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  • Sometimes you want to pull out all the stops to impress, but that doesn't mean cooking has to be stressful.

  • People often presume that to have a restaurant quality meal you've got to put hours and hours of work in and it's not the case.

  • I've been working on the most delicious recipe.

  • This is a mid-week meal that is so fresh and delicious and it looks amazing.

  • It's a 10 minute meal and it's a lovely piece of cod, I've got lovely seasonal asparagus and we're making an amazing version of a hollandaise and it's embracing the much loved avocado.

  • This is a hollandaise like you've never seen before.

  • Really easy, no splitting and when you see it all together I think you're going to love it and it's healthy as well, full of colour.

  • So first up, normally with a classic hollandaise you'd have vinegar or lemon juice and you'd kind of fragrance that with herbs, black peppercorns and stuff like that.

  • So I'm going to kind of go down that alley, right.

  • I'm going to take spring onions instead of shallots and I'll just take the green part and just slice that up like that and put that into a pan.

  • I'm then going to add the juice of half a lemon straight into there and a little swig of white wine vinegar.

  • So that's going to give you the tang and acidity that works so well with fish.

  • So lemon juice goes in, catch any pips like that.

  • A pinch of black pepper, I'll take a little salt as well and then I'm going to add a little kiss of water, about 100ml and we're just going to let that infuse.

  • So that'll come up to the boil, we don't need any more time than that.

  • Let's just talk about the condimental sauce and it's golden, it's silky, it's delicious and it's all about emulsifying egg yolks with fat, butter.

  • It can split when you're making it if you're not really careful and it can split when you keep it warm when you're doing your dinner parties.

  • So I'm going to take all of that away, please do not stress.

  • Now normally when you do a hollandaise what you would do is get your egg yolks and beat it and whisk it over a bain marie, which is a little pot of boiling water and then add your clarified butter along with this.

  • I'm going to simplify it much, much more.

  • So I'm going to take the egg and the egg yolk I'll put straight into this little liquidiser.

  • At the same time I'm going to take our source of fat, we're not using butter, we're going to use avocado, a nice ripe avocado.

  • So simply get a knife, cut it very carefully down to the stone and then just click it out like that.

  • You can give it a little tap with a knife, stone comes out and take that beautiful vivid green avocado out and that goes in and actually the texture and fibre in the avocado really stabilises the whole thing, it takes the risk out.

  • The herb I'm going to keep you know pretty classic with some lovely tarragon.

  • Now the truth is you can have fun with this if you wanted to do mint or basil or parsley or marjoram, you can.

  • Tarragon has got that aniseed kind of flavour which is very good with asparagus and fish.

  • Three or four sprigs go in, I'll put that to one side.

  • As soon as that water, lemon and vinegar has come to the boil we're good to go.

  • We'll go into our blender very carefully, get all those lovely bits of spring onion, that goes in.

  • So no more whisking right, no more vulnerability, no more possibility of splitting and although I'll be banned from France for life for doing this recipe, it is a really clean, beautiful, silky, elegant sauce.

  • Look at that colour, vivid green, silky smooth.

  • So give it a nice little whazz up and that's it, that's the sauce done.

  • Look at this guys.

  • This would be the bit where normally you're worried about splitting it.

  • It's delicious, really, really good.

  • I'll adjust the seasoning, very important and I'll put just a little extra boiling water in this just to adjust the consistency to your liking.

  • So I'll just buzz this up just to make it a little bit lighter.

  • The colour is just amazing, look at that.

  • The perfume from the tarragon and the tang of the vinegar and the lemon juice is going to be so good with the fish.

  • Now you can serve this hot, warm or even room temperature okay, so I'm going to keep it just warm for the moment.

  • So that's the first part of the recipe, very simple.

  • The next bit, which is kind of the end of the recipe, we're going to cook the fish and asparagus.

  • So we'll get that on full whack in the same pan and we're going to steam.

