Last month our associate outdoor chef Fin came to give his second masterclass of the year and cooked a full roast dinner for 10 hungry guests.
On the menu was roast salmon crostini’s, 4 rib of beef, leg of lamb with thyme and mint puree, goose fat roasties (obviously), cauliflower cheese and Yorkshire puddings. This last item proved a big talking point amongst the guests – which BBQ heat source would be best? (turns out the piping hot log fired pizza oven was triumphant) Hot or cold fat to start with? Ratio of milk to flour? It seems that everyone has a preferred method and a secret family recipe to achieve what they consider to be the perfect Yorkshire pud.
If you type “perfect roast dinner” into Google, you will come up with about 274 million results! However, we all decided that quality ingredients are key. Fin got the meat from Lakeland and Dexter the side of salmon was from Hendersons and all his veg was pure organic from a local farm shop.
We kicked off at midday, knowing that the meat joints would not be ready to come out until after 3pm. If you think that achieving the perfect roast dinner is a British obsession, the other great British fascination is the weather andthat day was a typical March Day; rainy, windy with moments of spring sunshine and a serendipitous rainbow that filled the sky over the Nursery just has all the food was serviced, making it very Instagramable moment. Luckily, our diners had followed the dress code and came appropriately attired with their own wine and beer for additional central heating.
It was a true team effort and to echo Fin’s social media account, we’d like to thank all the customers who came along as “without you guys it would not be possible to literally live the dream”.
