- Time for the Gs. (Barry and Ben growl)
(wheel clicking) (Barry laughing)
There's lots to choose from here.
There's only a couple of spin again.
Where are we going, where we going?
- Come on, come on.
Grenada? - Great place, great dish,
that's what we're after.
- Greece!
Guyana. - [Ben] Guyana!
- I don't even know where that is.
There!
- Guyana. (upbeat music)
- And a mystery board of tea towels.
- So a country in the north of South America.
- Yes, like touching Brazil, and that's about all I know.
- Let's have a look.
- Not where's the dish, but what's the dish?
- What we working with? - Oh, hello!
- Oh, is that a pig's trotter?
That's a pig's trotter.
- That is a pig's trotter.
And...
- Our favourite ingredient.
- Whenever we've done these A to Z
this crops up an awful lot.
(upbeat music)
- I don't think we've ever used this on the channel.
No, I think we've only used this on the channel once.
- What is it?
Is that vertebrae?
- Similar, it has something through the middle
that goes down and it's the opposite...
- It's a coin?
Tail.
- Yeah. - Is it pig's tail?
Is this all pork?
- Oxtail. - It's ox.
Okay, oxtail.
- I'm glad you got that from (meat slaps).
- Yeah.
- I regret doing it, because I've now got
raw meat on both sides of my hand.
Oxtail, pig's trotter, and some form of beef.
So we've got some brown sugar, spices,
scotch bonnet.
- Wiri Wiri chilies, a sun-dried chilli.
Am I going to do this?
- I don't think so.
You're probably gonna... - I did it.
- Wow, you shouldn't have done that.
Like all dried chilies...
- My goodness, it goes straight in your nose first.
- Why did you do that?
- I don't know.
I don't know.
- Small berry-shaped chilies.
- God, they're really fruity.
They're delicious, they're spicy.
- Distinctive taste, they're tomato-like.
Scoville rating of about 100,000-units,
(Mike yells)
which is comparable to a mild jalapeno.
- It feels like more than that.
It's really nasal heat.
- I know why I know these.
They look like little tomatoes, don't they?
(Mike coughs)
Bless you.
I was gonna grow these on my balcony,
and then I decided to go for Razzamatazz,
I wanted something other than the obvious
so I went for Razzamatazz instead.
- Ebbers, I'm gonna get straight into step one.
We've got recipe steps, we've got information cards.
Today we will be making Guyanese Pepperpot,
ever heard of that?
- No, but it must be a stew.
- Pepperpot, Guyana's national dish,
a beloved and time-honored dish in Guyanese culinary
and cultural traditions.
Oh, it's really hard to read
when your mouth is full of spice.
- Your nasal passage is offended.
- It's deeply rooted in the history of Guyana.
It's origins are intertwined
with the indigenous communities of the region,
and the culinary influences are African
and European traditions.
- Yeah.
- It's a dish with significant
cultural significance in Guyana
and often appears at holidays and celebrations.
Traditionally eaten on Christmas morning for breakfast.
Wow, that's a good Christmas breakfast.
- Merry Christmas.
I would associate a lot of these spices,
clove and cinnamon and brown spice and orange
with our own sort of Christmas celebrations.
- Step one, oh no, create your cassareep.
Peel and process cassava, juice and squeeze,
boil to a syrup and spice.
And then hints for cassareep, think molasses.
So step one, we know what we're doing,
you know what you're doing?
- Well, you've read it,
you know what you're doing as well.
- Great, let's set up and cook.
(upbeat music)
- So what's great about this series
is that we haven't used cassava an awful lot on the channel
in 13-years,
but we have now used it three-times in this series alone,
and we're only at the letter G.
- Yeah.
- But every time I remember having the conversation,
I'm pretty sure it's toxic raw, it's got cyanide in it.
- Don't eat it.
- And that's why we boiled it for Fufu,
then we baked it in the cake.
- Cook it out.
- And this time we're gonna basically
reduce it down to a syrup.
- So we're grating it.
We've covered a colander in a muslin.
And then basically we're gonna squeeze out all the juice
and then we're gonna boil that down over a high heat.
- Yeah.
- Oh!
It could take a while.
There we go.
- So my mate, Kush...
- Is he your mate?
- ...said, "When you see a job tomorrow
"that needs lots of doing,
"I've already done some for you."
- Oh, wonderful.
Let's cheat that.
- [Ben] See, does that make you feel better?
- [Mike] So much better.
