Prep in Advance The Best Dishes Ever

MUSIC SOUNDTRACK COVERS SPEECH

Today we're championing the phrase "preparation is everything".

We've got dishes from a whole host of your favourite chefs,

and what their recipes all have in common is that they are

really good to make in advance.

Sometimes for convenience,

sometimes because the flavours just improve if left overnight.

We'll start with a fantastic dessert from Nigella Lawson.

She's discovered the recipe for this ice-cream cake in a book by an old

Italian philosopher.

It needs 24 hours in the freezer,

but that's about the trickiest thing about it.

My pudding is much newer,

although in fact it comes from a relatively old source.

It's an ice-cream cake that is studded with meringue and grated

chocolate and it's incredibly high-impact, though low-effort.

And I discovered it in a book written by a highfalutin

Italian man of letters.

I may have found the recipe in a venerable volume, but it's now

one of the most straightforward and simplest dishes in my repertoire.

There aren't many puddings you can rustle up

early in the morning before a day's work, but this is one of them.

There are only four ingredients needed,

the first one being cream, obviously.

You want to whisk this so the cream is thick but still soft,

which is what I want.

And now I'm ready for ingredient number due,

a splosh of rum.

My philosopher actually specified a rather rare liqueur that

I can't get any more, but rum, to me,

always tastes so authentically Italian in puddings.

OK, so that's the whisking part over and done with.

My third ingredient is chocolate.

It's a good start!

I find it easier to cut the chocolate rather than grate it.

It makes a big difference if your chocolate is cold,

because otherwise it tends to melt as you chop it.

So in with the chocolate shards.

CHOCOLATE RUSTLES

Oh, lovely sound!

And now...a quick fold.

My last ingredient...some meringues.

A bit of brute force needed. They just get crushed in.

A sugary and heavy snowfall.

And the thing about meringues is that they will not freeze,

so you create this crisp texture within the ice-cream cake.

And now it's just a question of folding these in.

SOFT CRUNCHING

Mm!

Like a morning walk on freshly fallen snow.

Yes, it needs a day in the freezer, but basically this is now made.

The hardest thing for me is the tearing of the cling,

but I have learnt, I have been taught,

always tear the cling from a standing-up position.

Don't put it flat onto the surface. Look at that!

Got to line a loaf tin generously.

This makes un-moulding so easy. You just pull it out using the overhang.

In this goes...

Tamp it down.

So, after a day, give or take, in the freezer, this will be set

and ready to serve.

And with it I'm going to melt some chocolate,

some cream and another splosh of rum,

and that's the chocolate sauce done.

There's nothing fancy about it, there's nothing difficult,

but as Steve Jobs said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Ciao!

And a day or so later it's ready to bring out.

Well, as much as they've eaten, I think

they'll find space for a little bit more.

I'm about to unveil my meringue gelato cake.

The great thing about wrapping it in cling is that you can just

pull it out in one go without any worry.

Just a very light brick at this stage.

I'm just going to cut it into iced slices.

I love the nubbly texture.

That's all those crumbled meringues and the grated chocolate.

And although it looks rich, it's in fact incredibly light.

And although I'm going to put some raspberries on the table,

I do want to dot some here and there.

Yes, they do look beautiful, but they also provide just

the right tang against the sweetness of the ice cream.

And now I'm going to Jackson Pollock some chocolate sauce over.

Mmm!

This makes me feel absurdly happy.

Let's hope it has the same effect on them.

# I don't believe in frettin' and grievin'

# Why mess around with strife?

# I never was cut out to step and strut out

# Give me the simple life

# Some find it pleasant dining on pheasant

# Those things roll off my knife

# Just serve me tomatoes

# And mashed potatoes

# Give me the simple life. #

Next, a recipe from Nigel Slater, who knows a thing or two

about making the most of leftovers,

growing his own vegetables and not letting anything go to waste.

So of course he's going to have a recipe that will last you

for days and get better every time.

