Episode 3 The Good Cook

Love food?

Love cooking?

This series will show you how anyone can make fantastic food,

and introduce to you some new and exciting ingredients.

I'm Simon Hopkinson and cooking means the world to me.

I love cooking.

It's my life, it's my passion.

As a child and teenager, eating was always an adventure.

I opened my first restaurant

aged 20 and have been in a kitchen ever since.

But now I'm better known for writing cookery books.

For me, nothing beats cooking at home.

It's my real inspiration and I want to share my love of it with you.

That is just how it should be.

Tonight, I'm going to show you five dishes any chef would be proud of,

and that you can cook in your own kitchen.

Great home-made food that will impress your friends.

Follow my lead and you'll be able to cook some exceptionally good food.

I just love it.

Peppers. This dish has been with me for a very long time.

It is very simple. It relies on very good olive oil.

Everybody loves it. It is fantastically tasty.

This recipe just oozes sunshine.

All the ingredients, bathed in luscious olive oil, just sing out hot summer days.

Now, I'll leave the stalks on for this.

It's a decorative thing.

You don't have to, but it sort of holds the pepper together while it's roasting.

So I'm going to cut right through the stalk so it comes into two halves.

Once you've done that, just go right through the pepper.

There we are.

Cut through the, um, just under the stalk,

through the tough bit and remove the membranes and seeds.

Just tap them out.

It's worth making the effort to peel the tomatoes,

getting rid of that irritating skin,

helping to create some of the best roasted peppers you will ever eat.

This is the way I always cook them and have done forever.

Cover in boiling water and the skins will crack, making them easier to peel.

Just move these around a bit until you see the skins splitting.

And slide them off. Dead easy.

I've never made them with tomatoes left with skin on because...

it just wrinkles up to a crisp and, er, it is worth doing for this.

That's done, and now to some garlic.

Pop them in, willy-nilly.

I like it quite garlicky, I must say.

So, a little salt, not too much.

Black pepper. Quite like peppery peppers. Let's put the tomatoes in.

Squash them right into the bottom.

They're going to end up pretty squashed when they're cooked anyway. More pepper.

And just the weensiest...

bit of crunchy salt on top.

The lovely olive oil.

Let it go right inside.

Gorgeous oil.

Be generous.

Looks pretty good uncooked, in fact.

Everything in this recipe is affordable,

but it is worth spending a little more on good-quality olive oil

to achieve rich and rewarding juices.

It really makes a difference.

Provence in southern France produces one of my favourite of all olive oils.

There are good olive oils and there are fantastic olive oils.

It's a combination of nature and know-how

that makes all the difference.

All olives are green to begin with and have a fresh, sharp taste.

As they ripen, they turned black and develop a rounder flavour,

producing deeply fragrant oil.

It's this combination of ripe and unripe that gives the perfect balance.

They are harvested between October and December.

It seems almost everyone in this region has an olive tree to offload.

Local mills are happy to accept them from anyone.

The best-quality oil is produced by crushing the olives as soon as they arrive.

This is the traditional cold pressing technique,

used to create all grades of olive oil,

from the everyday to the very special.

Extra virgin oil, made from the first pressing of the olives, is the finest.

I love it so much that I'll fried with it,

use it instead of butter in mashed potatoes

and, of course, it's perfect on salads and beautiful bread.

My peppers have always loved their extra virgin lotion.

And don't they look just fabulous?

I can get quite rapturous about this dish.

To make this dish really stand out, add a criss-cross of anchovies.

Their saltiness marries perfectly with sweet tomatoes and red peppers.

The warmth of the peppers whilst they're still hot from the oven

will just let them melt and give their flavour to the pepper.

If you like, finish off with some aromatic basil leaves.

Just feeling a bit decorative.

Which one?

I often mess a shirt eating these, I tell you.

Great taste. Sweet, salty, oily.

One of the truly great vegetable dishes.

These peppers make a lovely light lunch.

Serve with some crusty bread to soak up those gorgeous oily juices.

Hi. Some steak, please. A nice bit of marbled sirloin.

Nice bit of sirloin? Beautiful.

Something like so? Lovely.

Super. Thanks very much. No problem.

Great steak like that.

Really thick, pale fat on the outside and marbling through it.

A little marbling of fat makes it tender, makes it juicy, makes it a great steak.

Thanks very much. Thank you, Simon. Have a good day. Take care. You too.

So many of us order steak in a restaurant.

Maybe because we are too scared to cook it at home, and if we do, is it ever as good?

