Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey
BBC ONE, 9.00PM; SCOTLAND, 10.45PM
Two years ago, Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain launched the next phase of her TV career with The Chronicles of Nadiya, a semiautobiographical documentary exploring her Bangladeshi roots. This new two-part series attempts to emulate that show’s success, as Hussain travels to south-east Asia on another (purported) journey of self-discovery. She’s discovered, you see, via a DNA test, that she has Cambodian and Thai heritage. But all this ancestry business is really just a pretext for an amiable two-part cookery-show-cum-travelogue, in which Hussain cooks her way around both countries.
She delves into weird cuisine such as “cricket nachos”, and whips up her own adulterated recipe for pad Thai. It’s simply enthralling to watch her deploy her formidable cookery skills – the Paris-Brest she creates with Cambodian patisserie students is amazing – and she proves to be sweetly vulnerable too, as when, during several “pinch me” moments, she says things like, “Girls like me don’t do stuff like this!” This journey, in the end, is more about confidence than DNA.