The queen of roasting tin recipes tells ELLA WALKER about turning her gaze global for inspiration
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. Iyer 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.
And 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, Iyer considers flavour combinations and uses them to vault into new one-dish recipe realms.
Writing the book pre-coronavirus was also a good excuse to jump on a plane, to America, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Iyer 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.
A visit to the USA inspired Iyer’s baked polenta with prawns, aka shrimp and grits. “You’ve got really rich, cheesy, buttery polenta and the lovely texture of chillispiked prawns,” she buzzes. “It’s such a nice comfort dish.” While on a previous trip to the South, these “really amazing
100ml warm water A handful of flaked almonds To serve:
A handful of fresh mint
1. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan/200°C/gas 6.
2. Tip all the chermoula ingredients into a blender and blitz until combined. Taste and add a little more salt as needed. 3. Tip the peppers, aubergine, onion, cherry tomatoes with their vines and the chickpeas into a roasting tin large enough to more or less hold the vegetables in one layer. Mix through three-quarters of the chermoula, making sure to coat the vegetables evenly, then transfer to the oven and roast for 40 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, spread the remaining chermoula all over the tuna steaks, then return them to the fridge to marinate. Don’t wash the blender - tip in the raisins and water, stir and set aside. 5. Once the vegetables have had 40 minutes, tip in the raisins and liquid. Remove the tomato vines, squash down the tomatoes, then lay the tuna over the vegetables. Scatter over the almonds, then return to the oven for 10-12 minutes, until the tuna is just cooked and the almonds are crisp.
6. Scatter over the mint and serve.