mustard.

It's all going to go in there.

Again, it's an Asian influence from when the Raj, you know,

the British ruled India.

-Yeah.

-And what we've got here is the teriyaki.

I've got soy, mirin, a little sesame and honey

and we're going to make a glaze out of that, so you can reduce that down.

-Another country you're putting in!

-Yes.

Being Asian myself, in terms of my heritage, I thought it would

be a nice little twist.

But again, the dishes we use at the restaurant at the moment

are all British, so what I've got here is the actual pork.

I've poached it in a vacuum.

You can do it in a pressure cooker, takes about an hour.

Or you can do it in the oven, a little bit of stock.

You just braise it, bit of foil, about 110 degrees,

takes about four or five hours.

-Pressure cookers are great for cooking pork belly.

-Incredible.

You take them out and then you roast them again.

The secret is once it's cooked, press it.

I've got some apple balsamic, which I'm going to get on in a minute,

but I'm just going to get a nice fatty piece, just a little slice.

-A northern slice, should I say? Look at that.

-That's that bit, mate!

-A northern slice!

-And again, you don't

need any fat for this cos there's enough here to render it down.

How long's that been in the fridge for?

-That's been pressing for around 24 hours.

-Right.

You can do it for a minimum of about four,

but you want to get that really compact.

In here, I'm going to get some apple balsamic. This is from Suffolk.

They use Suffolk apples when they're in season and make a lovely balsamic.

-It's a lovely flavour.

-You can use it for dressing as well.

-Yeah.

-Pork, apple, classic combination.

-Of course, yes.

So we've got the onions and the cauliflower, which of course

is in piccalilli, together with some cucumber and you salt this.

So chop everything up and then just drizzle it with some rock salt,

or rather some sea salt,

and then just leave that for a good hour or two,

drain it off and then we make a sauce out of that,

-add it to it and that's piccalilli.

-This pork again, the beauty of it,

we've used it in the restaurant for about four years,

and Johnny, our butcher, who is based in Mansfield Road, in Sherwood,

this is the pork we use for our bacon as well.

So you imagine the bacon being lovely pieces of streaky bacon,

no moisture comes out. So when you cook it, it just goes crispy.

-Fantastic.

-Beautiful.

-Look at that caramelisation.

A little bit of fat's rendering,

but you're going to get this lovely caramelisation.

We'll do all four sides and then start basting it with this reduction of teriyaki.

Just go through that. That's your salted vegetables there.

And what you need to do is just wash them off when they're soft.

You just rinse them through.

Congratulations, the Good Food Guide. You're...third?

We were blown away, yeah.

We were sixth last year and then this year, we hit number three.

And they gave us nine out of ten, so quite an achievement.

-Very proud of the team. They work very hard.

-Fantastic.

Yeah, the pressure's on now.

I'd prefer if they had given me a seven!

-A chef's life. Pressure is our life.

-That's true.

-And your ethos is still, local produce with a twist.

-Yeah.

We use influences from all over the world, but we use British produce.

That's really important, to celebrate.

But the techniques that you have in cooking are very, you know,

you were one of the first really, I suppose,

of UK chefs to really start that cooking, would that be right?

-And Heston?

-No, I'd say Heston was without a doubt.

But we're trying to learn our craft

and using different techniques to enhance the flavour.

-We don't want to overpower. You still want to taste pork.

-Yeah.

I think what you're going to taste today is the true

Nottinghamshire pork with a beautiful acidic piccalilli

and something that's very fresh, little florets of caulie

and apple that's really acidic.

-Right.

-So that's getting nice and caramelised, as you can see.

As well as the restaurant, you're busy doing a lot of these

-festivals cos they're all over the place.

-Yeah.

Particularly all over the world.

We were in San Francisco a few weeks ago with Claude Bosi, as you know.

But this piccalilli made me think of him cos it would have gone

really well with his pork pie before he turned it into a sauce.

The pork pie, he blitzed it into a sauce!

Quite weird. I've never seen that done before but it tasted delicious.

So I'm just going to take some of this fat off cos I'm going to

start glazing the actual pork now.

And all you do, you tip this on, now it's reduced a bit.

So this is the process of teriyaki.