The idea of growing your own food isn't new to us,

but suddenly there's a fresh energy for it.

Allotments are more popular than ever.

People all over the UK growing whatever they want on their patch.

You know, I'm not envious of people's houses,

I'm not envious of their cars or their boats, but I'm very

envious of their allotments.

A space like this, I would kill for it.

Somewhere to grow lots of things I haven't got room for at home.

In fact, the only thing that means that this isn't heaven on earth...

PLANE ROARS OVERHEAD

..are those.

I love soup.

And it's one of those recipes that you almost make up as you go along.

I start with a few veggies, just to make a sort of flavour base.

My Tuesday-night supper.

I'm cooking what I call Nigel's Adaptable Bean Soup,

which in short means you can adapt it to be whatever you like.

Start by making a base -

chop some spring onions and carrots,

add to a little hot oil and throw in a bay leaf or two to add some depth.

To add colour, I'm putting in some tomatoes.

Then pour in some vegetable stock, fresh or dried,

whatever you have in your cupboard.

To give my soup some real body and make it into a main course,

I'm adding some cannellini beans.

These are pre-boiled.

Strange as it sounds, I'm going to put some orange in there,

just a single piece of peel.

It just adds a quiet, warm citrus flavour to it.

The real secret to a good soup is using your old cheese rinds,

the ones in the back of the fridge.

I found some Parmesan.

If you leave it there it doesn't really dissolve,

it just slightly softens, and it sends that sort of savouriness

that you get with Parmesan very gently through the soup.

So when you taste it you don't think,

"Oh, wow, there's cheese in this soup,"

but you know there is something working behind to bring all

the flavours together and give it a real richness.

And the crazy thing is, it's the end of your Parmesan -

it doesn't cost anything at all.

Now, at this point...

..the soup can become anything I want it to be.

And I honestly don't know what it's going to be.

I mean, there's a point when you open the fridge, you go to the

salad crisper, you go to the veg rack and just see what's there.

I mean, I know that there's some beautiful chard out there.

Chard is one of those vegetables that really deserves to be

better known. It's a wonderful vegetable.

It's so easy to grow and it's one of the few vegetables that

doesn't seem to be attacked by all sorts of slugs and bugs.

The lovely thing is, it's two vegetables in one - crisp stalks

and then the very soft, tender leaves.

You don't really find it in supermarkets,

but most people on allotments will have a row of chard.

And if you have an organic box, you'll probably get a weekly supply.

The stalks take a little longer to cook than the leaves,

so pop them in first.

I'm adding some fresh parsley for seasoning,

but you can add whatever you fancy.

What I've got in there are very earthy, quite robust vegetables.

And I want something in there that's very soft and silky,

and chard leaves, because they're a little bit like spinach leaves...

..they just become very soft and melting when they're warmed.

They don't need much cooking.

So...

The cheese has softened but not completely melted.

And it's just added bags of flavour.

The beans have turned the whole thing into a main course.

And I've got this lovely tomatoey stock.

And then just because I love it, for no other reason...

I'm going to put a little bit of my favourite olive oil,

a really fruity extra virgin olive oil,

and just enough...

It just drizzles over.

There we are.

Make a whole batch of this and it will last you for days.

You can add something new every time you get it out.

Now a quick pudding that won't last as long as Nigel's bean soup,

but Mary Berry's fresh fruit salad is also full of variety and

tastes so much better if you make it several hours or more in advance.

Right, I'm going to start with the melon.

I've chosen fruits that do not discolour when you leave them.

If I'd put peaches in here,

or apricots or apple or pear,

they all oxidise.

That means they go brown and the appearance looks horrible.

I don't like fruit salad that you make in tiny, tiny pieces.

It reminds me of those little cans of fruit salad.

I like really decent-sized chunks that you can just eat

in one mouthful.

Along with the melon, add two mangoes,

a papaya and the segments of an orange cut away from the membrane.

Then scoop out the insides of four passion fruits.