  • So steaming is a beautiful, elegant, very healthy, clean method of cooking right and I think it's particularly good with fish.

  • So I'm going to add just a centimetre of water to a pan and bring that to the boil.

  • Now I've got two lovely portions of cod here.

  • You could have pollock, megrum, whatever is sustainable, whatever is local.

  • You know you can have real fun with this but what I have to do in this recipe is cook the asparagus at the same time as the fish.

  • So this is about four minutes right.

  • I reckon that's going to take about five minutes.

  • So you can control how quickly your fish cooks by how you choose to cut it and it's as simple as cut it in half.

  • Now when I steam that, that's four minutes.

  • That's going to cook at the same time as that and this asparagus is beautiful.

  • It's really nice seasonal veg.

  • What I want to do is take that A stew, fantastic in broths or you can even compost it.

  • We should all be composting.

  • And this asparagus will now go on the bottom of the pan and become a trivet for putting the fish on top.

  • I want to season the cod with some salt all over.

  • I don't want to do it with pepper because I want it to stay pearly white and clean.

  • So put your fish like that How beautiful is that?

  • And then lid on top.

  • So we're boiling on the bottom and we're steaming on the top.

  • This is going to be amazing.

  • Four minutes, that's it.

  • Four minutes, couple of minutes.

  • Mate, we're doing really well.

  • So let's do kind of what you would call a garnish.

  • Let me just wash my hands and clean my knife.

  • So I'll take these two white parts of the base of two spring onions, cut them in half and try and use your best knife skills just to slice them up as thin as you can.

  • Now a nice little tip here is if you get some ice water, these will all curl up and go extra crunchy and that will apply to anything crunchy you want to slice up.

  • It could be a radish, it could be a chilli, it could be even herbs.

  • Literally just water and a few ice cubes is all you need.

  • And now I just want to pick a few leaves of that tarragon.

  • Just sort of helps finish it off really nicely.

  • Give that a little mix.

  • Now I can't help myself but to put a little bit of chilli in there as well.

  • Just a couple of bits of chilli.

  • But you can see, look at the colours.

  • Just gorgeous.

  • And couple of tablespoons goes on.

  • Just use the back of the spoon just to kind of move it around a little bit.

  • Then the fish comes off.

  • Right, it's done.

  • Look at the lovely chunks of cod.

  • Be delicate with them.

  • Get your lovely asparagus and place this like that on top.

  • And this probably feels more pedantic than I would normally do, but I don't care because I'm kind of excited.

  • Place the fish on top.

  • Some of this lovely spring onion, chilli and tarragon and just whip off the cold water.

  • And we'll just kind of hold that on top like that.

  • And that's it.

  • And even if you do this badly and roughly, it will be beautiful.

  • Really fresh, really healthy, really vivacious.

  • A little kiss of lovely olive oil.

  • And that is a beautiful, beautiful dish.

  • In the middle of the week, come on darling, want a little bit of lunch.

  • There you go.

  • Oh what's that?

  • Oh I've got a nice little avocado hollandaise.

  • Oh what you been doing now?

  • Oh you're seconds.

  • Lovely steamed fish and asparagus.

  • Oh you must have worked so hard.

  • Seconds, well minutes.

  • So there we go.

  • I think it's fresh, it's really healthy and super beautiful.

  • Just look at that.

  • Right, let's get in there.

  • Let's just get the perfect little mouthful.

  • Bit of asparagus, bit of sauce.

  • Let's have a little bit of tarragon.

  • You still get that richness from the avocado.

  • The tang from the lemon juice and the vinegar is so good.

  • And then that method of steaming the fish, look how it just flakes.

  • Look at that.

  • It just literally flakes apart.

  • So delicate.

  • It's a lovely little mouthful.

  • It's full of flavour, full of texture.

  • Classy, really classy.

  • And the three things work so well together.

  • Wow, what a dish.

Sometimes you want to pull out all the stops to impress, but that doesn't mean cooking has to be stressful.

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