But if you follow my simple rules,

then you, too, can master the art of the perfectly-cooked steak.

For me, it has to be with chips.

I like mine not to chunky, not too thin.

My old dad had a fantastic little, erm...

It was like a... It had a handle and a mesh at the end and you put a potato in there.

You lifted up this handle, put the potato in then pulled it back

and out shot the chips and that was terrific. We loved playing with that.

For perfectly crisp chips, wash out all the starch

and do this until the water runs clear.

These are ready to drain.

So just get a tea towel out, spread them out and then just give them a pat.

The best chips need to be fried twice.

The most important point is they don't colour at all.

They do fry, but they also cook right through.

So the ideal chip is one that is really soft and fluffy on the inside,

and then really crisp and golden on the outside.

I mean, we all know that, but this way gets them really good.

I made my first chip with my brother when I was very small

and we had a chip pan. I could never understand why these chips wouldn't work.

I didn't know anything about doing this twice-cooked thing

until I went to work in my first restaurant.

They were always hard in the middle, and even then I thought, "These aren't like chips from the chip shop.

"I want mine to be like those.

"These aren't good enough for me.

"I want to learn how to make these better."

The initial fry cooks the chip right through, and this has to be done at a gentle temperature.

So, to the steak. I'm going to trim it up a little bit. Just the corner there.

I like making it look neat.

It's just my way.

And you need to just cut through the sinew underneath,

cos it can buckle the steak, if you like.

It'll do that while it's on the grill,

and we want it to stay as flat as possible. A little oil. Pepper.

Add fine salt here, as it sticks to the meat better than coarse salt.

Pay attention, as these are the secrets to cooking a perfect steak.

You need a really hot griddle, or hot heavy pan,

and always start the steak fat side down.

We want the molten fat to run out of the side of the steak.

It'll run down these grooves and lubricate the grill

with its own fat, which is... Can only be a good thing.

Once the fat is seeping out, then lay the steak flat.

Give it a little turn there, so you get the nice, classic diamond-shaped criss-crosses on the meat.

Everyone likes their steak cooked differently and every steak can be different.

I happen to like mine rare.

A thick steak like this needs a couple of minutes on each side.

For medium cooked, say three minutes.

For well done, about four.

But remember, the thinner the steak, the less the cooking time.

Now, that, to me, is just about perfect.

The final - and essential - thing for me

is to rest the steak for a few minutes before eating,

giving the meat a chance to relax and become even more tender.

Now, fry the chips for the second time.

Turn the fryer to its highest temperature.

They'll need no more than a couple of minutes and you want them really golden.

We get a much more instant frazzling this time round.

This is what gives you that fantastic crunchy chip.

Good old shake. Chips aren't chips without a sprinkle of salt.

We all have our favourite bit on the side with our steak, and mine is Dijon mustard.

Nice and rare.

Nice and tender.

That, for me, is perfect.

It's rare but it's not medium rare and, actually,

that's how I like it. It's just spot on.

Golden.

Soft in the middle.

A good chip.

So, you can now enjoy a really fantastic steak,

cooked by you at home.

Let's face it - the more you practise cooking steak and chips, the easier it will become.

Some people say that buying the finest ingredients means you can't go wrong.

Not necessarily.

I will shop anywhere, from my local supermarket to my local farmers' market.

If what I need looks good, I'll buy it.

You know, these days, supermarkets offer really good ingredients.

But good ingredients don't always necessarily mean you'll get a good dish.

More often than not, it's the cooking that counts.

It's what you do to your ingredients in the kitchen that can make them taste amazing.

A simple aubergine, for example, can become a star.

Sometimes you're given a recipe which you wish you'd known about for years.

This one was given to me by my friend Lyndsey, coming back from a sunny Greek holiday,

and it's now become one of my most favourite things to make.

This really special dish is pretty straightforward and yet so tasty.

Perfect for a nice little lunch or supper.

This Greek way with aubergines is astonishingly good.

I've only known about it for just under a year

and it makes me sad that I haven't been able to eat it for longer.

The first thing I'll do, which is very important for when you peel the aubergine,

is to give it a little cut around the top.

Just under the stalk, which is going to stay on, and then straight down four times.

This simply facilitates the peeling.

And just a trickle of olive oil.

I believe that this helps it to blister under the grill a little.

Grill them for 20 minutes or so under a high heat.

You need to turn them every five minutes so that they cook evenly,

but also to char the skin, ready for peeling.

Now, make a simple dressing of chopped garlic and parsley.

