Culinary power couple John Torode and Lisa Faulkner are on a mission to make restaurant-quality dishes more accessible to home cooks.
The pair first met when Faulkner won the fifth series of Celebrity MasterChef – with Torode a judge on the show – and have now published a cookbook, John & Lisa’s Kitchen.
“The last thing people want is to be scared by a recipe,” says Torode, “open up a book and think, ‘I can’t pronounce that, I don’t know where I can buy the ingredients, or I know that’s going to be really expensive’.
“I’m used to having ingredients that are used in restaurant kitchens, but the big thing I’ve learned from Lisa is that for everyday cooks, you need to be able to buy it from the shop, or it comes out of the cupboard.”
The 59-year-old explains that after training as a chef in his native Australia, he believed it wasn’t possible to replicate restaurant-style food at home. “That, to me, is why you go to a restaurant,” he says. “However, Lisa will go, ‘Hold on, we can do that at home, because you can buy these things now from the supermarket’.
“So Lisa’s brain, instead of going around a professional kitchen, thinks about everyday supermarket foods – which ingredients are accessible, and how can we make them come together to create a dish that wouldn’t be out of place in a restaurant?
“That, for me, is what’s amazing about Lisa. She’s about everyday, egalitarian and aspirational food.”
The couple have both separately written cookbooks before, but this is their first collaboration. It contains all 40 recipes from the current series of their ITV1 cookery show, John and Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen, and 60 other favourites the couple have chosen from the previous eight series.
“We’ve been trying to write it for a very long time and finally everyone went ‘yes’, and the stars aligned,” says Faulker, 52, “We both like the same sort of food – good food.”
While Torode is a professional chef and restaurant-owner, Faulkner simply describes herself as a “mum cook” (she has an adopted daughter, Billie, now 18, with her ex-husband Chris Coghill). So does her lack of professional cookery training mean she sometimes defers to her husband on culinary matters?
“Absolutely,” she admits. “I’m constantly asking John – and a lot of the time he goes ‘Why are you asking me this? You know this.’
“But of course I ask him, he’s a proper chef, he’s been doing it since he was 16 years old – and what he doesn’t know about food, he will learn.”
She says she knows tips and shortcuts, and “things that work for me as a mum cook”, but explains, “I’ve cooked forever, but I think that we work [well] together, because I’ll go ‘Can I put that and that in?’ It’s usually about quantities and mass that I’m asking John.”
But Faulkner’s ideas of combining ingredients are often winners with her husband, and their audiences, too.
Torode says: “This series, Lisa came up with an absolute ripper. She said, ‘Oh, I like French onion soup. I like sausages and gravy. I love Welsh rarebit – so let’s put those together.’
“So we’ve got sausages in a French onion soup gravy mixture, and on top of that, bits of bread covered in Welsh rarebit, and the whole thing’s baked in the oven. You’ve got bread, cheese, onions and sausages all together on one plate.”
Faulker chips in: “It’s a really lovely thing,”
She’s also managed to bring her husband around to a more realistic way of approaching home-cooked food. His acceptance of quick-and-easy recipes being a prerequisite for modern family meals is illustrated in the wonderful, yet slightly bizarre, recipe Fish Finger Katsu Tacos.
He says: “Years ago – had it been my recipe – I would have insisted that people make their own fish fingers, but actually that would become a scary recipe.”
So the recipe includes shop-bought frozen fish fingers and tacos, in a homemade katsu curry sauce, with perhaps a grudging acceptance that even the sauce can be bought from a supermarket if necessary, to speed things up.
“So this is what I’m saying about Lisa,” says Torode. “She’ll go ‘No John, people aren’t going to make their own fish fingers, mate, they’re just not gonna do it.’
“Fish finger taco – it’s inspired! Chuck that in the middle of the table and everybody can choose what they want. And everybody loves a fish finger.”
Torode says they’re “very, very proud” of their new cookbook, but adds: “We hope the book isn’t for somebody just to sit there and read the recipes line by line, but actually, just be inspired to give it a go.
“And – this is my biggest tip to everybody out there – you’re allowed to put your own spin on it. If there’s something in the recipe and you don’t like it, then don’t put it in, that’s fine.”
John & Lisa’s Kitchen by John Torode and Lisa Faulkner is published by Quadrille, priced £25. Photography by Dan Jones. Available now.
