Anticipation and excitement, for me, are two of the fundamental reasons for cooking with the seasons. It’s Nature’s way of providing things to look forward to. As a chef, it gives structure to cooking and menu planning and also means you are cooking with the best, and often cheapest, ingredients around. This in turn means that you, as a cook, have less work to do to create a stunning meal. Some flexibility is needed as the seasons do vary but if the produce tastes amazing and has been carefully sourced, the cooking – and, more importantly, the eating – will be a real pleasure.
Jon and I have tried to choose recipes for the book that are accessible and we really hope there is nothing here that you feel you won’t try. Some require specific equipment – such as a food processor – and some are more difficult than others. Making your own hot dog sausages, for example, will require a bit of commitment and won’t be for everyone but you could just make the chilli-pickled cabbage and buy some venison sausages. Do feel free to pick and choose, mix it up, take an element from a recipe and use it in one of your own.
If you’ve bought into the philosophy behind this book, you won’t be too worried if your carrots are a little wonky or your apples are different sizes. Accepting that things vary is really important as a cook – ovens vary, the speed at which a pan heats up and how evenly it cooks will vary. Equally, when we cook with natural products – seasonal vegetables, meat, fish and so on – even the taste and size can vary. No two lemons will taste exactly the same, for example, and the thickness of a fish fillet will often differ, which means the cooking times will need to vary too.
I hope you’ll use these recipes as a guide, rather than a strict set of rules. Yes, there are exceptions – I wouldn’t recommend using plain flour instead of self-raising (we’ve all done it!) – but what you do need to do is use your senses and develop an understanding of how things differ from day to day.
Learning to trust your senses will make you a better cook, too. Looking, smelling, tasting and listening are all so important. The sound a piece of meat makes when it goes in a pan tells you if the pan is hot enough, and a little taste of that lemon juice will tell you whether it’s eye-wateringly sour or actually quite sweet, and you can adjust accordingly. Tasting properly is a mental process, not just a physical one, and you have to engage and concentrate on what you are tasting. Most young chefs I’ve worked with have had to learn the difference between tasting and eating!
It’s also important not to get too hung up on specific ingredients. Buying what is good and then choosing what to cook is often the best way, but even if you do have a particular dish in mind, many elements will be flexible. Fish is a really good example – most recipes for oily fish will work just as well with a different type of oily fish. So, if it’s a cod recipe, but the haddock looks better? Buy the haddock. The recipe says sherry vinegar but you only have red wine vinegar? Use it. In many instances it won’t be crucial – yes, it will change things, but it shouldn’t be a disaster.
I speak to lots of keen cooks who get stressed out in the kitchen, especially when a dish requires several things to be done at the last minute, and my biggest piece of advice here is to adopt a technique from the professional kitchen. Look at a recipe and break it down into what can be done ahead of time. This is called ‘mise en place’ – literally meaning ‘everything in its place’, so you’re ready to start cooking. If a dish requires fresh herbs to be added just before serving, you don’t want to be scrabbling around looking for a clean chopping board and a knife as the fish is overcooking in the pan. The herbs, along with everything else, should be ready before you light the gas.
If you can make one element of the dish a day ahead, or if something, such as pastry, can be taken out of the freezer, that really helps as well. Puréed or mashed potato will be perfectly fine made in the morning and warmed up in the microwave that night. Salad dressings keep for weeks in the fridge and most types of dough freeze really well. It’s all about giving the cook more time to concentrate on those last-minute elements. Warm plates will mean you have to worry less about the food going cold, and some things, such as purées, will keep their heat for a fair while in a plastic tub with a lid on. Planning and organization are everything.
Some recipes in this book do call for a high level of accuracy in the weighing and measuring, particularly for things like bread and cakes. I’ve given spoon measures for the small quantities based on using a set of measuring spoons, as teaspoons from the kitchen cutlery drawer will vary. All the measures are level and scooped as opposed to packed hard. Where I feel weighing is either easier or more accurate, I’ve given a gram weight in brackets.
Weighing eggs is also important in some dishes, as a large egg can vary from 63–73 grams. On average, the yolk from a large egg weighs around 18–20 grams. Again, I’ve given the quantities in numbers followed by a gram weight where it is important.
I always use Maldon sea salt as a personal preference and grind it to the texture of table salt with a pestle and mortar when a fine salt is needed. The weight difference between a teaspoon of finely ground salt (which weighs 5g) and a teaspoon of flakes (3.5g) is quite significant, so if the recipe says, ‘1 tsp Maldon sea salt, finely ground’, it’s measured after the salt has been ground.
All gelatine sheets in the recipes are the type readily found in supermarkets that weigh just over 1.5 grams per sheet.
Where it’s necessary to preheat the oven, I’ve mentioned this at the very beginning of the recipe. This is really to flag up the need for a hot oven – when you do this will, of course, depend on whether you are breaking the recipe down into stages or popping out to the shops part way through!
A well-stocked store cupboard and fridge really helps to pull a meal together. My fridge nearly always holds eggs, milk, crème fraîche, cheese, mustard, gherkins, capers, spice pastes, cured meat, bacon, salad leaves, yoghurt, lemons and unsalted butter, plus assorted leftovers, experiments and impulse purchases! The larder will have lots of dried pasta (Rummo is my favourite readily available brand), Maldon sea salt, Arbequina extra virgin olive oil, rapeseed oil, jars of beans and pulses, arborio rice, couscous, basmati rice, various vinegars, dried breadcrumbs, tomato ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, honey, maple syrup, baking powder, saffron, chilli flakes, cumin powder, paprika, smoked paprika, ground coriander, fennel seeds and star anise. The baking cupboard holds a mix of dried fruits, muscovado sugar (both dark and light), caster sugar, golden caster sugar, soft dark brown sugar, plain and self-raising flour, strong bread flour, pasta flour, semolina, granary flour, and wholemeal and rye flours. Chocolate is a usual feature, as is golden syrup, cinnamon, ginger and mixed spice.
As you would expect for someone who has been passionate about food and cooking for the last thirty years, there is much more besides, but if I had to stock a kitchen from scratch that would make a good start. The beauty of the majority of these ingredients is that you will use them time and time again and they won’t sit languishing at the back of a cupboard for years.
Good equipment does make a difference to your cooking and I’m a great believer in buying something of good quality and only having to buy it once. However, you don’t need masses of kit. Yes, I have got a Thermomix, a water bath and a vacuum packer in my kitchen – relics from the restaurant – but how often do I use them? Well, when I’m just cooking for Eléna and myself or for friends, very infrequently. I do use a small food processor and Kitchen Aid mixer a lot and I use good-quality, stainless-steel pans with heavy bases alongside heavy-duty, non-stick pans that will all go in the oven. I also use a griddle pan, baking sheets and tins – all heavy-duty items. I use a number of knives but would happily manage with a serrated paring knife, a serrated pastry knife, a 20cm cook’s knife, a filleting knife and a boning knife. Assorted wooden and metal spoons, a couple of palette knives, a strainer and a ladle are all really useful. A sieve, a fine chinois and a colander will cover the straining and draining. Digital scales and a digital temperature probe I rate as essential. An oven thermometer to check how accurate your oven is will be useful, too. That should about do it; although I will freely admit my kitchen is cluttered with a lot more than that!
I’ve had a great time experimenting, testing and eating as we’ve worked on Well Seasoned over the past year. Many of the dishes I’ve cooked regularly, and I’ve become even more enchanted with the incredible seasonal produce available to us. Most of all, though, I really have had fun, and I hope you enjoy reading and cooking from the book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
Russell Brown