There is something magical that happens when you chop these two together and it's intoxicating.

The juices from both mingle and just produce this extraordinary odour.

And it's good. You can, if you wanted to, use a little mini food processor

and put the garlic and parsley in there and whizz them a bit together, but I like chopping.

Olive oil. It needs to be an oily dish

and you need to use good oil. If you like Greek olive oil, obviously that would be the one.

Ooh, yes!

I love doing this. It's a very pleasant occupation.

Although I cook aubergines in many ways,

I don't want the skin in this recipe.

If you look at that and look at what we'll eat,

would you want to put that in your mouth? You wouldn't.

It's beautiful.

Sort of heart-shaped, almost.

It's soft, yielding.

A tiny bit of salt now, and pepper.

I'm using black on this one.

I like this dish to be quite oily, as you can see.

Oily, parsley, garlic - yum-yum.

It just brings out the best in me, this sort of cooking.

The wonderfully cool and salty feta cheese

marries so well with the warm flesh of the aubergine.

I'd love a glass of ouzo with this.

And a bit of sunshine and a bit of sand around my feet.

That would be very nice.

Squeeze it over.

It's a great joy to eat. Fantastically creamy and juicy.

I love the hot and cold contrast of the feta and the aubergine.

It's exciting to discover something new,

but something that gives such pleasure at the same time.

It's like a big birthday present.

Cook this once and you'll cook it again and again.

Just fabulous.

I love stalls like this - really proper fishmonger stalls.

What you're looking for in fresh fish is dark gills just behind the eye.

That's a very good sign of fresh fish.

Also, a sweet smell.

Fresh fish should smell of the sea, not of fish.

It's a weird thing, but that's a good key.

Morning. Good morning, sir. How are you? Very well, sir.

Good. Coming for some smoked haddock.

Undyed. Natural smoked? Yeah, natural smoked.

I think that's a little bit big. That's a beauty.

Natural-smoked haddock, which I'm going to make a delicious pilaf with.

I'm going to put the pieces in the rice, cook them gently.

They'll flake, then mix it all up. And that's the perfect fish for it.

Lovely. Thanks ever so much. Great.

If you follow my tips in this recipe, a simple plate of rice and fish

can become an absolute revelation.

To begin, preheat the oven to 180 degrees

and melt about 40 grams of butter in a lidded pan.

This is not a curry powder, but it is a spice mix.

The heat is going to come from some green chillies.

Garam masala is a different mix of spices, but very fragrant. Garam masala.

Always try and find the best-quality basmati rice.

It is quite an exact science, making a perfect pilaf.

It's one-and-a-half times the weight of liquid to the amount of rice.

I've come across recipes where it will say double the amount of water,

and I really do think that's far too much. Straight in.

And we need the butter to coat the rice.

Eggs and smoked haddock have always been perfect partners.

The eggs are going to be boiled for about eight minutes, then peeled.

Fresh ginger gives aromatic warmth.

The juicier, the better.

Use a fine grater, so that it blends easily into the rice. Give it a tap.

Now, I change my mind about chillies all the time,

whether to make the dish quite hot

or just the flavour of the chilli itself.

You can always tell by just rubbing your finger along the chilli

and testing it in your mouth.

That's actually... Oh. No, it's a little bit hot.

So, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to take the seeds from one chilli

and leave them in the other.

I like a good chop - it's quite therapeutic.

So, one of my lovely vicar's bay leaves, as usual.

And the ginger and chillies. A little pinch of salt.

Now the most important thing - a lovely piece of undyed, smoked haddock.

Cut that in equal portions.

Let's go about there.

I'm going to leave the skin on because it's quite nice.

It keeps the fish moist while it's cooking

and it's just going to be steaming in the rice.

So, in with the stock.

Remember, use one-and-a-half times the liquid to the weight of rice.

As you can see, it doesn't look... You say, "Oh, is there enough stock in there?" There is.

So, just lay the fish on top.

Lid on.

And into the oven - 15 to 20 minutes. Check it after 15.

You need to grate the hard-boiled eggs

so that they mix easily into the pilaf.

And, anyway, grating eggs is so much easier than chopping them.

Chopped spring onions and fragrant coriander

add more flavour and more texture.

OK, time's up.

But, very importantly, do not take off the lid.

Leave it there for five minutes and allow the rice to finish cooking.

So...

'And when the five minutes is up, carefully remove the skin.

'It's done its job, and kept the fish moist.'

I love this dish.

A bit fiddly, but I think it's worth it.