And remember, the seeds are part of its charm.

There's no need to sieve it.

Some people sieve it just to get the juice.

That's it. Mix it well.

If you want more juice, don't add sugar to it.

You could add freshly squeezed orange juice

or the sort you have in a breakfast carton.

So that's all mixed. That will not discolour.

It will be just as good in 12 hours' time.

Cover the bowl with clingfilm and place in the fridge.

To serve, add a few fresh raspberries,

which are too fragile to mix in any earlier.

And your fruit salad is ready to serve.

Next, we have a chicken chasseur.

Chasseur is a French word which means "hunter".

And the idea is that

when hunters were off catching game to put in their pot

they'd also gather mushrooms and herbs to make the sauce.

It's perfect for the old eat-and-then-reheat treatment,

as James Martin explains.

When you're looking at dishes you can prep now and eat later,

you have to go a long way to find one better than a chicken stew,

in my opinion, because it gets better even the second time around.

For me, the French bistro favourite chicken chasseur

is one of the tastiest reheatable dishes out there.

The simple combination of mushrooms, bacon,

wine and herbs makes one of the most flavoursome chicken dishes going.

I've already jointed a chicken into eight pieces ready for the pot.

I'm going to coat these in flour.

And what this flour is going to do is help brown it

but, most of all, thicken our stew.

You want a light dusting, and that is a light dusting.

There is no more than that.

Grab some oil and then we start to seal this.

It's important to seal it in batches

because you want it to colour nicely.

If I put all this chicken in, it's basically just going to stew.

So put in four pieces first.

And what you want to do is just leave it to get some nice colour.

SIZZLING

So with our bacon, we're just going to cut this into lardons.

I'm using back bacon, but you can use streaky.

This isn't a fancy dish, it's a rustic French classic.

So you've got the bacon, now we just chop up the shallots.

If you've got small onions you can just put whole onions in.

So once you've got the chicken nicely sealed like this...

..we can then concentrate on what's left in this pan.

These are all the juices from the chicken. We need those in our stew.

A good knob of butter.

And then start frying your bacon.

You want to get a bit of colour on it, start to crisp it up slightly.

So once you've got the bacon frying, now we put in our shallots.

And now we can throw in our mushrooms.

I'm going to use little brown cap mushrooms.

Throw them in whole as well.

When you cut them up too small they sort of disintegrate.

An important ingredient in this - and you must put it in

at the beginning of the cooking process - is tomato puree.

If you put it in at the end of cooking, you can

really taste the sort of quite harsh puree.

And as you seal it around in the pan like this, it actually

starts to cook that flavour out and the bitterness out as well.

And then deglaze it with some white wine,

a good-quality white wine, of course.

Means that you can put glass in here...

..and a glass...in a glass...

while it's cooking.

Which is always quite handy.

Now, we need to reduce this down for about 30 seconds.

And then we add a really good-quality stock.

And for this, use chicken stock, obviously.

But you can get away with using beef stock as well.

While that's coming to the boil we can pop our chicken back in.

Now, what you don't want to do is add too much stock,

because there's a lot of liquid that comes out of chicken.

And then one final ingredient, before we leave it alone,

is fresh tarragon, the perfect combination to go with chicken.

And for that, really, you want to put half in now and half in later.

So just bring that to the boil.

We're just going to gently simmer that for about 30-40 minutes,

which gives me enough time to prep our potatoes for our mash.

It's not until you actually work in a commercial restaurant where

you actually begin to understand about preparing it now

and eating it later, and mashed potato is one of those things.

It will actually keep in the fridge for a couple of days.

So, you know, it's a bit like the Christmas lunch, where I used

to watch my mum stressing with pans of stuff boiling everywhere.

I don't think I've ever met anybody who doesn't like mash.

If you run some quality boiled spuds through a ricer,

add a knob of butter and maybe some cream,

you've made one of the tastiest side dishes going in no time at all.

