- Toodle pip, top of the morning.
We're at Lord's. It's 8:30 in the morning.
Lord's is our second restaurant.
The popularity of Dame definitely
led to some pressure opening Lord's. (pan sizzling)
The sophomore album's definitely harder
than the first album.
Everyone's a critic on the second album.
The expectations are through the roof.
And so we've really gotta nail it.
(upbeat music)
All right, so we're going to start our pig's head terrine.
I did a very ridiculous photo shoot
with a photographer friend of ours,
where we were like dressed up in tuxedos and bow ties
with playing around with pig's heads.
Me and my wife were very glamorous that day.
We get our pigs from a few different farms.
They're Berkshire hogs, normally.
We get these ones from Pennsylvania.
So into the pig's head braise,
obviously, we'll plop the head in.
Add some thyme and parsley. A little onion.
Season it with salt and some cracked pepper.
Doesn't need much at all, you know?
The fattiness and the richness of the head,
we want that to shine through.
Now we're going to ladle in a little chicken stock as well,
to moisten the pan.
We're going to wrap it in foil,
and it's going to keep the moisture in,
then we're going to braise this for six to eight hours.
The fun part about using the heads of the animal
is that that's where all the flavor is.
It's all concentrated there.
We get the pig that's split in half
so they cook more evenly.
Okay, so you can see the skin has gone really nice
and soft and tender on the outside.
You can feel like, this wobble is what you're looking for.
So, picking the meat from the head.
Start by removing skin,
and then we're going to take the skin
and chop it up very finely.
And we'll mix that in through with the terrine.
There are so many different textures in the pig's head.
It's like that scene in "Goodfellas", you're like,
"Yeah, I got a leg, I got a wing". (chuckles)
Like that, but with a pig's head.
So like a vulture,
the skull's being picked pretty clean.
And that's sort of the goal of the thing, you know?
And you see, out of that half a pig's head,
this is all the meat.
So it's not too much, but this is full of flavor.
Few chives, a little bit of parsley,
and then all that reduced stock from the pig's head,
all used to moisten it.
Now this pig's head will go into our terrine mold.
Okay, so here's a terrine that we made a little earlier.
See, it's set up pretty nicely,
and you can see the little different bits of the pig's head.
The purpose of making the terrine out of the pig's head
is it becomes a little more appetizing.
You know, you're eating a pig's face.
You're just eating it in a way
that might be a little more palatable to you.
And when you make these terrines,
you have to weigh 'em down a little bit,
so that they set nice and firm.
All right, so now we're going to cook off our black pudding,
or what's also known as blood sausage.
I think a lot of diners are raised with the expectations
that the food they eat should look like it never came
from an animal, which is very sad to me.
Very unnatural process.
We're going to cook these down until
they thicken a little more.
Add a little bit of butter for some creaminess,
then we'll plate up.
These beans are now nice and they're still brothy and sticky
but they've thickened up a little bit and they're rich.
Add the pig's head.
We'll dress it with a little bit of olive oil.
And this parsley and shallot salad, shallot salad,
will add a little brightness and freshness to the plate.
See? I'm becoming American.
You see how crispy it is?
And then how soft and sticky and tender
that is in the middle. Full of flavor.
A nose-to-tail restaurant is one that uses
every part of the animal,
and it's a more thoughtful way of approaching cooking.
It's about respect.
It's about, if you're going to kill the creature,
you should use every part of it.
It's also about flavor.
We're going to make our ox cheek, carrot, and Stilton pie.
You can see these are very fatty,
very nicely marbled cheeks.
Think about the cow chomping away,
chewing grass all day long.
Ox cheeks are particularly suitable
for braising because they're so tough
and they have so much collagen in those cheeks
that they need a long, slow, cooking process.
So we cook these cheeks off the day before.
We do it in large batches,
regulates the temperature of the braise a little better.
It's much more flavorful than something from the inside
that barely works at all, like a tenderloin would be.
And we would choose flavor over texture any day of the week.
So we'll start searing these cheeks off now.
I think the British meat pies become part
of our national psyche.
It's such a rich and comforting plate of food.
In a country that's pretty famous for its gray
and rainy weather all the time,
there's few things that are more soul-warming
than a meat pie.
