Cooking tips from Mill Road's Masterchef

Chris was looking for a healthy, planet-friendly but delicious meal. Not being a cook, though, he needed some help. Luckily, he happens to know a former Masterchef finalist and went to see him...

Chris - So here I am on Mill Road in Cambridge and I'm outside Vanderlyle. This is the restaurant of Alex Rushmer, my go-to person whenever we have a food related quandary or challenge. So let's go in and see if he can help us. Hello Alex. Good to see you. It's been a while actually.

Alex - Pre pandemic. A lot's changed. I think we've both aged probably about 15 years.

Chris - Now you are my go-to person whenever we have a food related challenge and I've been set a challenge. We vaguely outlined this when we agreed to meet, but we're doing a programme about how to make food that a person wants to eat, so it's nice and tasty, but also is healthy for them and critically is also healthy for the planet. We're trying to eat better in all respects. And it suddenly occurred to me that that is essentially what you were trying to do, your key aims when you set up Vanderlyle.

Alex - You've absolutely nailed it. First and foremost, we want to cook tasty food. Really tasty, delicious food that's reasonably healthy. I don't want people to roll out of here feeling overstuffed and full of heavy fats and proteins. So we focus on vegetables, but also food that's in season, food that's locally sourced where possible. I'm not too dogmatic about it, but locally sourced if and when it makes sense. So that's it.

Chris - How easy is it to meet those obligations in terms of getting the produce that ticks the boxes you want to tick? Is that easy to do and run a viable business?

Alex - I thought this was going to be a real challenge, but we made it much easier for ourselves by only focusing on plants. So we are able to tick an awful lot of those boxes by cooking a vegetable focused, vegetable centric menu. And that's not to say we're a vegetarian restaurant because that's not part of our philosophy, it just happens to be almost coincidental.

Chris - We did cook a chicken here once.

Alex - We did cook a chicken. It never made it onto the menu. But having that as a challenge and having those restrictions, I think, has made my cooking better and made it more interesting and made it more sustainable and made me think much more about the process. If you think about the foundations of classical French cooking, it's all meat based and stock-based and fish based, we had to throw all that out. We couldn't rely on those things. So we had to find ways to create those deep flavours, those textures, those satisfactory dishes and meals and menus without being able to use any animal protein.

Chris - It must be a bit like science in many respects when a scientist has a hypothesis and then they start doing experiments. Do you do food experiments to try to come up with different ways of cooking stuff and different combinations in order to make exciting things that I would want to eat?

Alex - Experimentation is really crucial to what we do and as you say, we begin with a hypothesis and for us that is the concept of a dish. And sometimes it's instinctive and sometimes it's based on empiricism and sometimes it's based on just some loose idea of a dish that we think might work. And then we go through a process of cooking and refining and changing and altering and often over the course of a two or three week period, a dish, even a dish on the menu, can change in incremental ways depending on the produce that we have available to us and depending on the cooking techniques. I think a good example is probably a chilli that we have on at the moment, which is made from strawberries, which sounds completely crazy, but we'd had a strawberry ragu on the menu for quite a long time and there was one morning when we came in and we said what would happen if we added spices to that? And cooking a ragu is a very similar process to cooking a chilli. It worked and it's now on the menu and we're doing a little dish of almost like a jacket potato with a strawberry chilli and some sour cream and some cheese. So it's very comforting and it's very familiar, but it's using ingredients and techniques in ways that are very unfamiliar and also allows us to use potatoes and strawberries, both of which are in season, both of which are sourced within 10 miles of the restaurant. So we're very happy to be able to showcase local produce in a really unexpected fashion.

Chris - So have you got anything I could cook that you think I am capable of knocking out?

Alex - I think that you should learn how to cook tempura vegetables. We are going to make a really super tasty, super simple tempura batter, which is something that people just don't do at home because they think it's challenging and they think it's something that they can only eat in a specialist restaurant. I'm not saying it's going to be in any way authentic, but it will be delicious. There's the fundamental lessons of making something delicious usually is, is it seasoned properly? And that means is it salted properly and does it have enough acidity? Because acidity is what keeps the palate alive and salt is what makes things taste delicious.

Chris - What do I do first?

Alex - We need to secure some seasonal vegetables, aubergine, broccoli, anything that steams well. Although it's being deep fried, the actual cooking process is done through a steam.

Chris - Right? I've written those down. We'll get James onto that in a minute. What do I do with them?

Alex - Wash them, peel them and then slice them into pieces that you think will cook within about two minutes or so when they're being fried.

Chris - So what a centimetre? Two centimetres?