Glazing it and glazing it as it's reducing. Look at that.

It gets golden.

Yeah.

-So we just need to blend the piccalilli.

-Yeah.

So the idea is, we've got the sauce boiling.

If you wanted to make a piccalilli,

what you would do with this is you would take...just pour

the sauce over the top of the veg and leave it just in a container.

Leave it in a container, anything up to three months.

What happens is you end up with this lovely store cupboard ingredient.

Keep it in the fridge though, and any time you've got a pork pie,

anything like that, a sausage stew, add some on the side, it's fantastic.

-Yeah.

-So we're just getting this apple, cut it into little dice,

it's going to be served with salt and the idea is we're going to get

this lovely salty apple, which goes again really well with the pork.

Now that teriyaki that you've done there,

if anybody wanted any chicken, fish, you do it exactly the same way.

Exactly the same.

Again, you only want to finish it cos the pan's very hot,

so it's about creating a nice little glaze.

Yeah.

So the idea is we blend all this piccalilli now.

And then when you've got it blended, pass it through a sieve

and we end up with this sort of smooth sauce at the end of it.

It's as easy as that. Like magic.

So that's perfectly glazed now for me.

-Yeah.

-If you look at that, it's really rich.

And what we've got here is Johnny, our butcher, does some sonka,

which is a Hungarian air-dried ham, which is

very nice smoked. We're using a bit of, er, pancetta, sorry, er...

-Parma ham.

-Parma ham.

-Thank you, I'm glad you're here.

-Yes!

-THEY LAUGH I couldn't remember it.

-Parma ham.

-Parma ham.

All you do, you slice it and what it does, it gives a lovely contrast,

you roll it in the actual ham. You've got two different textures and notes.

You said particularly, this pork is...it's the way that it's fed as well.

Without a doubt.

You see the layer of fat on there and that's where flavour is.

-But you mentioned crisps.

-Yeah!

I went there to have a look and there was a van turned up with

a sign of a crisp factory and I said, "What's that for?"

Basically all the broken crisps are fed as part of the diet

and that's what gives it that lovely saturated fat,

to give it that level of fat to the pork.

Now people will think smoky bacon but it's actually...

-It's a flavouring, a natural flavouring.

-It's a natural flavouring.

-I thought the same, but yeah.

-Yeah. There you go.

It's part of the diet of the pigs, of course they will eat that.

They eat natural food, it's fantastic, and I've seen them.

They absolutely look beautiful.

We just need some little florets of cauliflower.

-Don't you mix it. Oh, fantastic.

-Done.

We just sort of dress it, again, piccalilli, you want quite a bit

because you want to make sure you get the balance of the two.

The balsamic is going to end up being reduced and what I've done,

-I've got some done already which is reduced and chilled.

-Yeah.

Because you want it like a nice syrup.

You put the pork on.

Do you want the apple dressing, a bit of olive oil?

-Just a bit of salt and olive oil. I've got salt.

-There you go.

There you go.

Again, if you think about it, when you're eating it you want a bit

of everything, so you just want it dressed, just scatter it all around.

The apple for me is what makes it. It's quite acidic.

-It's Granny Smiths.

-Yeah.

You just want a few pieces of the apple.

You just put some of the apple balsamic.

Nice.

Finish it with cumin, and again, when the cumin hits the heat,

it releases its flavour and again, not too poncey.

You just throw some coriander over it.

So remind us what that is again?

-So belly pork with piccalilli.

-That's the reason why

he's the third best restaurant in the UK.

SAT LAUGHS

Absolutely brilliant. Well, you get to dive into this and have a taste.

-It looks beautiful, I have to say.

-Wow.

-There you go.

-Ten out of ten for presentation.

-There you go, dive in.

-Very good.

That little bit of cumin at the end, that's just the powdered cumin?

Just a bit of spice, yeah. It lifts the piccalilli.

-Is this one of your most popular dishes?

-It will be now.

-Yeah.

THEY LAUGH

I'll order some more pork! Trying to get some pork!

-Mm.

-You put this on at lunch, or an evening?

We do it at dinner. The tasting menu.

-But then that's the big portion, we normally just do one piece.

-Yeah.

-As part of a...

-A ten-course menu.