The purpose of searing these off before we braise them
is to introduce more flavor into them.
Develop that Maillard reaction on the outside,
get them nice and brown. It's going to be more delicious.
I think as far as beef goes,
cheeks are one of my favorite things to eat.
Now once these have nice color all the way around,
we're going to take 'em out and put 'em in our braising pot.
So in the States, most animals are fed corn
for the majority of their lives.
And in Europe and most of the rest of the world,
it's grass most of their lives,
which is a more natural diet.
That's why you get very, very fatty American steaks,
but quite low on flavor,
just full of fat and loaded with carbohydrate.
And in the UK, you get a sort of richer,
more robust, beefier flavor.
So we look for that flavor,
but we can't find it in the rib-eyes, the strip steaks here.
We have to look in the off-cuts.
These are the pig's trotters.
And we add these as the base of a lot
of the different cooking here.
This pig's trotter becomes
this chopped pig's trotter braise.
It's a technique Fergus Henderson at St. John developed
to add depth of flavor to braises and stews.
Okay, so the beef cheeks have all been braised
in a big batch.
We do that overnight. Gives you a nice shot,
you can see how meltingly soft and tender these are.
Six hours of cooking and here you go, one beef cheek.
To make the sauce, we're going to add some stewed carrots.
Now this is another reason we braise instead of slow-roast
or something.
We get all this liquid that's so flavorful,
and when we reduce it down and mix it into the pie,
it makes it so much more delicious.
Chives and parsley. We use a lot of that in British cooking.
And after it's chilled, it turns into this.
When this gets hot in the oven, all of this gelatin
and the sauce that's stuck to the beef is going to melt
and form the gravy that defines it.
You'll see it when we cut into it.
Then we'll add little bits of blue cheese, little chunks.
And we're going to stud this in throughout.
This is an entree-sized portion
and it's to warm you on a cold winter's night.
Okay, now we're ready to top it.
The thing that ties all of them together
is the beef suet crust on top too,
which is a quintessential part of a meat pie in England.
Crust has to be made with with beef fat in the pastry.
It's suet fat from the kidneys around the cow.
The richest kind of fat that you can get,
but also the cleanest in flavor.
And you really wanna seal it nice and tight
so that the beef can steam,
and all that cheese in there can melt
and that sauce can get nice and piping hot.
It's egg yolk and heavy cream.
And it'll bring some color
and form a nice crust on the edge of the pastry.
Brush it all around nice and evenly.
Now I'm going to score it.
And the only reason to do this is so it looks pretty.
The meat pies are one of the most popular items
we have here.
It's what people are seeing as a Lord's classic.
(upbeat music)
Duck is a little misunderstood as a protein
because people just focus on the breast, or the leg,
and ignore all the other delicious parts of the duck.
The ducks are Rohan ducks from D'Artagnan,
a little farm, upstate New York.
So we're going to use the duck in two preparations.
The first one is a dish with leg meat and offal.
So the way we prepare it here
is making a sausage out of every part of it,
apart from the breasts,
which we'll then cure
and turn into a prosciutto-esque-style charcuterie item.
Okay, the bones of the carcasses,
we'll roast off as stock later.
And we'll start making the the duck farce now.
Duck farce would just mean ground duck meat.
We're going with like a country-style meatball here,
like through pretty coarse die
and just using the most intensely flavored parts
of the duck.
So this is all the leg meat now, diced up.
These are the gizzards and liver and the duck heart.
Just before we put 'em through the grinder,
we're going to soak them in a little cream.
And we get the offal with the ducks too.
We'll process them separately.
We're going to take our duck in panade downstairs
and get it ground.
Corner!
There's no "chef" or any of that stuff.
This is Nemi, captain of the eggs.
This is Dagoberto.
Longtime followers will remember Dago
from the last video at Dame.
He works at Lord's now.
We've been together five years now.
By using the whole animal,
you're introducing a lot of work,
a lot of labor into this equation.
So I have to have a much larger team. People who I trust.
Delegating to them and watching them grow and inspiring me,
and us inspiring each other as a team.
By using all the gizzards,
using the livers, using the hearts,
these are all the really delicious parts of the duck.
