Letter B The A to Z of TV Cooking

This is the show where we bring together some of the nations top TV chefs and letter by letter

serve up some of their greatest ever dishes.

It's as easy as A, B, C, on the A To Z Of TV cooking.

Today we're looking at things linked by the letter B.

Let's start with one of life's basics.

And here's Michel Roux with his B, he's baking bread.

First, put the milk on to a gentle heat.

Then, slowly melt some butter.

Before adding a tablespoon full of golden syrup.

The golden syrup is in there to give just a touch of sweetness

but also it helps to give that lovely moist crumb.

So whilst this is melting...

..we put our fresh yeast in our bowl.

Every bread needs some form of leavening and this yeast is the leaven.

It's the life.

Pour the warm milk on to the yeast and stir until it's dissolved.

We buy more white bread in Britain than any other variety.

I want to prove to you that it is possible to make a really

delicious white loaf, that's why I'm using white flour.

Then, add two pinches of salt to complete the dough.

Then we're going to leave it for a while

so that all the moisture is absorbed in the flour.

And that's it.

After just five minutes resting in a warm place, you can

start to knead the dough.

I'm just keeping it in the bowl

and I'm not really working very hard, I'm just stretching.

Stretching the gluten in there.

And if it does stick to your hands a bit you can just get a little

bit of flour and rub that on your fingers and your fingers come clean.

There are no shortcuts to making a great loaf of bread.

So after the dough has been kneaded for around ten minutes,

leave it to rise for half an hour, to give the yeast time to do it's work.

And again, as soon as you take the clingfilm off you can smell

those yeasts working.

It has a lovely aroma, beautiful aroma and it's smooth,

it's glistening.

Quite beautiful.

So I then turn this out on to the board.

I remember these smells, these aromas as a child.

Of waking up to freshly baked bread.

I want every house in Britain to be baking.

Or at least supporting your local baker.

Form the dough in to two balls, place them in a baking tin

and allow to rise for a 2nd time.

A bread that's only risen once and has been pushed through

the whole process is bland and it hasn't had a life.

A further 30 minutes in a warm place is all it should need.

Wow, that looks beautiful.

It's got that lovely shape, beautiful sheen

and it's ready to go in the oven.

First off, we need to slash the bread.

So we take a very sharp knife and just go over there like that.

And that will help the bread develop and open up. And in to the oven.

Now the oven is at 200 degrees C and we do that for about ten minutes.

And that helps to really push and make the bread develop

and then we turn it down to about 180.

And it should take 30 minutes to cook. 30 minutes to wait for heaven.

Here we go. Looks beautiful and the smell is great.

This is what I love about cooking bread.

You never know exactly how a loaf will turn out.

This is beautiful and it's white bread

but it actually has got a crust so it's crunchy on the outside.

And it's got that lovely delicate texture on the inside.

It's got the perfect crumb

and you can smell all the ingredients in there.

That golden syrup gives it just a hint of sweetness

but it's also helping the yeast to grow and to give that lovely texture.

Good bread needs butter.

Mmm. So simple to make.

But the pleasure you get out of that is indescribable.

Next up, a breakfast time B, courtesy of Sophie Dahl.

This is her bright and beautiful bruschetta.

So having had the most perfect breakfast on my selfish day,

I've been thinking about lunch.

In fact I haven't been able to stop thinking about lunch.

So, I'm going to make a really simple feast of the most

beautiful ingredients.

A yellow and green bruschetta.

Got some fennel here and unless you're an expert chopper,

peeling is a brilliant way to go.

Our lovely yellow courgette.

Predominantly chosen for it's colour

but they have a really subtle flavour and

when you put the dressing on it it really sort of wears it like a coat.

And fennel is the sort of opposite of that.

It's the kind of bold, fearless cousin.

Sort of sharp and liquorice and crunchy,

so they work really well together.

Add some orange to it.

And little fennel tops, little aniseedy fronds.

Mint, you can just roughly tear it in.

When I was little I loved going to the bakery

and sort of picking things out.

I was very keen on doughnuts.

So that would be my earliest memory of the experience of eating

on my own and sort of picking something out on my own.

And I recently met a child who was a far more sophisticated

version of my kind of gluttonous eight-year-old self.

