A Seasonal Supper
Led by Head Chef Sean Fleming, Bureau’s kitchen team produce, pickle and preserve their store cupboard staples in-house, meaning they’re dab hands at turning a few simple ingredients into showstopping plates of food (they even make their own goats’ curd). Here, Sean shares two surprisingly simple recipes from Bureau’s Spring Supper Clubs for a decadent meal at home with minimal effort.
Journalist, author and food obsessive Michael Pollan concluded that one should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” in order to maintain a healthy diet and not knacker the planet. It’s a simple, if brief, philosophy, and one shared by Sean Fleming, Bureau’s Head Chef—although he’d probably stress that the food you eat should also be delicious. Sean doesn’t fit the egotistical image of a chef we’re accustomed to seeing on screens and in some high-end open kitchens, and his approach to food is pragmatic, emphasising simplicity and seasonality above all else.
“I think a menu should be a reaction to need rather than a reflection of personality,” he says. “I don’t ever want to be bogged down with too much technique or over complicate a recipe for the sake of it.”
But a few techniques learned well allow a chef, and a home cook, to be flexible in their approach to cooking, and to take a few simple, seasonal ingredients and transform them into a knockout meal. It’s this subtle alchemy that underpins the flavours on show at Bureau Supper Clubs, and that Sean wants to impart through the recipes he shares.
“As you develop as a chef, it’s very important that you understand seasonality, for sustainability, cost and crucially, for flavour.” That way you can take a basic ingredient like red cabbage, salt it, pickle it, and turn it into something crisp and acidic that can elevate a spring dish. Or once you’ve mastered the art of confit, you’ll be able to preserve the sweetest spring lamb to be enjoyed when the season is just a distant memory (Sean also swears by confit pig’s ear for the more experimental home cook). So turn up the heat, get the fat rendering, and prepare to be wowed by your newfound skills.
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LANCASHIRE HOTPOT
(Serves 4 as a main)
Ingredients:
– 4–6 lamb or mutton cutlets (best-end or middle-neck)
– 400g diced lamb or mutton (neck fillet or shoulder)
– 3 large floury potatoes (Maris Piper or King Edward)
– 2 sprigs of thyme, leaves picked
– 1 bay leaf
– 2 onions, finely sliced
– 500ml lamb stock
– 20g melted butter, plus extra to grease
– Flour, sugar, salt and pepper, to dust
Preheat the oven to 170C. Dust the meat lightly with flour and sprinkle with a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper, then set aside.
Peel and thinly slice the potatoes.
Butter a high-sided casserole dish and arrange about a third of the potatoes in the bottom. Season and sprinkle with a little thyme.
Top with the meat and bay leaf, followed by the onions, seasoning each layer with salt, pepper and thyme as you go.
Arrange the remaining potato slices on top of the onions like overlapping fish scales, and season with salt and pepper.
Pour over the stock until the liquid reaches the base of the potato topping, then brush the potatoes with melted butter.
Cover with tin foil or greaseproof paper and bake for two hours (2 1/2 if using mutton), then uncover and bake for another 30 minutes, until the potatoes are golden and crisp.
Serve and enjoy with pickled red cabbage.
BAKED RICE PUDDING
(Serves 4)
Ingredients:
– 850ml whole milk
– 285ml double cream
– 1 vanilla pod, split
– 110g short-grain white rice
– 25g golden caster sugar
– 2 strips lemon zest
– 1 tbsp butter, for greasing the dish
– 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg, for topping
Preheat the oven to 150C.
Lightly butter a 1.25-litre oven-proof pudding dish or a 20cm x 20cm baking dish.
Combine the milk and cream in a saucepan. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod using the back of a knife, add them to the milk/cream mix and stir. Drop in the vanilla pod. Heat the milk and cream through very gently; do not let it boil. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 5 minutes. Remove the vanilla pod and discard.
Spread the rice and sugar in the buttered dish. Pour over the warmed milk and stir thoroughly. Add the lemon strips and stir again. Grate a generous layer of nutmeg on top.
Put the dish on a baking sheet and carefully place in the centre of the preheated oven. Bake the pudding for 2 to 2½ hours, until it turns creamy, thick and forms a skin of nutmeg on top.
Remove from the oven and set aside for 15 minutes to cool.
Serve the rice pudding on its own or with stewed fruit such as poached pears or roasted rhubarb. You could also add a dollop of homemade jam if you’re the kind of person who regularly has homemade jam to hand.
Confit Anything
Less a recipe, more a culinary skill that will allow you to prepare myriad meat dishes in the blink of an eye, confit is traditionally used to preserve meat in its own fat by rendering and then slow-cooking it at a low temperature. Once you’ve mastered the meat, you can preserve any food in fat in the same way.
Fats and Oils
The most important element of a confit is fat. The process of slow rendering in grease kills off microorganisms and makes it hard for them to return, allowing you to store your confit ingredients for months at a time. Special attention should also be paid to the temperature and storage during the preservation process to ensure you don’t risk botulism (the bacterial enemy of all anaerobic preserving techniques).
Common fats used in a confit include duck, goose, chicken and olive oil, but you can make use of whatever fat you have available. What’s crucial is that you have enough fat to fully submerge whatever ingredient you want to confit, so while a fatty cut of meat will render sufficient fat for you to confit with ease, if you have a lean cut of meat, or are confiting vegetables or herbs, you’ll need to get hold of some extra grease.
Slow Cooking
After the meat or vegetable is submerged in fat, it is cooked at a low temperature for a few hours. In the classic example of duck confit, the duck thighs are arranged skin side up over a mixture of salt with garlic cloves and herbs, refrigerated for a period of time, then simmered with duck fat in the oven for two to three hours.
What Can You Confit?
Ingredients that best fit the confit process follow the flavour profile and physical structure of foods like fatty meats, starchy vegetables, and citrus and stone fruits. But don’t be shy, most foods can be made more delicious by submerging and slow cooking them in fat.