-A ten-course menu, there you go. Happy with that?

-Mm. That's lovely.

-Really.

-Something you'd attempt to do at home?

-Er...

-Maybe not.

I'm all right, if I have a really good recipe book which takes

you through step-by-step, I'm good.

And five chefs behind you, that as well.

That piccalilli was delicious and well worth trying at home.

Now it's time for a vintage slice of Keith Floyd.

Today, he's in the Pays Basque region of France.

These farmers aren't posing for picture postcards, you know.

They're an essential part of this unique region and the landscape

is dotted with these rather delicious looking stacks of fern.

They remind me of crunchy Walnut Whips,

but the Spanish influence abounds.

The cooking is highly spiced and gutsy and it's simple to cook

and not wildly expensive.

This place is like a morgue. There's nobody here.

Not a soul, look. 48 different tables and not an order in the place.

Well, it is January, after all.

And you know how we bust into these places and we scrounge things

and we put their patrons to a lot of inconvenience? Well, I thought

they could have the afternoon off and I'd cook my own lunch.

It seems quite elementary, doesn't it?

And one of the things that the Basque's people are very, very

proud about are their red peppers. Come down here a minute, Clive.

They love their red peppers.

They love their green peppers and they love their onions.

In fact, those are the colours of Pays Basque.

Also they're very proud of their jambon de Bayonne, which is an essential part

of this wonderful chicken dish that I'm going to cook today.

Slide over here a bit, old bean.

Little pieces of lovely maize-fed free-range chicken,

but I'm using just the legs because that's quite economical.

I've seasoned them with salt and pepper.

Over here a bit, some beautiful fresh tomatoes, which I've peeled,

skinned and crushed up.

And then one thing the little dish must have is

some of their famous red pimiento powder, which is a little bit spicy.

So what I'll do is a bit of chopping up, a bit of cooking,

a little glass of Monsieur Bonnet's special wine,

because it's Mr Bonnet's hotel that we're staying in. And as they say,

a day without wine is like a day without...you know what I mean?

So, the director says I haven't been doing enough chopping,

I haven't been demonstrating enough of my culinary skills recently,

so we'll put that right and chop up a few onions. Like that,

because we need to fry those in a moment in with some lovely lard.

This is a dish in the Pays Basque. You don't use olive oil down here.

You don't use butter. You don't use corn oil.

As I've said before, in fact, you use either goose fat,

duck fat or pork fat. I have to chop those green peppers up.

Which I do. Are you going to show them this, Clive?

Come on, I'm doing my best here to be jolly sporty on this quiet

January afternoon. Bashing away with the old sharp knife. You see?

People like to watch me do this

because they hope I'm going to cut my fingers, but I never do.

Right, cut all those up, then this one. Very elementary, very simple.

Then we need some Bayonne ham cut into little tiny pieces.

I'll explain where all these bits go in a minute

when we move over to the stove but that will be in a little while.

Chop, chop, chop those into small bits, a bit finer I think.

Pleased with me so far? I'm quite enjoying myself.

I've got the whole hotel to myself. There's about 800 rooms here.

There's only the BBC crew staying in it, which must be

a bit of a turn-off for the owners.

There we are, a bit of chopped parsley which goes in later.

Lovely fresh thyme. Look, I've made a little rainbow. Isn't that pretty?

A bit of chopped thyme down the edge there.

A little bit of pimiento I'll put there just add the effect.

Stay on that, Clive. No, stay on that, please. Thank you very much.

Because we've got to cut because I'm going over to the stove, OK?

OK. Well, you see, into this little pan - the ideal meal for one person

but that's the trouble with borrowing things,

you have to take what you're given, ha-ha - are the chopped onions,

the little pieces of jambon de Bayonne, which is

ham from Bayonne, get it? OK, and some lovely, lovely lard.

Next, we put in the already seasoned little leglets of poulet de mais,

that is to say chicken which has been raised on corn.

A lot of that is grown around here.

I do hope the cameraman's taken a picture of those corn stores

otherwise that remark will be quite pointless, won't it?

That's why the chickens are yellow.

Anyway, back to the pot, if you don't mind.

Let those take a nice golden colour in this quite brisk heat.

Turn them all over.

Next in go my red and green peppers.