I was doing a book signing at a shop in London.

I said what are you doing here? Are you here with your mum or your dad?

And he said, "No, I come here every Saturday morning to buy sushi." He came on his own.

He'd sit on the steps of the shop and eat it on his own.

And he was called Bertram.

And I so wanted to be his friend

and then he sort of disappeared off in to the ether

and I will for ever wonder here he is and what he's doing

because he's a boy after my own heart.

So I'd like to dedicate my lunch to Bertram, actually.

So, we've got the first stage done. Happy, fragrant little salad.

We've got a really lovely sourdough.

It's a good hearty loaf.

Take a clove of garlic and rub the surface of the bread with it.

It gets sealed in by the heat,

without it sort of whooshing up in your face when you take a bight.

My favourite bit, the cheese. It's a lovely, alabaster ball.

Buffalo mozzarella.

It's really soft, a bit like kind of, the wobbly bit on someone's arm.

There's something about ripping a great,

soft hunk of it off that is deeply, deeply satisfying.

Our lovely yellow ribbons.

The fennel, orange, mint and frond.

And as I'm here on my own I can totally indulge.

Having a little sort of artistic frond arrangement on my plate.

No-one's here to mock me.

So there is my ultimate selfish lunch.

Totally thrilled I don't have to share it

because I'm not very good at sharing to begin with.

Particularly not good at sharing when faced with that.

Now, pudding time and we're looking at B for blackberries,

with those Hairy Bikers.

You didn't pick those blackberries off a bush near here, did you?

I was just thinking, you see these blackberries?

If you found a blackberry bush close by where you live

-and you found those on them, you'd kill for it, wouldn't you?

-Oh, aye.

But that's what we just found this morning when we were out foraging.

Yeah.

-Down the fruit wholesalers.

-Well, you can't win them all, can you?

-We're busy, you know!

-Right.

-Cooking stuff for you.

You start with the usual thing when making sponges.

Blend together 150g of butter

and 150g of golden caster sugar.

To this, we add the zest of a lemon.

Now, if the butter's hard,

just knock it about the bowl a bit with a wooden spoon

and once it's softened slightly take it over to the electric mixer

and blitz it there.

Meanwhile, I need three eggs in a bowl, lightly whipped.

The first mention of any sort of sponge was a sponge cake,

referred to in a letter written by Jane Austen in 1808.

Sponge pudding, which is steamed,

arrived at the end of the 19th century.

They're both made with the same basic ingredients of

eggs and flour, which allows the mixture to rise.

And, do you know, it was like a seminal moment

in the world of baking and pudding making, when people first

decided and realised that eggs could be used as a raising agent.

First off, whisking half the eggs.

Then, whisking half the flour.

Then, the other half of your eggs.

And by adding it bit by bit,

you kind of ensure that it's not going to split.

That means, kind of go all curdley.

Now for the Bramley apples.

Skin them, core them and cut them in to cubes about 2cm.

These are nice, big, appley chunks that just sit in the duvet of sponge.

Meanwhile, I'll prepare the pudding basin.

Butter a basin, put a disc of greaseproof paper in the bottom.

That sits there and it stops a seal being formed between the pudding and

the basin. That will enable you to get your pudding out without it sticking.

There's nothing worse after all the cooking, all the baking,

all the foraging,

getting your pudding stuck and it comes out looking like a...well, a cobbler.

And you put these in to there.

When the sponge cooks, there's going to be quite a lot of liquid

comes out of the bramleys.

Blackberries are our classic foraged ingredient.

Now this is the lovely, Hairy Biker, tricksy, twisty bit.

Just put a little kind of phalanx of blackberries

on the bottom of the bowl.

Now, obviously when we pop the pudding out they're going to

be like proud little soldiers standing on the top.

There you are, look. Nicely packed in the bottom.

We reserve this to make a sauce for the top. That goes in.

But blackberries are interesting.

-There's over 2,000 varieties of blackberry.

-Is there?

-And it's said that the blackberry leaves purify your blood.

-Ohhh.

Every year we used to go out blackberrying with my mother

and she'd make blackberry and apple pies.

Bramble jelly was always a favourite. That was lovely.

It was just like a thin, thin jam.

But the thing about foraging is, it is seasonal.

