YOUR summer holiday might be off (sorry), but you can now travel the globe in 75 faff-free, one-tin recipes, courtesy of food writer and stylist, Rukmini Iyer.
The former MasterChef contestant pioneered the "chop and chuck traybake" with her wildly successful Roasting Tin series of cookbooks, single-handedly making it possible for us all to get in late (and hangry), switch the oven on, and swiftly have something not only acceptable and edible to feed people, but something surprising, delicious and practically effortless too.
Book four, The Roasting Tin Around The World, has come at an admittedly difficult moment. But arguably its timing couldn't be more pertinent, either. When our horizons have been wholly curbed, and our lives tethered to one spot, being able to "travel via your kitchen" is quite a gift.
Iyer, who llives in London with her border collie, Pepper, has managed to condense into a cookbook the feeling so many of us get on holiday, of eating something amazing, and knowing we will desperately try to recreate it when back home – only she's made that possible.
"When my mum came back from a trip to Peru, she was like, 'I've got to get these purple potatoes'," says Iyer, adding how she also saw this book as a chance to "get a bit more creative, and authentic with flavours.
"With the first two books, a lot of the recipes was just me going, 'Just add a bit of lime juice'," she says, rather self-deprecatingly. "Now it's more like, no, this is based on a really authentic dish – and from that you get so many new ideas."
Take her north African-inspired chermoula roasted tuna steaks, her Russian meatballs with sour cream and, a current lockdown favourite, a peach dulce de leche cake, which is a riff on the Uruguayan cake, chaja, just "executed completely differently".
The original dessert layers tinned peaches, whipped cream, icing and dulce de leche, into a towering, 80s-style meringue. Iyer thought: "How could I use those flavours but make it easier and also maybe a bit less sweet and sugary?" So she laces the sponge with tinned dulce de leche, bakes in fresh peaches, and sprinkles crushed meringue over the top at the end.
And these aren't pilfered replicas of traditional dishes, manhandled into a tin – for starters, in many of the regions she features, ovens aren't even widely used. Instead, Iyer considers flavour combinations and uses them to vault into new one-dish recipe realms.
Writing the book pre-coronavirus was also a good excuse to jump on a plane, to America, Singapore and Sri Lanka. Iyer has long been the kind of person who, after eating something particularly good, accosts the chef to ask, "Excuse me, how did you make this?" – meaning she already had reams of notes, recipes ideas and food memories scrawled down from years of holidays and trips to work from.
With a laugh, she calls it "being a really irritating traveller", admitting she is also the person who drags her travel companions off on culinary missions. "If they're like, 'Should we just go and get pizza?' I'm like, 'No, no! Unless it's a really exciting pizza! [Before saying] There's this really amazing little place that we have to go to that serves the best crab cakes...'."
She's careful to only note down fun dishes ("Things that felt really special, that just make you remember eating things for the first time"), many of which have in turn made their way into The Roasting Tin Around The World.
A visit to the USA inspired Iyer's baked polenta with prawns, aka shrimp and grits. "You've got really rich, cheesy, buttery polenta and the lovely texture of chilli-spiked prawns," she buzzes. "It's such a nice comfort dish." While on a previous trip to the South, these "really amazing Louisiana crab puffs" inspired her Creole crab tarts. She swaps out expensive chilled crab meat for tinned, blending it silkily with cream cheese and hot sauce atop a pastry base.
Recalling endless bowls of chicken rice, chilli crab and satay eaten on the streets of Singapore, a city where street food stalls bear Michelin stars, she says: "I was just eating non-stop. There's 20 places selling chicken rice, but people in the know will only go to one of those because they're like, 'That's the best one'. I arrived from the airport and, my friend said, 'Let's go get satay, you're hungry, let's not wait around at a restaurant'. And we're passing loads and loads of satay stores. I'm saying, 'Are we stopping at this one? At this one?' And she's like, 'Nope, no, it's not the best!'"
And Iyer knows, good food is always worth tracking down.
:: The Roasting Tin Around The World by Rukmini Iyer, photography by David Loftus, is published by Square Peg, priced £16.99. Below are two recipes from the book for you to try.
CHERMOULA ROASTED TUNA WITH PEPPERS, CHICKPEAS AND RAISINS
(Serves 4)
For the chermoula:
45g fresh mint, leaves only
1 1/2tsp ground cumin
1 1/2tsp ground paprika
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
3tbsp olive oil
A pinch of sea salt
1 preserved lemon or 1/2 lemon, zest only, and 1tsp white vinegar
3 colourful pointy peppers, halved
1 medium aubergine, cut into eighths
1 red onion, cut into 1cm slices
300g cherry tomatoes, with their vines
1 x 400g tin of chickpeas, drained
4 nice thick tuna steaks
100g raisins
100ml warm water
A handful of flaked almonds
To serve:
A handful of fresh mint
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C/fan 200C. Tip all the chermoula ingredients into a blender and blitz until combined. Taste and add a little more salt as needed.
Tip the peppers, aubergine, onion, cherry tomatoes with their vines and the chickpeas into a roasting tin large enough to more or less hold the vegetables in one layer. Mix through three-quarters of the chermoula, making sure to coat the vegetables evenly, then transfer to the oven and roast for 40 minutes.
Meanwhile, spread the remaining chermoula all over the tuna steaks, then return them to the fridge to marinate. Don't wash the blender – tip in the raisins and water, stir and set aside.
Once the vegetables have had 40 minutes, tip in the raisins and liquid. Remove the tomato vines, squash down the tomatoes, then lay the tuna over the vegetables. Scatter over the almonds, then return to the oven for 10-12 minutes, until the tuna is just cooked and the almonds are crisp. Scatter over the mint and serve.
PEACH AND DULCE DE LECHE CAKE WITH MERINGUES AND CREAM
(Serves 8)
225g olive oil
225g dulce de leche (you can use tinned Nestle caramel, sold next to the condensed milk)
50g caster sugar
4 free-range eggs
225g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
3 under-to just-ripe peaches, thinly sliced
To serve:
175g dulce de leche (this is the remaining caramel in the tin)
A handful of crushed shop-bought meringues
Creme fraiche or lightly whipped cream
Method:
Preheat the oven to 160C/fan 180C. In a food processor or by hand, mix the olive oil and dulce de leche together with the sugar until well combined, then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Fold in the flour and baking powder, then pour into a 26cm by 20cm roasting tin or cake dish.
Arrange the sliced peaches over the batter, then transfer to the oven and bake for 25 minutes, until golden brown and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the tin for 10 minutes.
Melt the remaining dulce de leche in a pan until smooth and pourable, then drizzle this over the warm cake. Scatter with a handful of crushed meringues, then serve with creme fraiche or lightly whipped cream alongside.
Note: As this cake contains fresh fruit, if you are not eating it on the day you make it, store it in the fridge. I like to warm it up slice by slice in the microwave – 30 seconds on high.
