(egg clinking) (egg cracking and sizzling)
(funky percussion music)
- Hello everyone, and welcome to SortedFood.
- Now today,
we've got another incredible lineup of DIY food kits,
because, well, let's face it,
we've probably all got a lot more time
for cooking right now.
- And a lot more time for eating.
- Oh yeah. - Ben, you're up first.
- Wonderful.
(funky midtempo synth music)
- Go on then Ebbers, unbox.
- Ooh!
Sushi Dog, which I think is the clue to what we're doing.
- [Jamie] So Ebbers,
this is the Salmon to Love kit from Sushi Dog.
Now, Sushi Dog have a couple of stores in and around London,
and they are essentially handheld sushi burritos or hotdogs,
and this is their most popular sushi dog,
the Salmon to Love one, in a kit for you to make at home.
- Nice, everything we need for spicy tuna, Salmon to Love,
and the instructions to do the whole thing burrito style.
- Well, let's crack on.
- Step one, wash the rice.
- That's a lot of rice,
'cause not only have you got enough rice
to make four sushi dogs,
you also have enough rice and nori to practise as well.
- [Barry] Do you?! - [Jamie] Yes.
- 'Cause they saw you come in?
- (snickers) They saw me come in.
- My rice is squeaky clean,
it's gonna go into a pan that's got a lid,
and I'm gonna add 520 ml of boiled water.
Never added boiling water to sushi rice.
This is already an interesting twist.
Give the pan a little shake to make sure the rice is flat.
(pot rattles on table)
Place the lid on, medium heat for five minutes,
then reduce to a low heat to simmer for around 13 minutes.
Whilst the rice is cooking,
I can prep some of the fresh ingredients:
cucumber, chilli, spring onion, avo.
Once the rice is cooked, tip it into a bowl,
leave it for five minutes to cool
before adding in your sushi seasoning.
Then we can construct.
- While you're prepping Ebbers,
good time to mention that is top quality
sashimi grade tuna and salmon.
Sushi Dog talk about how they ethically
and sustainably source all of their fish.
They only want the best quality.
- Everything ready.
They give you a sushi mat, it comes with the kit.
So lay it down, nori sheet, and then a layer of rice,
leaving an inch at the top, and use wet fingers.
- So they've been around for the last four years or so,
started by a couple of friends who went on holiday
and they came across a shop that was packed with customers
eating huge sushi rolls, like burritos basically.
Tried them for themselves, went, "This is fantastic."
Came back home to the UK,
couldn't find them anywhere and thought,
"Why don't we just do it ourselves?"
- Nothing new about sushi,
but the fact that it's kind of reinvented itself
in this bigger handheld burrito cool vibe, I like,
and the fact that you see it when you travel
and bring it home and make a business out of it,
smart right?
- [Barry] Bold portions, Ben.
- He seems to be going for Jamie portions.
- I know, it's really confusing.
- [Jamie] Well, I'm looking forward to it.
Come on, Ebbers. - [Barry] Go on.
- [Jamie] Come on. - [Barry] Tighter.
Yeah, well done mate,
well done. - [Jamie] Yes.
Salmon one, done.
Let's make a tuna one.
(funky Asian style music)
Good cross-section Ebbers.
(funky synth music)
- Cheers. - Cheers.
- I don't imagine it's as dainty as eating sushi.
- [Barry] That is delicious. - Mmm, that is very tasty.
That tuna is fantastic.
Like, freshness of the tuna is great.
- The tuna was in a marinade.
The salmon was just clean and fresh with that Japanese mayo,
So I think this is almost,
there's less going on here,
which means it celebrates the freshness of ingredients,
whereas the tuna one,
you've got a lot more kind of spicy flavour as well.
Slightly different method on the sushi rice
than I think we would normally do,
but it's worked perfectly.
The seasoning of the rice is excellent,
and the freshness of the ingredients, spot on.
All of those ingredients are scratch cook ingredients,
so you absolutely could have done by buying your own stuff.
However, if this is also like your first step into sushi,
you wouldn't have the mat,
and you'd have to commit to buying
a lot more of those products.