Grinding that with the leg and the fat,
that adds body, it adds texture.
It makes just a more intensely flavored duck thing.
You're going to mix it together with your hand
and emulsify it.
You want to be careful not to overwork the sausage too much.
You don't want it to be too crumbly.
Well, with the duck entree,
we wanted to showcase the whole duck
in a creative preparation.
So we said,
"Well, let's make the cabbage the star of the show."
And chou farci, especially in winter,
that's what it's called in French, is very, very popular.
I'm going to wrap it,
and it's a very similar technique to making a burrito.
Little pillows, duck pillows.
And these will go in the oven, 20 minutes.
A lot of restaurants serve a seared duck breast on a plate,
and that's just, in my mind, a little dull.
This is a rough mash of swede,
what you guys would call rutabaga, and potato.
Okay, so the chou farcis have been braising,
20, 30 minutes now.
And I add a couple of brandied prunes in there.
You see they're getting some nice color on top.
And this sauce is getting nice and thick.
And we're going to glaze the chous with the port.
The port pairs really well with the offal too,
brings a nice sweetness to it.
All right, so let's plate up.
These beautiful vintage plates
are not allowed to drop on the floor.
Two of these to an order. And each one gets a little prune.
We'll add the clapshot.
So the sauce almost looks like chocolate, it's so rich.
Some crispy sage to finish it, to bring a little texture,
'cause British food gets a reputation
for being a little brown and drab.
I can't imagine why. (chuckles)
I have pretty brutal childhood memories
of takeaway Scotch eggs from an M&S
before we go on a long train ride.
And you know, just like gray egg yolks on the inside,
really overcooked sausage,
just unpleasant, stale breadcrumbing.
So we try and do a nice version here.
You know, we cook the eggs for six minutes and 20 seconds.
Six minutes and 15 seconds is not long enough,
and six minutes and 25 is too long.
We're just going to pull 'em out. Straight into ice water,
and that'll stop the cooking process straight away.
Scotch egg, at its core, is an egg,
and then wrapped in a meat sausage of some sort,
and then breadcrumbed and deep-fried.
They're like the quintessential British snack.
This is a lamb's shoulder that we bone and grind in-house,
and then we mix it in with a curry paste.
We make it with ginger, garlic, shallots
and then a bunch of Madras-style spices.
And this is an homage to the original Scotch egg.
So you need to make sure it's all evenly packed
around the egg so that the sausage will cook evenly.
And you're cooking it blind, you know.
It's going to be breadcrumbed and deep-fried,
so you can't check it until you cut it open.
And if at that point it's wrong, then you're pretty screwed.
We go through 50, 60 Scotch eggs a night.
This is a small restaurant.
We only have 50, 60 tables a night.
So, they're on every table.
Now they've been in for seven minutes,
we can pull 'em out.
This is an herby creme fraiche sauce
we put on the bottom of the plate,
just to bring some acid
and balance out the spiciness a little bit.
So see, that's the perfect egg.
The sausage is evenly coated around it, nicely cooked.
And then the egg's still jammy and runny in the middle.
Now I don't want to toot my own horn,
but it's a pretty good Scotch egg, I think.
This is like the revenge for all the bad Scotch eggs
that I had growing up.
So I'm glad these ones are coming out well.
We're getting ready for service now.
The whole team's here, all the night-time guys.
So you say hi to all of them.
I mean, my growth as a chef recently
has been driven by the great team of people
I have around me.
Really acting as more of a leader and an employer
and less of an employee.
A little difficult for me to grow into that role,
but I think I'm achieving it a little bit better now.
Always need to keep everything consistent,
we finish the meal with very traditional British desserts.
This one we're going to do right now is a Queen of Puddings,
named, I think,
because the little meringue pipes look like a crown.
The difference between opening the second restaurant
versus the first one,
is the size of the second one
makes it much more challenging
to be on top of every element.
So, I'm learning to grow as they're learning to grow.
Giving them opportunities,
'cause this kind of food we're cooking at Lord's,
is food I grew up cooking in the UK, grew up eating.
It's food I love. It's definitely a learning process.
No one's perfect at it.
And we make mistakes along the way,
but we try and learn and grow from them.