And that mashed potato... that is delicious.

If I'm reheating a dish like this,

I always hold some of the fresher ingredients back

so they retain some of their texture and flavour when cooked.

It couldn't be easier.

Do the main prep in advance, then on the day add some skinned

and deseeded diced tomatoes along with some roughly chopped parsley,

a handful of tarragon, and simmer it for 20 minutes

and you're ready to go.

And then all you need to do now is serve it.

You've got all the amazing flavour of tomatoes, tarragon,

mushrooms and bacon, which is a real classic to go with this.

It's kind of the perfect dish

for sort of prep-now-eat-later.

You've got to try that!

The simple but quality ingredients used in retro dishes like

chicken chasseur means it tastes as good today as it did years ago.

Mm! And it will still taste as good in a few days' time, too.

Now we end with the Hairy Bikers' autumn pudding.

It's their take on a classic summer pudding.

So, can this really need

so much prepping that it takes a whole season to get ready?

I doubt it, but let's find out anyway.

Instead of all these wet fruits - strawberries, raspberries

and everything that we love in summer pudding -

this has got apples, pears, plums and blackberries.

It really is a forager's delight and it's cheap as chips, this one.

You start off, a couple of Bramleys.

Chop them into juicy chunks and pop them in the pan.

Along with 500g of halved and stoned plums

and a couple of lovely peeled and sliced pears.

Summer pudding is an interesting dish.

I don't know who thought of this,

but I know in Victorian times there were references to a similar pudding

and the Victorians called it hydropathic pudding.

-A bit of a healthy pud.

-Yeah!

But the first recorded recipe where you actually put it

together like this was published in 1902.

But I'm not sure then if it was called summer pudding.

Well, no, but I think actually the first reference

to it being called summer pudding was in a book called

-The Diner's Dictionary, written by a man called John Ayton.

-Right.

And he referred to it as "a summer pudding".

-When was that?

-1930s.

I'm going to bring the rest of the fruit up to temperature

and then the blackberries we're going to throw in a little bit later

because we want to keep the shape of them because they're lovely.

And we've got a trick to show you how you're going to get it

out of the basin without ending up with an unholy mess.

Yes. It's a good trick, this.

To turn the fruity juices into a sticky syrup, chuck in

a knob of butter and 200g caster sugar and simmer on a low heat.

-Look at that!

-Isn't that just gorgeous?

Now, as there's a bit of heat in the pan, what we're going to do

is just put the blackberries in at this point and then just give it...

We're not kind of stirring it, we're just kind of folding it.

Do you know what I mean?

It's going to be lovely and you're going to be able to see

the shape of all the ingredients that you've put in.

It's not just going to be a big gloop of fruit.

That's been on now for about...

five or six minutes,

-and look at the juice that's coming out of those fruits.

-Good grief!

-That's not cooking, that's leaking!

-Isn't it?

-Yeah!

That basically goes for 15 minutes.

-That's gone for 15, hasn't it?

-I think it probably has, mate, yeah.

Aye.

What we need to do next is separate the solid fruit from the syrup,

because we soak the bread and syrup as we go

and we want to pack it with that lovely fruit.

So...

-It's fantastic, isn't it?

-Absolutely gorgeous.

And just leave that to sit to make sure

that all of those lovely juices come out of the fruit.

Now, really, you can't do much with this until it's gone cold,

and you want it to drain so you've got all that fruit out.

So really you want to leave this for, well, 20 minutes,

just to do its own thing, just for that juice to naturally come out.

-Quick cup of tea?,

-Might as well.

-Aye.

SNORING

TIMER DINGS

-THEY GRUNT

-Is it ready, do you think?

As ready as it'll ever be. Look at that!

That's what happens when you milk autumn fruits.

We need to boil that until it's reduced in volume by half,

and that will be the most syrupy,

fruity dollop of gorgeousness not seen since Adam bit into the apple.

Mr King, I think we are there. Look at that.