Alex - Depending on the vegetable, you've got carrots, then I'd probably go with half a centimetre. But nice thin long slices because you want plenty of batter. So ratio is important here because you want the crunch of the batter but you also want the rigidity still in the vegetable, but it also has to be cooked.

Chris - It's the batter that's scaring me. The vegetables don't worry me, I cook them all the time, but the batter frightens me because I've never done this. So take me through it gently.

Alex - So essentially what you want to achieve in a tempura batter is lots and lots of air bubbles. To achieve that, we rely on a very simple chemical reaction between a base and an acid. We use a self raising flour, a gluten-free self raising flour, which already has some raising agents in it. To that we add a little bit extra bicarbonate of soda. We use soda water to make the batter, a touch of salt for seasoning. And then just before you batter the vegetables, I always add a touch of vinegar and I usually use white wine vinegar. And what the vinegar does is react with the bicarbonate of soda, creating lots and lots of delicious bubbles, which then activate in the fryer and give you a super light, super delicate batter on the veg. The first thing you see as the batter reacts with the hot oil, it will puff out and you'll get loads and loads of bubbles of carbon dioxide.

Chris - Well sitting here listening to all that is James Tytko from our team. Have you got all that, James?

James - Thanks Chris. Challenge accepted on the condition that I can solicit some help from someone I know will be able to offer some very well informed advice.

Alice - My name's Alice. I'm the manager of the Cambridge Food Hub and our purpose is to connect local producers in Cambridgeshire and its surrounding counties with businesses in Cambridge and primarily that's retailers but also cafes and coffee shops.

James - Thank you so much Alice. Down to business, we've got a task. Alex has set us an achievable recipe for a home cook. It's a version of the tempura dish they make at Vanderlyle. And the first ingredient on my shopping list is seasonal vegetables. And we're in the perfect place to acquire those at the Cambridge market in the middle of town. What should I be on the lookout for?

Alice - So you've picked a great time of year to use seasonal veg. This is like peak UK growing season, you've got calabrese like broccoli, it's local sweetcorn time of year as well, which is always exciting for people that grow that. French beans, loads of leafy green vegetables, spinach, lettuce, salad items. We're going to find this task okay, there's a lot of things growing at the moment.

James - So the mission is to make sure that as much of the food that ends up on the dinner plate is as good for the planet as possible. Is food miles the primary metric? I'm sure there are other factors as well, but is that the main one?

Alice - Food miles are important in that, like I said, we work with local farms, but I will say that in terms of judging the sustainability of a food product, particularly in terms of its embedded carbon, food miles are actually not so significant. Air freighting food is very bad for the environment, but shipping food is pretty low carbon, much more important is how food is produced. So, for example, if you get tomatoes that are grown in a heated greenhouse, so burnt fossil fuels to heat the greenhouse, even if they're grown locally, that's likely to be worse for the environment than if you've shipped tomatoes from somewhere where they are growing in season if it's a longer season, for example in Spain. But it's also about supporting the local food economy. It's about making sure that people feel connected to their food and also making sure that, as a country, we are resilient in being able to produce food for ourselves.

James - So, Alice, we've found a fruit and veg seller and he assures me that pretty much everything on the show here is locally produced and a whole lot of it's going to be seasonal as well, isn't it? We've got courgettes, broccoli, carrots, these are all the things you were mentioning. What looks good to you?

Alice - Yeah, I think I'd go for the courgettes, definitely. We've got courgettes coming out of our ears at the moment. There's so much of them being grown locally. Broccoli could be very nice. They've got a bunch of carrots here at the front.

James - Does freshness play a big part in taste?

Alice - Yeah, I think freshness is really important. The idea that we might pick up something from a farm on Monday and then somebody's eating it on Wednesday, so it's two days after it's been harvested vs if you've had to import something from another country, it's had to travel, it's likely to have had two weeks from it being harvested to it being eaten. But the impact that that has on taste really varies on what the food item is. So, for example, asparagus, a really classic seasonal product, you've got about six weeks where English or UK asparagus is in season and people know that is the time to eat asparagus. Outside of that you get it from Peru likely to have been air freighted because it's a fragile product. If it has taken a long time to get to your plate, then the sugars in this asparagus turn to starch and the taste of the product has changed. But, if you've got other vegetable items like peppers and aubergines, for example, classic Mediterranean vegetables, actually the taste can develop over time. But for a lot of things people who have their own gardens or allotments and grow their own food know that if you pick something and it's a perfect ripeness and it's perfectly fresh, it does taste amazing. But I do think when it comes to taste, what's really important is the variety of item that you are eating. So one variety of strawberry versus another. It isn't actually so much about where it's grown, that's just another thing to bear in mind. Some varieties are better quality and they do taste better and they've been bred for certain characteristics. And you can think about that when you're growing your own food at home as well.