It’s the VEGGIE Bikers! Brilliant recipes to help you get slim

Britain’s bestselling cookery duo reveal why they have ditched the steaks and bacon to create meat-free recipes that taste great AND will help you to shed pounds

IT’S safe to say that Si King and Dave Myers, the TV duo better known as The Hairy Bikers, are dedicated meat lovers. In their 2016 recipe book Meat Feasts, they wrote: ‘There’s something about the smell of meat cooking that signals a feast – a steak on the grill, a roast in the oven, a casserole bubbling: they make your mouth water.’

So it comes as something of a surprise to discover they’ve gone vegetarian – at least part-time – and are so enthusiastic about their new regime that they decided to write a book about it.

The latest in their multi-millionselling Hairy Dieters spin-off series of books features entirely meat-free dishes. A vegetarian diet is, they say, not only an easy way to lose weight ‘because vegetables are lower in calories than meat’, but also gives a fibre boost for the digestive system.

Gone are the juicy slabs of beef and chargrilled chickens, replaced by grains, pulses and clever ways to cook tofu.

Quite a U-turn, I suggest when I meet them, though the pair – these days more slimline than ever – stress that they are not full-time vegetarians. They stay away from meat for about four days a week and say they’re enjoying the variety that veggie cooking brings to their diets.

‘This is a veggie book for meateaters,’ Si, 50, says. ‘Simple as that.’

Dave, 59, adds: ‘When I was growing up, especially when I was a student in the 1980s, vegetarian food was a plate of brown stuff.’

Si continues: ‘And you got bored halfway through it. What we’ve done is make great-tasting food that just happens to be less calorific and have no meat. It’s full of texture, flavour, seasonality – and that’s what we do.

‘Even when we make our veggie versions of meat dishes that we love, they are not substitutes trying to replace meat, but vegetarian versions that don’t need it. For example, our mushroom pie with chestnuts is so rich, so creamy. Love a steak and kidney pie? Have this instead and you don’t feel cheated.’

THE pair say their conversion wasn’t a conscious decision. They met up at the end of last summer and discovered that they had each been eating green for weeks without realising. Si explains: ‘Dave and I chatted over the summer holidays – he lives in France and I had been in Italy – and we talked about what we had eaten. I said to him, “You know what, I’ve been out here for a month, and I’ve hardly had any meat at all.” And he said, “You know what, King, neither have I.”’

Dave says: ‘We realised that we had lost weight while being away for the summer, still eating a lot, eating healthy, but hardly any meat. We are still overweight but we are not morbidly obese any more.

‘Some of these dishes are about 220 calories, so you can actually eat double,’ he adds with a chuckle.

Si interjects: ‘As with all our books, we’ve stuck to ingredients that you get in the normal supermarket.’

Summing up their mission, Dave claims: ‘We want to enthuse people about giving veg a go. Trust us. Do it.’

Are they right? Why not try these five mouthwatering recipes from the book and decide for yourself…

The Hairy Dieters Go Veggie, by Si King and Dave Myers, is published by Orion at £14.99. Order your copy for £11.24 (25 per cent discount) until June 4 at www.mailbookshop.co.uk, or call 0844 571 0640.