- And that, thinking about where we are geographically,
look what's settled in the bottom of that.
- [Mike] Pure cyanide.
- No, it's very starchy,
and it's got cornflower vibes to it.
You're doing a great job there,
I'm gonna take this and start reducing it.
- Thanks, is that enough?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Next, oh goodness me.
Next step, create the Pepperpot,
pressure cook and then reduce to thicken.
Hints, think stew.
So we knew it was a stew because of the cuts of meat,
that's fine.
I'm gonna say all of these ingredients
into a pressure cooker.
We've got an orange,
so I'm gonna go with orange peel rather than whole orange.
Also reminds me when you do really meaty dishes,
I think feijoada, also South America,
a neighbouring country, lots and lots of meat.
The orange is a really good kind of digester, digestive.
- So we're going to essentially boil this
in the syrup and additional stock.
- Pressure cook, I think.
I think it's gonna have to be pressure cook,
or a long slow cook.
- Clearly not traditional, pressure cooking,
but we wanna eat this quick (laughs).
- It does the same job.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- It gets to the same place.
You're the king of chilies,
do you want to just start prepping,
chop some scotch bonnet,
but also we're gonna add our Wiri Wiri chilies.
We'll use one scotch bonnet,
and then we'll use a few of the Wiri Wiri chilies,
'cause I think that'll be more of the fruity.
Oh, we should probably hydrate those.
- I've hydrated them in my mouth,
I can feel them in my guts.
- They're a lovely shape and size, we reckon five?
- They are really delicious, like a real fruity taste.
Okay, right.
- Actually, right, I'm thinking on my feet here.
I'm gonna hydrate those in beef stock.
(upbeat music)
I'm thinking for this, this is not fine French cooking,
this is robust stews and casserole.
So I'm thinking rustic on the veg,
quite chunky on the onion.
We'll cook the oxtail and the beef as whole pieces,
the pig's trotter,
which will give it a wonderful gelatinous texture
as it cooks.
If we're making lots of cassareep, then therefore
it's gonna be quite a sweet savoury dish, right?
- Yeah.
- But spicy because of these.
- Do you think this is an all-in-one?
- Yeah, I think so.
The only instruction we've been given
is make the Pepperpot,
i.e. it must all be in one pot,
pressure cook, which we can do,
but that all has to be in one together,
and then it says reduce.
So I'm guessing once we take it out,
we reduce it down into something thicker,
but it all gets cooked together.
So make the Pepperpot,
shall we just put all the stuff in a pot?
- Yeah.
- [Ben] Onion, thyme, scotch bonnet, garlic,
orange peel, cinnamon, clove.
- What's known today as cassareep
was discovered by the indigenous
Arawack people of South America.
After being left in the sun
the reduced liquid was found to be a preservative,
and this was realised to be a useful substance.
These communities were adept hunters and gatherers
skillfully employing locally-sourced ingredients
in their culinary creations.
In its earliest incarnation,
Pepperpot likely constituted a stew,
compromising game meats, cassava,
and an assortment of local herbs and spices.
- Nice, so I wonder if we're supposed to put
the cassava that's grated in there as well.
- If you're thinking of the hunter-gatherer sensibility,
you're using everything you're hunting and gathering.
- 100%, but I wonder if we use that
to make some cassava bread instead to dip in our stew.
- Out of us both, which one's the hunter
and which one's the gatherer?
I'm quite good at gathering.
- You are quite good at gathering.
But I dunno whether I'm very good at hunting.
(Mike laughs)
These are a lot of effort.
And if you look it this way, fine,
'cause there's very little meat on them,
some skin and then a lot of cartilage and bone.
And it's gelatinous for sure, but it's a lot of work.
Change of plan.
- Slight deviation of plan.
- We made a Pepperpot,
the next instruction is pressure cook.
But actually, it's gonna take so long to come up to pressure
that actually we wonder whether searing some stuff off
and getting it up to temperature first
might help us,
given we also have to wait for our cassareep
to reduce down anyway.
- There's a city in Guyana called Cayenne,
it's not the Cayenne, do you think?
- Yeah, I would have thought so, probably.
It's definitely a country known for their peppers
and pepper sauce.
In this case, we're using Wiri Wiri pepper,
which sounds a bit like Peri Peri pepper,
but with a W.
- Ebbers, we've been left a bottle of cassareep.
- Do you know, I saw that over there.
And I presumed from a distance it was beer.
- Oh no, you don't wanna be drinking that.
