Start the clock as the red tomato and green pepper kitchens are back
Rylan Clark-neal, new host of rebooted Ready Steady Cook talks about the return of the daytime show
Are you ready? The ultimate reboot is on: Rylan Clark-neal is hosting the newly updated version of Ready Steady Cook – the daytime telly show that sees contestants hand a random bag of ingredients to a chef, and expects them to create something genuinely tasty.
Formerly hosted by Fern Britton and then Ainsley Harriott, the original incarnation ended in 2010, but now presenter and X Factor competitor Clark-neal is working the red tomato and green pepper kitchens.
Alongside him, chefs Anna Haugh, Akis Petretzikis, Romy Gill, Ellis Barrie and Mike Reid are taking on timed challenges, which are also factoring in budget cooking, healthy eating and food waste.
Here’s what you need to know...
Many of the show’s stars watched the original when they were growing up...
“I’m 31, so Ready Steady Cook for me was 4:30pm, just got home from school and it’s on, and there’s Ainsley giving it the shake. That was my childhood! I always gauged what time of day it was from Ready Steady Cook,” says Clark-neal, while Haugh says she’d never have believed it if someone had told her that, 20 years on from watching the show, she’d be on it.
The chefs were treated to some difficult ingredients to turn into meals...
Barrie raised his eyebrows at being given a pack of ready salted crisps, while Gill had to work with sumac, which was a new one for her.
“I’m asking questions that you sat at home would ask,” says Clark-neal. “What is sumac? I don’t know what sumac is! But now I do.”
There are times when the chefs really regret the direction they’ve taken with their ingredients...
“Every time!” says Petretzikis. “Why did I do that?!”
“There were genuinely times when I’m going, ‘There’s one-minute left, and in the green kitchen Romy is working with a pineapple, a halibut and some broccoli’
– but I’m looking and the halibut is still raw on the side, wrapped in its paper, not even opened,” recalls Clarkneal. “But somehow, a peeler comes out and boom, it’s sashimi!”
It’s a competition, but things don’t get nasty between the chefs...
“It’s a competition, but there’s no rivalry,” says Haugh. “So, when you’re coming in and competing, you’re enjoying it. You’re not worried that you won’t be good enough.”
Barrie says the time pressure means “you can’t look up to see what everybody else is doing” anyway. “It’s a competition, but you’re literally competing against the best version of yourself,” he adds.
They’re hoping to factor in the personality of the contestant as well as make something good to eat...
“We’re trying to create dishes to match the contestants,” explains Haugh. “It’s not just the food that we want to cook. If somebody comes along and has something they’re really excited about learning, or maybe has a special dietary need, or one of mine was a mother and she wanted something for her kids – you’re really trying to think; you can’t just cook what you want.”
The show is really hot on recycling, sustainability and limiting plastic use...
“If we could be 100 per cent plastic-free, we would be. Unfortunately, still in this day and age, it’s very, very difficult to do that,” says Clark-neal. “But we are being sustainable; I’ve never worked on a show like it. I mean, I like a bottle of Evian; to try and get a bottle of Evian, it’s like a drug deal. It was crazy.”
“The produce was amazing to work with,” Barrie adds, noting how a lot of the food used during filming is freerange, organic, and locally sourced. “We were hitting up small fishmongers.”
There were a few disasters during filming...
According to Haugh, they really “don’t stop the clock” when something goes wrong, meaning Gill had to juggle too many dishes while making paratha (buttery Indian flatbreads) and working out how to involve peanut butter. Barrie lucked out when his pastry worked, despite the fact he’d accidentally turned the oven off; and Petretzikis managed to break two ovens.
“I didn’t have any food disasters!” he says with a laugh. “I just destroyed everything.”
“He’s so heavy handed,” says Clark-neal, who was roped in to hold the oven door shut for him “for fear of a chicken not being cooked.”
Some of the dishes they come up with are truly impressive...
“The food was banging,” says Barrie. “We all kept waiting just to eat all the dishes – we’d be running back on set.”
“I made a black forest gateau in 20 minutes,” says Haugh proudly, while Gill whipped up samosas in just 10 minutes, and Barrie says: “I made a great little Italian pavlova – that was naughty.” Meanwhile, Petretzikis adds again jokily: “I broke two ovens!”
● Ready Steady Cook is set to air on BBC One at 4:30pm on weekdays from today and afterwards on BBC iplayer.