Travel the world from the comfort of your kitchen
QUEEN OF ROASTING TIN RECIPES RUKMINI IYER TELLS ABOUT TURNING HER GAZE GLOBAL FOR INSPIRATION
“IN THE traditional
Korean dish, aubergines are steamed for just seven minutes before you gently stir in the red pepper and sesame dressing. In this version, I let the oven steam the aubergines, while fresh basmati rice and cabbage cook underneath for a simple and filling all-in-one dish,” explains Rukmini.
“Gochugaru, or Korean red pepper flakes, are easily available online, at specialist shops, and even on Amazon.”
INGREDIENTS (Serves 4)
200g basmati rice, rinsed; 2 cloves of garlic, unpeeled; 2 leeks, or 1 small Chinese cabbage, thinly sliced; 400ml vegetable stock; 1tbsp sesame oil; 2 aubergines, cut into 1.5cm slices; 1tsp sea salt flakes; 3 fat spring onions, very thinly sliced; 1tbsp sesame seeds
15g Korean red pepper flakes (gochugaru); 30ml sesame oil; 30ml rice vinegar; 30ml soy sauce; 5cm ginger, grated; 1 clove of garlic, finely grated
METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 210˚C fan/230˚C/gas 8.
Tip the rice and garlic into a wide lidded casserole dish or a medium roasting tin, then evenly cover with the sliced leeks or Chinese cabbage.
Pour over the vegetable stock and sesame oil, then lay the aubergines over the top in one layer. Scatter over the sea salt, cover with the lid or very tightly with foil (this is important or the rice won’t cook properly), transfer to the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix the dressing ingredients together. As soon as you take the tin out of the oven, remove the lid or foil and dress the aubergines with the red pepper dressing.
Scatter over spring onions and sesame seeds and serve hot.
YOUR summer holiday might be off thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, but you can still travel the globe in 75 faff-free, one-tin recipes, courtesy of food writer and stylist, Rukmini Iyer.
The former MasterChef contestant pioneered the “chop and chuck traybake” with her wildly successful Roasting Tin series of cookbooks.
Book four, The Roasting Tin Around The World, has come at an admittedly difficult moment.
But arguably its timing couldn’t be more pertinent, either. When our horizons have been wholly curbed, and our lives tethered to one spot, being able to “travel via your kitchen” is quite a gift.
Rukmini, who grew up in Cambridgeshire and is now based in London with her border collie, Pepper, has managed to condense into a cookbook the feeling so many of us get on holiday, of eating something amazing, and knowing we will desperately try to recreate it when back home – only she’s made that possible.
“When my mum came back from a trip to Peru, she was like, ‘I’ve got to get these purple potatoes’,” says Rukmini affectionately, adding how she also saw this book as a chance to “get a bit more creative, and authentic with flavours.
“With the first two books, a lot of the recipes was just me going, ‘Just add a bit of lime juice’,” she says, rather self-deprecatingly.
“Now it’s more like, no, this is based on a really authentic dish – and from that you get so many new ideas.”
Take her North African inspired chermoula roasted tuna steaks, her Russian meatballs with sour cream and, a current lockdown favourite, a peach dulce de leche cake, which is a riff on the Uruguayan cake, chaja, just “executed completely differently”.
The original dessert layers tinned peaches, whipped cream, icing and dulce de leche, into a towering, Eighties-style meringue. Rukmini thought: “How could I use those flavours but make it easier and also maybe a bit less sweet and sugary?” So she laces the sponge with tinned dulce de leche, bakes in fresh peaches, and sprinkles crushed meringue over the top at the end.
These aren’t pilfered replicas of traditional dishes, manhandled into a tin – for starters, in many of the regions she features, ovens aren’t even widely used. Instead, Rukmini considers flavour combinations and uses them to vault into new one-dish recipe realms.
Writing the book prepandemic was also a good excuse to jump on a plane, to America, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Rukmini has long been the kind of person who, after eating something particularly good, accosts the chef to ask, “Excuse me, how did you make this?” – meaning she already had reams of notes, recipes ideas and food memories scrawled down from years of holidays and trips to work from.
With a laugh, she calls it “being a really irritating traveller”, admitting she is also the person who drags her travel companions off on culinary missions.
“If they’re like, ‘Should we just go and get pizza?’ I’m like, ‘No, no! Unless it’s a really exciting pizza! (Before saying) There’s this really amazing little place that we have to go to that serves the best crab cakes...’.”
She’s careful to only note down fun dishes (“Things that felt really special, that just make you remember eating things for the first time”), many of which have in turn made their way into The Roasting Tin Around The World.