That's what we should aim for.
- Whoa, that's what we need to make from this?
- That is molasses, isn't it,
in terms of texture and colour?
- Absolutely delicious.
It reminds me of treacle, but it is, yeah, molasses.
It's just a... - Like a caramelised...
- ...a very earthy, bitter sweet, it's bittersweet.
Adding in the oxtail, a little bit more fat.
(upbeat music)
And then we go in with our stock into here to deglaze,
get all that lovely flavour off, nothing is lost.
(pan sizzles)
- [Mike] You're going in with the sugar, lovely.
- We've been giving it.
- [Mike] All the veg.
- And then some cassareep,
our deglazed beef stock and Wiri Wiri juice.
No idea if searing it off first is the way forward,
but we now have ourselves a Pepperpot.
It smells incredible. (spoon thuds)
Let's get it onto pressure cook for maybe an hour?
And in that time we'll continue reducing that down
to our own cassareep.
The same cassava root that we grated up and squeezed dry,
I've just pressed into a dry pan, seasoned up,
and we're gonna cook it over a medium heat
until it sticks together and colours on one side.
And then hopefully we can flip it.
(upbeat music)
So our Pepperpot pressure cooked for one-hour
and we've let it cool down, strained off,
we've reduced the sauce down,
and then we're gonna pick out all the good bits
and all the not so good bits.
- Smells phenomenal.
- Every bit of oxtail has something like that.
Absolute melt in the mouth.
It's very fragrant, and I think that's in part
because of the orange and the herbs and the spices,
the cinnamon and the cloves,
lots of cloves, and these are, ha, very hot,
these are really cheap cuts of meat,
but they're so flavorful and so nutritious.
Whilst it's a bit of effort to slow cook it
and then separate it out,
it is, well I hope, so worth it.
Wow!
There are some words I hate when we use
to describe food and one of 'em is deep.
- Wow, that is deep. - That is deep.
Look at the colour. - Oh my goodness.
- Spicy, bittersweet, tangy.
- That is everything, isn't it?
- And all of that meat.
- That orange really comes through
in a perfect amount,
because I don't like putting orange
with anything that isn't an orange.
- And that I think is our Pepperpot.
- Sorted's version of a Guyanese Pepperpot
with cassava bread, comment below.
If you're enjoying this,
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Thanks.
(mellow music)
- It smells incredible.
- It does, I'm so excited.
But shall we find out what the authentic version looks like?
Same colour, shiny, dark
- I think maybe bigger chunks of meat.
Ours we've broken up a bit more as we've cooked it,
but we could have served whole chunks.
- Pretty close though.
- [Ben] I wish you could scratch and sniff.
- Me?
- No, the photo,
because I feel like this is what sets us apart,
the smell of this stew.
- Let's go for it.
Oh wow!
Wow!
- That's like stick to your ribs good.
- That instantly, you don't have to, whoa!
- It's warm.
- Yeah, that pepperness comes through.
- But you're right, I mean you had the whole one just dry,
but it's like fruity spiciness.
- That is like no stew I've ever had in my life.
- And even on top of all of that pepper,
you've also got that orange
and the freshness of thyme coming through.
- So sweet and meaty.
- Can you imagine having that as for breakfast
on Christmas morning? - I can now.
- Yes, please.
- And the Christmas spices,
like the cinnamon and the orange.
- What we would associate as Christmas spices,
they're all over that.
And what makes it so deep and dark and rich,
is that cassareep.
- [Mike] Yeah.
- I think there's a Belgian stew that has similar
spiced beef, deep rich profile,
but not with that Wiri Wiri pepper,
which I think gives it that fruity spiciness.
- Yeah.
- That is so good.
- That is fantastic.
I think that is a job well done, sir.
(hands slap)
We'll find out in the comments,
let us know how we got on.
But thank you so much to those of you
who suggested we do this particular dish.
- Shall we spin for H?
- Let's spin H.
Hong Kong, Hungary, Honduras or Haiti?
- Shall I give it a spin?
- Give it a spin.
(Ben whoops)
It's such a spin that it's knocked the thing off.
- Spin again. (Ben groans)
- What are the chances?
There's only two spin agains on the entire wheel.
I would be hungry for Hungary,
or Haiti.
- Haiti.
- We'll take it.
- So if you are from Haiti,
or know anything about Haitian cuisine,
comment down below,
let us know what dish we should be cooking from Haiti
and give us all your tips as well,
'cause we're gonna need it.