Throw those well in, let them take the lard, get them

seasoned well with the bits of ham.

Now, if the director - I can manage myself, it's over my here -

into my little bit of parsley here, look very closely.

I've put that fierce red pimiento powder, OK?

And the garlic, to flavour this dish even more. Got it, Clive? Good.

So that goes in.

Let it all take the heat really well

and then finally these chopped tomatoes, all their juices,

stir it in like that.

Give it a good...

PAN BANGS ON THE STOVE

A good shake like that and let it simmer.

Clive, can I speak to the customers, please?

That will take about an hour and 20 minutes to cook, OK?

I'm going for the stroll. I've booked a table in the dining room.

I'll see you in there, OK? Bye now.

MUSIC: "Bolero" by Maurice Ravel

BBC research has shown that you'll find these pictures of mountains

just as exhaust...I mean, fascinating as I do, but they were the birthplace

of Ravel, you know, and look what he did for Torvill and Dean.

It is said he used to hum it as he strolled on his way down to

Saint-Jean-de-Luz for a plate of grilled sardines. Yum-yum.

But seriously, this former whaling port is a great place in winter.

The Sun King Louis XIV got married here.

Hemingway liked it and I like Hemingway.

"We had a good meal, a roast chicken, new green beans,

"mashed potatoes, a salad and some apple pie and cheese."

It sounds good, doesn't it? Almost as good in fact

as my brilliant chicken Basquaise. Look at that, isn't that delicious?

Anyway, as you can see it's really just down to me and Ernest at the moment,

so if you wouldn't mind, I'll get on with my lonely little supper.

So, if there are any publishers out there, I really want to be a novelist, OK?

So cop this lot. A little piece I've just written.

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

"The cold winter air cleared my head and the mountains capped with snow looked fine.

"Jake wanted to stop at the auberge for a drink.

"I said, 'No.' We'd miss the dealing if he did.

"We walked into Espelette as the sun broke the ridge.

"The horse fair was going good and the men did their business."

It is actually quite extraordinary, isn't it?

Pulitzer Prize for me, I shouldn't be surprised.

"Pablo was grilling Bayonne ham over charcoal.

"I took a long pull from my flask and watched Clive take mood shots

"of men quietly discussing pelota with the easy passion of the aficionado.

"The women sold hard mountain cheeses on rough tables

"and stacked spice mountain sausages like gold bars.

"Jake said it was time Clive won an award for his photography.

"I took another draw from the flask and wandered off to buy a gateau Basque."

Which is filled with custard and tastes really good. Ha-ha! Did you like that?

Anyway, back to the real business - a cooking sketch.

I've borrowed this wonderful old farmhouse,

which belongs to a family of elver fishers.

So, you must come into my kitchen, as we say in the trade.

Do you know, I've cooked in some grand kitchens in my time,

in the restaurant kitchens of five-star hotels, on boats, by the

side of the river, over campfires, but I've never felt so much

that I'm right in the heart of things as I am in this beautiful place.

Look at the floor, for example.

Ancient slabs that have been trodden by Napoleon's soldiers

and generations of fishermen, peasants

and people who make these wonderful, wonderful hams.

Clive, go up and have a look. Superb Bayonne hams,

which have been salted, salted down for a month.

They've been allowed to dry for three or four days,

they've been rubbed in piment rouge

and hung up there to last for a year so they can fry

them on sticks or like I'm going to, cook over this wonderful wood fire.

You'll see Madame sitting next to me quietly.

She's been here, her family have been here since 1832,

when they started keeping records. She's about 84.

She's a wonderful lady who's allowed us in.

But listen, I must get down to a little bit of cooking

and you probably saw the rifles over the top there.

They shot these pigeons I've got in the pot here.

Very, very simple Basquaise dish which is called a salmis de palombe,

a little stew of pigeons.

If you can come in very closely in, Clive, I've got bits of carrot, bits

of the very same bacon that's hanging from the roof of his kitchen, little

bits of garlic, bits of onion and the pigeons beautifully golden brown.

All I have to do to finish off this wonderful, wonderful dish,

sprinkle a little pepper.

I'm sorry I'm slurring my words a bit.

It's very, very hot down here.