That's where this is a really nice entry step to sushi.
- [Jamie] The question for you Ebbers,
is how much would you pay?
- Sashimi fish is not cheap.
All the other ingredients, relatively affordable.
£8 a pop minimum, so it's 32 quid.
- [Jamie] It's £35.
- That's a substantial portion of sushi and it's delicious,
and that's pretty good.
- Box me, Barry.
- From me to you, mate.
Enjoy. - I've got a lunchbox.
- [Ben] Good for weekend sandwiches.
- Ooh, Barry Taylor. - I know.
- Barry Taylor!
Fries, burgers.
The Vurger Co. New York melt meal kit.
- This is a plant based burger.
This is the Vurger Co's famous New York melt.
This is actually award-winning.
It won the award for Vegan Food and Living Awards
for best make at home kit.
- Amazing, or "vake" at home, am I right?
Yeah, or make at "vome."
(boys laughing)
I think I have everything I need.
We're gonna oven bake the chips,
so they're gonna go in first.
It does say the fries are perfect when deep fried,
but at home, am I gonna get a deep fat fryer out
to cook chips midweek?
No, I'm not gonna do that.
I'm gonna bake them in the oven.
15 to 20 minutes, 200°C.
So first things first, I've got to season my patties.
Reading this, these patties aren't made by Vurger.
- No, these are Beyond Burger patties.
This bit did confuse me, 'cause for me,
the reason you'd go to a restaurant
is for the restaurant made patties.
- What they're doing is consolidating
all of the great ingredients into one package,
into one box to make the award-winning
Vurger Co. New York melt vurger.
- [Barry] "Vurger Co's mission is to revolutionise
the fast food industry through the power of plants."
They serve everything from soul satisfying vegan burgers,
mac and cheese, shakes, fries, and much, much more.
- And it's starting to smell great.
Whilst they're cooking, I can prep all the other bits.
I have brioche buns.
It doesn't say about vrioche,
so I don't know how they're vegan if they're brioche buns.
Vomato, vlettuce, (Barry snickers)
their homemade vurger sauce,
and some vickles as well, which is gonna be great.
And some vegan vheese.
Can I also point out,
packaging made from plants, not plastic.
- That's important, especially in these meal kits.
- It is, it's vackaging. (Barry laughs)
- Now my vurgers have cooked,
I can put my vheese on it and put it under the vrill
so that it can all velt.
- When does this running joke stop?
- It's Jamie, it never stops. (Ben chuckles)
- Few minutes under the grill to melt the cheese,
hasn't really melted.
Well, it's kind of melted around the edges,
but then the top looks like it's starting to burn,
but right, whilst I'll leave that there,
I'm just gonna toast the buns quickly under the grill.
Ebbers, any reason why that might be like that?
- It's not cheese, so it's not gonna behave like cheese.
- If I'm being honest,
these instructions are in a slightly backwards order.
It tells me how to cook the patties,
and then it tells me how to construct the burger.
But in constructing the burger,
I have to do things like toast the buns,
slice the tomato, like do all that prep,
which would have been useful to know
whilst the burgers were cooking,
'cause I could have done all of that beforehand.
It doesn't- - [Ben] It's not linear.
- No, it's not linear.
Construction time: burger sauce, yeah.
Lettuce leaf, tomato sli-
Ooh controversial, burger patty with cheese, gherkins.
You gherkin fans? - [Barry] Ahh, big time.
- Add more sauce to the top bun, place it on top, and chips.
- [Ben] Even oven baked, they look good.
- [Jamie] They look proper crispy, don't they?
Vurger.
(soft rock music)
It looks great.
That looks like the kind of vurger you want to eat.
Cheers. - [Ben And Barry] Cheers.
(rock and roll guitar riffs) - [Barry] Delicious.
That is really nice, I like that.
- It's good.
So it does have the texture, the smell, the taste of meat.
I can't taste that the cheese didn't look great,
if that makes sense.
- I think the cheese is much better now it's heated.
- I think the biggest compliment you can give these burgers
is you don't miss meat.
This works really well for meat eaters.
- This box challenges me a bit.