It's sticking to the spoon like crude oil to a penguin.

Look at that.

And before we can move on, we've got

to cool down the syrup. Another Hairy hint for you -

pouring it into a flat dish makes it cool much quicker.

Now, this type of pudding is notorious for being difficult

to get out of the bowl in one piece.

So our top tip is to line the bowl with clingfilm,

but make sure you oil it first.

That way you can slide the clingfilm right down to the base.

Leave plenty over, because we're going to overlap that on the top.

-This is the good bit now.

-The build.

-The build!

-And for the build, it's all about one thing.

-The bread.

It can be stale, it can be cheap, it can be nasty,

it's still bread and it works great for this.

As you might have noticed, the bottom of the basin is circular,

so therefore we need circular bread for the bottom.

Now, we need to dip this in the syrup.

We don't want to soak it in the syrup. It's like flick and dip.

One, two...

And this is the brilliant thing to do with the family.

Kids can see the pudding being created and crafted.

Yeah, because they can get it all over their new T-shirts.

Luckily, Dave is dressed for the occasion.

Now we've got the topping, we need to build the side.

Cut rectangles from the bread, dip them in the syrup

and place them round the bowl, making sure they overlap.

-Now, the fruit.

-That looks beautiful.

-Doesn't it?

Just pack that...

Oh, yes, man!

Now, just push it into all the corners of those overlapping

bread pieces.

But I prefer this to a summer pudding.

I like the apples and pears. It's a bit more substantial.

-That is going to be gorgeous.

-It's just perfect.

Once it's filled, we like to be really tidy

and use a plate to cut perfect little segments for the base.

Oh! Happy days, Kingy.

Four of those, we've got a perfect base to our autumn pudding.

Each segment has to overlap slightly to make sure

you're sealing in all that fruity goodness.

Isn't that lovely?

-Beautiful. Right, um... Wrap it up, mate?

-I think so.

Wrap the clingfilm carefully over the base.

What we want to do is we want to make a nice seal.

And this needs to go in the fridge for about 12 hours.

Overnight is great.

And it's going to kind of just coagulate into this big

fruity mass.

So to do that, rather like you would do a pate or a brawn or ham,

we press it.

There's a plate.

You can use a house brick covered in foil, you can

use a can of beans, or indeed a seven-pound weight is perfect.

Into the fridge

until tomorrow.

BIRDSONG

Our autumn pudding has been in the fridge for 15 hours,

and now it's the moment of truth.

We need to get it safely out of the dish.

-Carefully peel back the clingfilm. Don't disrupt the form.

-Ohhh...

-Oh, it's lovely, this.

-Oh, it is.

-Isn't it?

When you're ready, hold a plate over the pudding and flip it over.

When you're ready...

DRUMROLL

It's the tricky bit, this, you know.

Thank you.

-Hold on.

-Yes.

-Be nice and come out.

-Aye.

I'll hold the clingfilm, you take the bowl.

DRUMROLL

TENSE BREATHING

Oh, look at that!

DAVE SCREECHES WITH DELIGHT

-Have you hurt yourself?

-I'm in luuuuurve.

-That...

is an autumn pudding.

# My first, my last, my everything... #

That's made from wonderful British fruits,

old bread and a bit of native wit.

-Now, a wedge of that with cream, what could be better?

-Nothing.

-That is beautiful.

-Perfect.

-Look at that. That's a proper British treat.

And dressed with beautiful fresh British cream.

# I know there's only one like you... #

Ohhh...

# There's no way they could have made two. #

It just fills your mouth full of flavour and fruitiness, doesn't it?

Yeah.

It's a wonderful harvest festival on your tonsils.

It's great taking a British classic

and giving it a seasonal twist.

What better way to use some bread you've got left over

than on a dessert like this?

# You're the first, the last, my everything! #

Thanks, lads, and thanks to all today's fantastic chefs.

Plenty more where they came from,

so join me again next time for more of the Best Dishes Ever.