A little pepper, a little salt, a little fresh thyme,

a little fresh parsley, flame it with the Armagnac of the region.

Then... Oops, I've dropped the wine!

Stay there, we can't interrupt a good thing like this just

because I've knocked over the wine. We pour the wine in.

Like that.

Get a good look at that, Clive,

because the lid's going on any moment now.

OK? There goes the lid. It takes about an hour to cook that.

MATCH BEING STRUCK

Oh, that's better. I always enjoy a cigar in these tranquil moments.

Yes, you see the director likes the warp and weft

of the elver fishermen of the Adour River.

Sadly, I don't care for elvers.

I know they're celebrated on the River Severn back home,

where they cook them with eggs and make elver cheese, but these

little silvery threads are hardy creatures, you know, swimming all the

way from the Sargasso Sea just to end up cooked in olive oil and chillies.

It's a brilliant programme, isn't it?

Cooking, eel-fishing, the wonderful nature sounds, the little coots,

the weary farmers wending their way home on Mobylettes late at night

and me, stuck watching the river flow, really,

with a little pile of stones and a super, simple Basquaise soup.

Clive, come into this and have a little look what I've been doing here

while everybody else has been getting cold.

I've been bubbling up haricot verts and cabbage and goose fat

and making myself the perfect warming winter snack.

We don't have tins on Floyd on France, you know.

We do everything really properly.

How I made this soup, whole, hard white cabbage, very finely sliced,

a pound of white haricot beans, dried ones, soaked in water overnight,

a good dollop of goose fat melted in the pan,

popped the things in, a litre or two of water,

a bit of ham, or pork, or sausage if you have it to enrich it.

Let it simmer for three or four hours and have a really fabulous time.

Now, what you can do while I enjoy myself here enormously

is get on with elvers part two.

An extraordinary thing happened here.

Madame, walking through shot right now, flatly refused to let me

film in her kitchen at Chez Pablo in Saint-Jean-deLuz.

Luckily, the chillies, an essential part of this dish, were not

so bashful. I don't know why she wouldn't let us in.

After all, everyone knows how to cook elvers,

or piballes, as they're called here.

You simply toss them into very hot olive oil with finely chopped

chillies for a moment until they turn white, like spaghetti,

and serve them piping hot.

You can hear them sizzling in little earthenware bowls.

Could you fade up the sizzling noises for a moment, please?

SIZZLING FOOD

Thank you.

And you eat them with small wooden forks that don't conduct the heat.

I have to say though, I was very surprised to learn that even British

elvers are shipped in tankers down to the Spanish border, where,

as you can see, they're enthusiastically consumed by one and all.

And at about seven quid a head, that's quite expensive.

I wonder if she enjoyed hers? I'd rather have a pigeon.

There, you see, I've actually cooked it and they, poor things,

poor souls, whose kitchen we've interrupted,

whose life we have tipped upside down, are going to have to eat it.

Messieurs, j'espere que mon petit plat est mangeable.

Il faut que vous goutez un peu.

C'est bien, un peu trop cuit, parce que...

MEN LAUGH

C'etait cuit depuis quelques heures maintenant.

Mais quand-meme, c'est un petit pigeonneau.

Et il reste un peu de sauce.

This is the moment when the normal hubble and bubble of a busy farmhouse

goes very quiet.

There's something about me and the BBC that turns vibrant,

lively, beautiful Basque characters into statues.

I wonder if it's my food.

-C'est bon!

-Ca va? Ca va.

Oui, oui, oui, oui.

Of course, you can't beat a classic piece of cooking from the great Keith Floyd.

Now we're not cooking live in the studio today.

Instead, we've got some of the brilliant

recipes from the Saturday Kitchen archive for you instead.

So still to come on today's Best Bites.

Direct from Ludlow, Will Holland takes on a very determined

Silvena Rowe at the Saturday Kitchen omelette challenge.

They were both level pegging on previous attempts, so the pressure

was really on to see who would get further up the leaderboard.

And the one and only Ken Hom, "half man, half wok", as he calls himself,

stir-fries fillet of beef just for us.

Tender meat is cut into strips and served with onions

and mint as well as served with some delicious spicy noodles.