'Cause I think the only thing
it's got going for it is convenience,
in the sense that all the things arrive to your door,
but all of those ingredients, you can pick up,
and you'd end up in the same place.
- I kind of agree,
but I also appreciate that as a chef, it's different.
And also we are normals,
but we're- - Foodies.
- We're foodies, we know how to make burger patties at home.
We would go out and get everything that we need
to create a perfect burger for us.
As a safety net for people who don't have the skills
to make things at home,
that will get you a really good tasting vegan burger.
And I think that does a really good job,
and that's probably one of the reasons
why it's their best-selling.
- How much are those two burgers and chips?
- FYI, chips are great.
I didn't give you any. (fries crunching)
£23. - £20.50.
Delivery is nationwide as well.
- It's not the cheapest way of doing it,
but if it's instead of going out to a restaurant,
or instead of getting a takeaway,
that's the comparison, not necessarily,
"Let's make a burger at home."
Would I do at home?
I don't know yet.
- Would you have another vurger?
- I mean, it's sitting there.
Of course, I'm gonna eat it.
(Ben snickers) - Yeah, cool.
(energetic music) (applause and cheering)
- Okay Baz, I thought we'd finish with something sweet.
Open it up. - Ooh, okay.
This is a dark chocolate tart.
Wait a minute, there's no pie case.
- This is gonna turn you into a pastry chef.
This is the dark chocolate tart from Bakesterbox.
So, "it contains finest ingredients,
top quality baking equipment
and detailed step-by-step instructions
to delight your inner pastry chef,
no matter your baking ability."
- I'm slightly concerned,
the fact there's no prebaked pie crust.
I usually rely on that for a tart, but I'm excited by this,
and fascinated to see how it turns out.
Okay, so I've got everything out.
So to start off,
we've got some fridge cold butter in a bowl,
and then in with my preweighed out, premixed white powders.
Now I've got to rub it in into breadcrumb-like consistency.
It's really fridge cold butter, Ben.
(boys laughing)
You're welcome
- It's just those little arms of yours.
- [Barry] Shut up! - [Jamie] Why you smiling?
- Hands are cramping up a little bit.
(boys laughing)
- [Ben] Once you've got
a nice golden breadcrumb consistency,
you're gonna add in water,
then you use your scraper to kind of bring it all together.
- Okay, that's it, that's all come together.
Now what?
- This next bit is a wonderful hack.
- Unfold your parchment parcel and place the dough inside-
Oh, I see what's gonna happen.
- So Baz, what's really important here is that
when you fold it,
you're then tucking it in around all the edges,
and then you can roll it out to the size of that square,
and it's just a clever way
of keeping the whole thing contained.
I've actually not seen this done before,
but it seems really smart.
And this is what I quite like about this box,
is it's made by Tamsin.
Only founded last year,
so something that's come of lockdown.
She's a Cordon Bleu trained pastry chef,
and she wanted to give people basically
an easy way of doing great French pastry at home.
- I forget, the other thing that you get
from these recipe kits isn't just the recipe.
It's their expertise.
That is genius.
- [Jamie] You just put a massive hole in it.
- [Barry] Oh, sorry. (Jamie laughing)
- Then I guess into a fridge for 10 minutes.
Okay, 10 minutes have passed.
Unwrap it, and then you need to peel this off.
Then let it fall in, quite rigid still.
- If it's too cold, it will crack.
If it's too warm, it's an absolute mess.
You just kind of let it do its thing,
press it into the edges, thumb it up,
you're gonna trim the top.
- Oh, that's satisfying!
This bit throws me,
'cause usually we tend to trim after baking
because it can shrink back,
but because it's a slightly different mix,
it should be more stable, it shouldn't shrink back too much.
Just look at that for a second.
That is exceptional.
Right, now with a fork, do some docking,
which is basically giving it a little prick.
Okay, now I've gotta trim this parchment paper
to the right size.
Now I've gotta let this rest and chill for 30 minutes
and then bake for another 20.
So the tart is cooked, but we took it out the oven,
we let it cool, and this is what we've got.
(Jamie snickering)
- I think what's interesting is that
the kit is kind of aimed at great pastry,
regardless of your baking experience.