It's wonderful and you can actually define the seasons by what you're eating.

Because we've got big hunks of apple in it, what we're going to do

is we're just going to tamper the mixture down a little bit.

There we are, brill.

The mixture will expand, so take some greaseproof, put a pleat on.

Then wrap it over the pudding bowl.

Put the foil on next then.

Then do the same thing with a layer of pleated foil to seal it up.

The pleat will allow that paper and foil to expand,

-so it's not just going to simply split and pop off.

-Tricky bit this.

Tie the foil in place with some string,

-leaving a bit left over to make a handle.

-Lovely.

That gives us a nice little handle to drop our pudding in to the pan.

Now, you notice in the pan we've put an upturned flan ring.

That's like a trivet to rest the pudding on.

You can use an upturned saucer, it's just

so that this bottom doesn't rest on the bottom of the pan and catch.

So, you put that on there,

pop your pudding in, sitting nice on the trivet.

Then pour water in up to about,

kind of two or 3cm short of the top of the basin.

Set it on a low simmer

and allow it to bubble away for an hour and a half.

Keep an eye on it to check it doesn't boil dry or else it'll

ruin your pudding and your pan.

That gives us time to make the sauce.

It's a simple sauce made with blackberry jam

and whole blackberries.

Don't worry about those little stalks

because we're going to sieve this off before we serve it.

Take the rest of the lemon

and squeeze out the juice into the fruit mix.

Oh and these Amalfi lemons, they're like the caviar of the lemon world.

-Beautiful, aren't they?

-Yeah.

Like that that quintessentially Mediterranean sunshine in a lemon,

-aren't they?

-I know.

And I know it's cheating but we British,

we're a nation of traders and it's just the thing you need after

a cold day out foraging for your blackberries.

Well, this is nice cos it's sweet-sour.

But we need to cook this until these blackberries are soft,

they're still quite hard at the minute.

So let's just cook them down for a little bit further.

Stir over a low heat for six to eight minutes.

Look at the deep, red colour that is.

So lovely, so autumnal, just lush.

I think they're just about ready, mate.

-Aye, they've disintegrated, haven't they?

-They have. Fabulous.

I'll get the basin, sieve those off.

Press the mixture through a sieve and in to a bowl.

Look at that.

It's fabulous, isn't it?

Taste the sauce and add more sugar or lemon, as you prefer.

-Right, that's perfect.

-Oh, yeah.

Big, big flavour of fruit, blackberries.

But it's sweet and sour. It's like sherbet, isn't it?

It is. Oh, yes.

Epic.

All that's left now is to wait for the pud to cook.

The moment of...

-Cor, look at that.

-Oh, yes.

There's pressure under there, Kingy. See that?

-That's stretching like Nell Gwyn's bodice, isn't it?

-Ooh.

-If this was a bosom, it would heave, wouldn't it?

-Beautiful, isn't it?

All the chemistry's happened in that pan.

-Right, should we unleash the beast?

-I think so.

There's something that's always exciting about unpacking

your pudding, isn't there?

-There is.

-Has it worked? Has it happened? And will it come out.

-Oh, that is epic man.

-Beautiful, oh.

-This is the tricky bit, isn't it?

-Danger's over.

Yeah, it's coming.

-Apple chunky, yes. Look at that.

-Oh, yes.

-That's beautiful.

Now that is an apple and blackberry, steamed, sponge pudding.

This is what we like to refer to as the Vesuvius moment.

Ahhhh.

It's just screaming out for cream. Or ice cream, or home-made custard.

That is flipping lovely.

Bit of sauce on there like that. And now...

Oh, yes.

-You've got to get the berries of the top, haven't you?

-Yeah.

-Ahh, that's absolutely gorgeous.

-It's great, isn't it?

Do you know what's lovely?

The sweetness of the sponge pudding, it's offset by the bramleys.

It's quite a grown-up pudding this.

It is and there's that lovely level of acidity in the blackberries

-and the Amalfi lemon. Really nice.

-Yeah, yeah.

-That is a foragers success.

-Oh, yeah.

So we've reached the end of today's A To Z Of TV Cooking.

Thanks again to all our amazing chefs and I hope you feel inspired.

Make sure you join me next time for more delicious food. See you soon.