And '80s singer Nik Kershaw faced his Food Heaven or Food Hell.

Would he get Food Heaven -

pan-roasted duck with home-made ginger chutney, asparagus and

Tenderstem broccoli, or would he get his dreaded Food Hell, squid.

He could be eating crispy breadcrumbed squid with

a creamy ponzu dressing and Chinese leaf salad.

Find out what he gets to eat at the end of the show.

Now, when Allegra McEvedy came to the Saturday Kitchen hobs,

I knew she was going to make me work really hard,

but I didn't realise just how hard.

Take a look at this.

Good to have you on, Allegra. What are we cooking today?

We'll do a monkfish and couscous dish. Kind of Moroccan influences.

Put it in a bag over here.

This is our beautiful piece of monkfish.

Cornish monkfish. Over here we've got couscous,

spring onions, coriander,

two kinds of cumin, seeds and ground,

a bit of saffron, preserved lemons.

-Which we'll get on to later.

-Cherry tomatoes and fennel.

That's what's going in the bag.

Over here is just a go with salad.

Nice Greek yoghurt, English radishes...

Kind of like a tzatziki side.

Yes. That's sumac, an Iranian spice.

Which often people would have with bread.

If they visit Cyprus quite a lot, put it on the top of bread.

And sesame seeds, and they've bake it. Anyway, here we go.

Monkfish. Lovely fish.

Very, very easy to fillet.

That's what's going to be so great about this dish,

-it's going to be simple, easy.

-Monkfish is an amazing fish.

It's quite an ugly fish.

60% waste on it.

But it was kind of a fish that not

often chefs used very much. It was always deep-fried in breadcrumbs

and used a poor man's scampi.

Yeah, and that's quite dear.

You can do this with any white fish, really.

Or salmon, something like that.

I like the monkfish.

It used to be called poor man's lobster, cos I like the way...

If you want to chop on those.

Also, the cherry tomatoes after that. And quite quickly. Thanks.

Yes, Chef.

LAUGHTER

Thank you very much. I'm making those into medallions.

You can tell it's her first time. You'll calm down on the second one.

LAUGHTER

I do like things to happen.

So I'm going to make these into little medallions here

and put those aside once we get the rest of it together.

So, I'll drop the saffron in here, into the water,

to infuse a little bit, get that moving.

-What's next?

-If you cut those

-little cherry tomatoes in half.

-OK.

On your travels, restaurants and bits and pieces

where you've worked all over the world, I've actually eaten in one

of your restaurants, probably when you were there.

-A certain Mr Robert De Niro owned it in New York.

-Oh, Bob.

Bob. Sorry, Bob. Yes, Bob.

Tell us what it's called?

Tribeca Grill. It's in the southern part of Manhattan.

A real experience. Very, very busy. 500 covers a night.

I was in charge of running the kitchen.

Didn't you get a special visa to go over there?

Yeah. I got a visa...

I was an "alien of extraordinary ability in the culinary arts".

I know. My dad thought that was hysterical.

So that's all going in.

Preserved lemons in there, tomatoes, spring onions in here.

Want to chop a bunch of that,

keep a bit on the side, put the rest of it in.

Yes, Chef. I'm going to get on...

What did she say?

-More chopping!

-Right, OK.

More chopping, less talking.

You can't say that on TV, can you?

And I suppose your ability in the kitchens there

led you to win numerous prizes,

one of which is best cookbook of the year, is that right?

Yeah, in the States. I'm just cutting this fennel a bit.

In the States last month, my cookery book did amazingly well.

It kind of blew me out of the water.

Best chef's cookery book in the world.

-In the world?

-Apparently.

-Really?

-That's what it said.

-America is the world.

-That's what it says on the medal, so it's got to be true.

So there you go, Gordon Ramsay!

LAUGHTER

Shh!

-Go on, then.

-Right, so there we go. Fennel's in.

I've got some foil here.

Now we'll make our little bags, which is

where all the magic's going to happen.

Do you want to rip off two lengths of that?

Yes, Chef, no problem.

A little bit of that going in, olive oil,

just to keep the couscous grains apart.

-Lovely.

-Obviously, you need salt, for the couscous,

also for the fish. If you don't get the seasoning right at this stage,

you haven't got a chance.

