Hairy Bikers’ new fare
“Why did the chicken cross the road, roll in the mud, come back across the road, and then cross the road again and roll in the mud again?” asks one half of The Hairy Bikers, Dave Myers, eyes glinting.
“Cos he was a dirty double crosser!”
Spending time in the company of Myers and his good mate Si King is pure laughter-filled joy, particularly when they’re so enthused by their latest project. BBC Two’s Hairy Bikers - Chicken & Egg has seen the boys travel the world in search of the best recipes using, you guessed it, chicken or eggs, and now there’s a cookbook to accompany the series.
Puns abound, and today the boys are on great form, hence the chicken joke, which Myers follows up with, “One egg is never an oeuf!”
It’s a project that’s been incubating for 10 years.
“It’s always a book that’s been on the boil, really,” says Myers. “To a cook, they’re such useful ingredients. We’ve done some stand-alone cookbooks that have been very successful, like Great Curries, Perfect Pies, Meat Feasts, so why not Chicken & Egg?”
Myers and King both grew up eating lots of eggs - but in very different ways.
“One of my first ever food memories was sitting on my grandfather’s knee at the table and sharing two dippy eggs and soldiers,” says King, who turns 50 on October 20. “He died when I was four, and I think I was three. The fire was on, and that’s the only memory I have of my grandfather. I found a box of old photographs the other day and that memory is on a photograph. I was absolutely made up when I found it, because you think, ‘Have I invented that?’ It’s such a vivid memory and the two of us look so content, we’ve got this soldier that’s about three times the size of us, it was so lovely.” As for the young Myers, he liked his eggs scrambled. “I used to love scrambled eggs when I was a little boy,” says the 59-year-old. “I had a bright yellow jumper that my mother knitted me and I used to call it my scrambled egg jumper.” With our interview drawing to an end, it’s time to tackle that age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
“The egg,” says Myers. “Everyone knows the bird came from the lizard, so I think there came a point when the DNA of the egg changed to be more chicken than lizard.”
“It was the chick,” counters King. “You can’t have an egg without a chicken. In evolutionary terms, the chicken is the closest relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The T-Rex laid eggs, didn’t it? So at some point, it turned into the chicken. The scientists who think about these things go, ‘Nah, it was the chicken’.”
“Can you imagine the size of the oven if we ate T-Rex? ‘Anyone want a thigh? It’s the size of a front door!’” adds Myers, before King chimes in: “You’d be making the stuffing with a cement mixer.”