Personally, there are a couple of things I would have done
just to build an extra safety net.
For example, chilling the pastry before you roll it out,
not trimming it back before you bake it
so it has room to shrink back,
and then you've just got a bit more control.
- That's now not even usable, there's no room for filling.
- Fortunately, we saw it shrinking back in the oven
and quickly prepared one with our food team,
so we can still test the filling,
'cause that bit, I'm also excited for.
- But, although we're not gonna fill it with chocolate,
I still want to taste the pastry.
- I'm gonna crack on with the filling:
dark chocolate, butter over a bain marie, let it melt.
- Now, Valrhona chocolate is one of the world's
most exquisite chocolates.
So it's in the Rhone Valley in France,
and it is exceptional, but it is also expensive.
There's a reason that pastry chefs use it,
especially in dishes like this that celebrate chocolate,
and don't cover it up with too much else.
- That's now melted, that needs to cool for two minutes.
In the meantime, I can crack some eggs into a bowl
and whisk that in with my dark brown sugar.
- [Ben] So the only additional fresh ingredients
you add to the small box is a couple of eggs and the butter,
both for the pastry and the filling.
If you buy the bigger box, it comes with those,
but then obviously, the box and the shelf life is shorter.
- What I like about the kit is that
it comes with the written instructions with photos,
and there's a video that you can watch online as well.
They're both really, really good in their own right.
There are a couple of differences
between what they chose to do in the video
and what they chose to do in the written instructions.
And as a normal, I don't know which one to follow.
For me, I'd need that to be consistent
so I know that I'm doing it right.
- Stir it up and then add in your cane spirit,
which is non-alcoholic.
- Oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness, look at that.
So velvety.
Okay, that's the mix done,
and the food team have made a pie case that has worked.
It hasn't shrunk this time
because they baked it with a bit of overhanging edge
and then they trimmed it back.
Now this goes in the oven at 120 for 20 minutes.
It's now cooled.
I'm pretty happy with that.
- [Jamie] It looks glossy AF. - Now, duster.
Here, this is gonna get a very fine dust
'cause we're kind of putting the cocoa powder
in a muslin cloth.
- I've never seen this before.
That is great! - Oh!
Okay. (blows air)
- What's the blowtorch for?
- [Barry] Apparently, hot knife through chocolate tart.
- Oh! - [Jamie] Ooh!
- That felt good.
Oh my goodness.
Look how delicate that is!
Look how shiny that filling is.
- D'you know what, Baz?
You have done 50% of that tart beautifully.
- Shut up!
Give me this for a second, let me have this!
I'm gonna cut you a slice of the original tart as well.
- Cheers. - [Barry] Cheers.
(big band music) - That is like shortbread.
- That is exactly like shortbread.
- Very short, very crumbly, very buttery.
Delicious.
- Now imagine that with this filling.
(Jamie chuckling)
- Oh, that's something. - Decadent AF.
- That is absolutely sublime. - So good.
- I think it's the trickiest one yet,
to pin down on price.
- There's lots of things to consider:
very expensive, well sourced ingredients.
The Valrhona chocolate itself is top notch,
professional baking equipment
that you can use again and again,
and the expertise. - £25.
- 27, so you're pretty good there.
- I'd view that money as an investment
into learning how to make a proper tart.
I'm annoyed that I got it, it allowed me to get it wrong.
- To me, it feels like with a few tweaks to the kit,
making sure that the written instructions match the video,
and it is a little bit more idiot-proof,
that could be incredible.
- Either way, it's an exceptional recipe
and an unbelievable tart.
- Well, that was a very tasty episode.
If you liked the video, give it a like,
and make sure to comment down below,
let us know what DIY food kits should we be testing next.
- And of course, as always,
join in the conversation over on Twitter,
and to do so, it's the #sortedfoodkits.
- [Mike] Over on sorted.club/blog,
you can find our guide to restaurant kits
for every occasion.
There are loads of other articles on there too,
and the link is downstairs.
(Jamie snickers)
- Oy. - Whoa, Ebbers!
Jamie nearly threw it at me