That goes straight in like that.

Lay out two of those.

-Two of those.

-One in my place.

That's it. Coming along nicely.

Then, just going to drop in the saffron water,

just to give it a little kick-start.

And the rest of the moisture

to cook the couscous in comes

out of the fish so that's part of the magic of the dish.

-Have you put those spices in? The cumin in?

-I have.

Both the seeds and ground.

I like the textures of both of them.

That's that one.

-A little bit of oil.

-Sorry.

A little bit of oil.

-Then your fennel.

-The fennel, yeah.

Then a blob of the of the couscous.

OK. Blob of the couscous.

Spoon. There we go.

Or your hands, either way.

Monk on top.

Did you save a little bit? There we go. That goes on top of there.

Like that. A touch more seasoning.

The soy, yes.

Come on. That's lovely.

Great, perfect. A bit of coriander on top.

-Coriander.

-OK, and now you want to make your bag.

Hold on a minute! I haven't put salt and pepper on it yet!

North over south.

-What?

-Like that.

Look at that. That just looks so fresh.

North over south?

North over south, like that.

You do sides first.

You've got to get a really, really good seal on this, James. One, two.

And press down.

I'm pressing down, I'm pressing down.

One, two, three, like that. Flip it.

Other way round. One, two, three.

I'm pressing down, flipping it.

You doing it? Doing it had?

Yes, matron!

I've got it, yes.

And before you do your topping,

I'm just go to drip a little bit

more water in like that.

You can put vermouth in,

but they frown on that in Morocco

where I got the inspiration from.

And then your top. One, two, three.

It must be a good seal,

or else your bag won't puff up

and the magic won't happen.

It's like a private party now.

-It's a good seal.

-In it goes.

-Thank you very much indeed.

-There you go, Chef.

-A bit more work?

-Yes.

Want to do a bit of peeling and seeding and then, thin slicing.

Peeling? Right.

A peeler. Don't worry about peeling it. That's fine.

-Just slice it?

-We're in the same situation as we were earlier

-with spoons and soup.

-Slice it, slice it.

And I'll do the same with some radishes over here.

Slice them up.

I'm tripping on all of his veg on the floor.

So this will just go in like this.

Very simple and it's going to be

a little yoghurt-y salad to work

with the flavours. Very authentic to the region.

At my restaurants, Leon, we do a lot of this kind of Mediterranean kind

of food, because it's very healthy,

very delicious, really good for you. Simple stuff.

A dish like this is just a joy,

cos you can do the work ahead of time

and whack it in the oven when your guests or your date arrives.

Tell us a bit about the concept of your restaurants that you're doing.

Basically, it's healthy fast food, is what we do.

Particularly, these days, people have got less time to eat

and more awareness about what they're eating.

There was just this space in the market that my partners

and I saw and we're just having a lot of fun with it.

Doing really well. Won Best New Restaurant in Great Britain.

A little bit of dill.

Not too much dill. Easy to do the overkill.

-MATT:

-So, how fast would you say fast-food?

I mean if someone was to come in

and sit down and order something?

-Now.

-It's like McDonald's...

-Is it really that quick?

-You go in, you order at tills.

But, instead of there being nasty burgers,

not mentioning any names, there's super-food salads,

grilled chicken with aioli, Moroccan meatballs.

-There's the daily slow cooks.

-Wow.

-Is that enough?

-Fine.

Yes, that looks lovely. A bit of that, bit of that.

A little splish of olive oil.

-A bit of that.

-Bit of that.

I'll loosen it up with a drop of water,

cos it looks a little sticky.

-Sticky, yes.

-That's great.

-Give that a stir?

-Yes, Chef!

I'll get this one out of the oven.

Rather you than me.

Speed up, James. It's fast-food!

LAUGHTER

So how long is that in the oven?

So it will be about 15 minutes.

Depends on the size of the monk.

You want to whack one of those on there.

-Let me give you that.

-Cheers.

Watch out for steam when you open it.

-That's to be baked at 200 degrees, yeah?

-200 degrees.

-See that little puff of steam there. Open it up.

-Beautiful.

That just looks very nice indeed.

Here's our little salad.

Finish with a little bit of fresh cori, like that.