Bake Off winner John Whaite’s new book, plus Rose Murray Brown on Sicily’s best wines
The new book from chef and Great British Bake Off winner 2012 John Whaite is dedicated to the humble pan and the wondrous food you can rustle up on a stove top
The pan, in most kitchens, is an auspicious symbol – an emblem of culinary opportunity for every home cook. We rack our brains at lunchtime to invoke ideas for the evening’s dinner. The image of a hot, smoking pan serves as a life raft to carry us through the working day. A dear friend admitted that on returning home from work, the pan will go on the hob before she’s even foraged in the fridge or rustled through her cupboards to concoct supper. While that isn’t an action I’d recommend – unless you want a roomful of smoke by the time you’ve peeled your first onion – for her, merely heating a pan signals safety and homeliness. The sentimental value of that piece of formed metal balances with, if not outweighs, its basic function. Whether it’s an heirloom cast-iron skillet, scrubbed clean and oiled by generations of a devoted dynasty, or the pan that fills an empty house with the inaugural scent of home, the raw concept of the pan – metal on heat – has evolved alongside us into an indispensable part of modern day life. That story began a million years ago. n
Bloody Mary prawn tacos with celeriac and lime slaw
While the Bloody Mary cocktail, like Marmite, may be a severely polarising thing, this permutation is sure to please most. The tender prawns are so well suited to the spicy tomato sauce, and the celeriac slaw offers both earthiness and acidity to complement and cut through it all. With the mayonnaise, I use the Kewpie brand – but if all you have is the regular variety, that’ll be fine.
Serves four
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1 banana shallot, finely sliced
1 celery stick, finely sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
½ tsp celery salt
50ml vodka or white wine
½ tsp Tabasco sauce
1 tsp horseradish sauce
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
150ml tomato juice
500g king prawns, peeled and deveined
1 tbsp parsley, finely chopped freshly ground black pepper 100g celeriac, peeled
2 fresh limes, cut into wedges
1 tbsp lime juice
½ tsp celery salt small handful of coriander, finely chopped
4 flour tortillas mayonnaise
1 Set a large frying pan over a high heat. Once the pan is hot, add the oil, shallot and celery. Fry for a minute until everything starts to sizzle, then reduce the heat to medium. Fry, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until the shallot is just softened. If the shallot starts to catch, reduce the heat further.
2 When the shallot is soft, increase the heat to high and add the garlic and celery salt. Fry for a minute then throw in the vodka or white wine and allow the alcohol to bubble and evaporate almost entirely. Add the Tabasco, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce and tomato juice and bring to the boil, then throw in the prawns. Fry just until the prawns are cooked through, then remove from the heat and stir in the parsley and a good grinding of black pepper.
3 For the celeriac slaw, coarsely grate the celeriac into a mixing bowl. Add the lime juice, celery salt and coriander.
4 To serve, fill the tortillas with the slaw before layering with the prawns. Top with a squeeze of mayonnaise and serve with lime wedges and extra slaw.
Sweet potato and harissa salad
Harissa paste, that Moroccan stalwart, is something I hoard jars of in my cupboards. Whether slicked over chicken thighs, marinated into steaks or used simply to add spice and zing to roast potatoes, it’s something I would now struggle to part with. It is delicious in this salad with the sweet potatoes and pungent goats cheese.
Serves two
75g sunflower seeds 2 tbsp olive oil
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm dice
2 tbsp rose harissa paste
100g goats cheese
1 small red onion, finely sliced small handful of mint, roughly chopped
4 radishes, finely sliced
1 small orange, peeled and segmented extra virgin olive oil sea salt flakes
1 Heat a large frying pan over a medium-high heat. Once the pan is hot, add the sunflower seeds and toast, shaking the pan back and forth, for a minute or so until the seeds release their earthy aroma. Tip into a small bowl and set aside until needed.
2 Return the pan to a medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Once the oil is hot and starts to shimmer, add the sweet potato pieces and fry, tossing occasionally, for 15-20 minutes, until the sweet potato is tender enough to eat, and is slightly charred. Add the harissa and toss through the potatoes, still on the heat, for a minute or so. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
3 Tip the cooled pieces of harissaslicked sweet potato into a large mixing bowl and crumble in the goats cheese. Add the onion, almost all the mint and the radishes, and toss
together. Season to taste.
4 Serve the salad with orange segments on top, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and scatter with the remaining chopped mint.
S’mores sundae
S’mores (an abbreviation of the recipe title Some Mores) are an American camping classic where marshmallows are held above a campfire until they become burnished on the outside and molten on the inside. They are then sandwiched with a slab of chocolate between Graham crackers. This recipe is a sundae version of that combination, crowned, of course, with toasted Swiss meringue. Graham crackers are pretty specialist here in the UK, so I’ve opted for the next best thing: the digestive.
Makes four
400g can condensed milk
150g dark chocolate (70 per cent cocoa solids), broken into chunks
2 large egg whites
120g caster sugar
100g digestive biscuits or Graham crackers
8 small scoops vanilla ice cream
8 small scoops chocolate ice cream
4 cherries, to serve
1 Make sure you get the ice cream out of the fridge at the start of this recipe. There’s nothing worse than ice cream that’s so hard to scoop it gives you a strained wrist.
2 For the chocolate sauce, put the condensed milk and chocolate into a medium saucepan and set over a lowmedium heat. Allow the chocolate to melt into the condensed milk until you have a thick, smooth sauce, stirring occasionally. Decant into a small jug or bowl.
3 Don’t bother to clean the saucepan, just fill it a quarter full with hot water and set it over a high heat. Once the water boils, reduce the heat to a simmer. Put the egg whites and sugar into the heatproof bowl and set it over the water. Whisk constantly with a hand-held electric whisk until the meringue is thick and glossy. When it gets to that stage, remove the bowl from the heat and continue whisking until cool – this will take between 5 and 10 minutes. It’s also important that if at any time you stop whisking, the bowl must be removed from above the water, otherwise the egg whites will scramble.
4 To assemble, crumble the biscuits into the bottom of each sundae glass. Top those with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and try to flatten the ice cream out a little so that it fills the diameter of the glass. Top that with a generous layer of the chocolate sauce, then a layer of chocolate ice cream, again, pressing it down as best you can.
5 Finish off with a dreamy dollop of meringue. If you have a chef ’s blowtorch, by all means torch the meringue, if not, eat merrily in full confidence that this is still just as decadent. Serve with a cherry on top.