Lovely. That's it. Right.

Now, my favourite, favourite part is doing the stirring.

Lovely, fluffy rice,

and once you've got the fish a little bit broken up,

straight in with the egg.

Now tumble in those spring onions and coriander.

Whoosh! Lovely!

Clean tea towel.

And what this does, in effect, is remove the excess steam

and makes it even fluffier and more delicious and fabulous.

So, leave that for five minutes.

I can't wait.

Waiting for a dish to be perfect is always worthwhile.

This is what makes something quite simple

into something extra special.

Right, that's had its five minutes.

And we give it one more mix.

Lovely, separate grains of rice.

Lovely, flaky, fishy, spicy, ricey. Everything you want.

And finally, a squeeze of lemon juice.

Little forkful for the cook.

The smoky taste of the haddock comes through.

Blends so nicely with the spices.

Yeah.

And the second chilli, with the seeds in,

coming through quite strong now. Lovely dish, really nice.

Smoky fish, fluffy rice, a little herb, a little spice.

Here is an unusually tasty supper for all the family.

'Really very nice indeed.'

On a lazy Sunday when I may have friends coming for lunch,

I love making a pudding that I know will go down a treat,

and is quick and easy to make.

Thick Guernsey cream, wonderful pink rhubarb,

combined to make a crumble to be proud of.

Use a nice Pyrex dish - the sort of dish my mother used to use.

And then, just slice the rhubarb into short lengths.

It's such an easy thing to make, crumble. It really, really is.

Because it is possible to make a crumble mixture in a food processor,

but the texture, made by hand, is far superior, always.

Start by cutting some butter into chunks.

Plain flour, golden caster sugar.

I have not much time for additions such as nuts, chopped up, or oats.

My idea of a perfect crumble, which DOES crumble,

which does get crunchy, is butter, flour, sugar.

A pinch of salt. End of story.

What happens here when you're making a crumble is that

you can feel when it's right with your fingers. You don't want the mixture too fine.

That's the death of a crumble, because it ends up like sweet breadcrumbs,

and you want little lumps of butter remaining in the mixture.

It's still a very nice feeling.

For the lightest crumble mixture, you need to get some air into it.

Before adding the topping, sprinkle some sugar over the rhubarb,

otherwise it will be too sour.

To make the ultimate crumble, a few tips...

A squeeze of lemon juice intensifies the rhubarb.

Also, a few extra lumps of butter to make it sumptuous and rich.

This should be done in little... Shall we call them "heaplets"?

The last thing you want to do is pat it down,

because, as the rhubarb is cooking underneath and it bubbles up,

the crumble topping sinks down a bit.

It's when you get this lovely balance between the two.

I know it's only a crumble, but this is going to be the best crumble.

We're going to be very careful.

Extra crunch.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes,

until it's golden on top and bubbling underneath.

So, to the lovely cream.

Golden top. Gorgeous, golden Guernsey cream.

I love opening these.

We used to get cream, when I was a boy, from the farm up the road.

In those days, it wasn't plastic - it was a nice little waxed cardboard carton.

And it was so thick, you could do that with it.

It's very clever, that cow from Guernsey,

to produce something so utterly gorgeous.

The Channel Islands' greatest ambassador has a big taste for grass.

The Guernsey cow is very special.

Its milk has more protein, vitamins and more calcium than any other dairy cow.

All very healthy, but it's the cream that I'm after.

And the reason why this cow makes the best is the high content of butterfat in its milk.

This is what makes the cream so uniquely thick and luscious.

At the dairy, the milk and cream are separated.'

These thick, golden folds are, for me, so special.

It really is the only cream for MY rhubarb crumble.

For the beauty of the thing,

I'm going to serve it in a beautiful little glass bowl.

Am I going to do what I normally do? I think I am.

Mmm!

Ooh, gosh! That is very nice indeed.

It smells wonderful, by the way.

That's just perfect.

It really is a very nice crumble - nice, pink juices.

My little hillocks become soft sand dunes.

I think that is a good crumble sound.

That is just how it should be.

Same cream spoon to eat with. Don't waste any of that.

This is a very fine crumble.

It's very British, and it's very delicious.

Sometimes words fail me when it's just right. And this is just right.

So, a classic pudding for a Sunday lunch.

To taste it at its best, serve warm, and make plenty,

so there is enough for seconds.

Next time, I'll be showing you five more super recipes,

all of them special, all of them easily made

in the comfort of your own kitchen.

Restaurant quality, but made by you.

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