SAVOUR & SIP
FOOD FOR THOUGHT SIMPLICITY IS KEY TUCK INTO THE MONTH WITH MARK POYNTON, ACCLAIMED CAMBRIDGE-BASED CHEF AND DEBUT AUTHOR OF IT’S JUST FOOD
THE KITCHEN TIPS Taste your food as much as possible. It’s something all chefs will say: taste your food, season it, taste again. There are a couple of things you will always need in a kitchen: always have an oven thermometer. Buy a good spatula, make sure you’ve got steel and keep your knives sharp. I’m forever going out to get my steels to sharpen the knives, because you don’t just damage yourself with blunt equipment, you damage the food as well. THE RECIPE We’re getting to the end of game season, the end of root vegetable season. Get a fatty cut of venison from one of your local butchers (Mill Road Butchers, maybe), cook it as slow as you can with loads of red wine, carrots, onions, celery, leek and garlic in a slow cooker or pressure cooker and shred it all down so it’s a bit like a bolognese mix or ragu. Get one of those spiralising machines and spiralise a root vegetable like carrot, celeriac, swede or turnip and put that through your ragu mix so you’ve got a spaghetti bolognese-style mix – which is super seasonal, super fresh and gluten-free – then finish it with loads of parmesan.
THE STORY It wasn’t until I really started working in fine dining – Juniper in Manchester, my first Michelin-starred restaurant – that I realised food can be so much more than just someone’s dinner. It’s interesting to think back to those days because I always simply cooked because people wanted food and it was just a job. But head chef Paul Kitching made me think about why we’re doing what we’re doing, why food combinations go together and how we can do something different. Eight and a half years at Midsummer House led on to 18 years at Alimentum – that’s 18 years of my life and I’m only 42. Cambridge is my home. I think it’s a fantastic place. The produce is amazing; we’re very lucky that we’re by the sea and we’ve got this amazing pork, amazing lamb. We’re close enough to everything in East Anglia to be a base for other people to come and see. I don’t think a lot of people look at East Anglia as a top destination, but it really is. I think we should shout about it a bit more. THE BOOK I was doing a dinner in Birmingham and Andy Richardson was taking pictures on
the day. We got chatting and he said: ‘I’m a publisher as well as a food photographer, I would be really interested in getting your thoughts on a cookbook.’ With the opening of MJP @ The Shepherds, it seemed like the right time. By that point, I’d been cooking for 25 years. I’d love to inspire people to want to cook with It’s Just Food . When I was writing recipes, I got my 12-year-old son to read all of them. If he could follow, I knew I was going down the right path. THE NAME When I cook for people, I get lots of compliments: ‘Oh, that’s amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever had.’ Some people say, ‘You should go on MasterChef, ’ which I think is nonsense. It’s just food at the end of the day, I’m just feeding you and want you to be happy. That’s where the title came from. THE PHILOSOPHY My food philosophy has simplified during my career. Now it’s just about taking the best produce possible and cooking it in the most sympathetic way while getting the best flavour out of it. With amazing food, the less you do to it the better it is.
SEASONAL PAIRINGS Mark’s modus operandi is to work with ingredients that are in season, aiming to complement their natural flavours
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