By way of thanks, I’ve left you a gift below: a ridiculously optimised lasagne recipe, along with some pre-emptive lasagne FAQs. If you’ve got any LFAQs (less frequently asked questions), feel free, as always, to drop me a message here and I’ll get back to you.

If you haven’t upgraded to the paid newsletter yet, this might be a good time to do so (or start a free trial) to get this recipe and loads more. On Tuesday I’m coming at you with a Lobster Fried Rice recipe that I’ve poured ever so much time into. I hope to see you there.

All my love, Ben xx

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This week, an introduction to parenting, and a buffalo chicken wing deep dive. I’m going to detail everything I have learnt from a couple of weeks of development, ending in a recipe for wings, the ultimate buffalo sauce (fair warning, it takes a week) and a cooling ranch-inspired number to dip them into.

On Friday, I’m coming at you with the best lasagne I have ever made. So if you haven’t already upgraded, now might be a great time to do so!

Love, Ben xx

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I had hoped my chillies might grow faster this year. A few months ago, I carefully sowed the seeds in little trays, bought a heating mat and an ultraviolet light (which I had to prove my age for to pick up from the Post Office). These things were meant to speed the whole thing up, but the progress was still slow.

Then I came home one morning just as it was just getting light and saw the very conspicuous purple glow from outside my living room. So, I opted to do away with the lighting and mat and just let nature do its thing: the only thing more embarrassing than growing weed in full view of the street below is getting raided by the police for Kashmiri chillies.

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This week, we are taking a deep dive into meatballs. I’m sharing everything I know and have learnt about them (there is a lot to tell you about!). Scroll right to the bottom for the recipe and a delicious garlic butter polenta.

All my love, Ben xx

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We found a particularly comforting schedule on our honeymoon: rarely leaving our air-conditioned hotel room except to eat lunch, supper, or sip little beers over a game of cards. I couldn’t tell you much about Marseille itself, but I now have a good grasp on its dining landscape, and I know exactly where to find the best pastis and the wobbliest table to drink it at. We did the bare minimum, together, brilliantly. Any culture we happened to absorb along the way to a wine bar felt like a bonus.

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If you want to eat my food IRL, I will be on the pans at Elsa on the 11th and 12th of September cooking a special collaboration menu. Come through! Bookings still available.

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I found myself on Wilton Way in Hackney a couple of weeks ago. The street was busy, hot and filled with people who couldn’t fit into the Spurstowe Arms around the corner.

I had spent the day working out how to make my favourite pub snack, Scampi Fries, at home. I had the seasoning powder down - it’s easy enough when most of what you need to know can be found on the back of the packet. But emulating the texture at home is no mean feat. Most crunchy snacks you find in pubs are extruded under insanely high pressures and temperatures, using machinery that cost as much as a small flat - I did check. And while I love investing in a project, it felt like a step too far.

We swerved the ten deep vermouth bar queue, and went to a corner shop to buy cans of premium lager. At the counter they sold Scampi Fries and pork scratchings - naturally it occurred to me that the next day I should try and combine the two to make a mashup. I made the note “scratchings, dusted scampi”.

On a molecular level, scratchings have a lot in common with puffed corn snacks. Both rely on trapping steam inside a matrix, and letting it expand before the structure sets solid. Scampi fries reply on that pressure being created by a machine, but in the case of scratchings, that pressure is created through steam pushing out into the surrounding collagen, which is tough enough to stretch around it rather than tear, leaving you with thousands of little crunchy air pockets once it sets.

When making scratchings, as with pork belly, the only variable worth worrying about is the dryness of the skin. That’s because water has to fully evaporate off the surface before the skin can heat past 100°C, and it’s only above that point that the collagen network can blister, puff, and brown. Wet skin gets stuck boiling off moisture rather than climbing in temperature, so it wastes valuable time steaming instead of crisping. Properly dried skin has next to nothing left to evaporate, so it shoots straight through to the higher heat needed for puffing, giving you a far more reliable, repeatable result.

You might get lucky with recipes that call for oil, or worse still, vinegar, on the skin, but results vary massively because neither reliably shifts moisture out of the skin. Some recipes go for a thick layer of salt instead, which works to a point since salt pulls water out of the skin’s surface through osmosis. Leave it on too long, though, and that draw happens faster at the surface than moisture can migrate up from deeper in the skin, so you end up with a dried, toughened top layer sitting over a still-chewy band before you’ve even started cooking. I dry my pork belly out for at least two days in the fridge, then tend to dry pork skin for scratchings for at least a day before even thinking about cooking it.

Let me know how you get on with the recipes below. I have also added a recipe for my some delicious Mini Cheddar-inspired biscuits made with my favourite cheese, comté.

Perfect Scratchings w. Scampi Fries Seasoning // Makes 20-30 with seasoning to spare

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This week: I got married, headed straight to the pub, then to mark the occasion, developed the ultimate scotch eggs. I have gone into alot of detail here to hopefully make the whole process easier, more repeatable and ultimately, less stressful.

Scroll right to the bottom to a recipe for the most perfect of piccalillis too (the scotch egg’s natural soulmate). And a seasonal spin on a snakebite (the original pub cocktail).

I ran out of space here, so will be continuing the pub theme in an additional edition this Friday. If you like the sound of scratchings and Mini Comtés (Mini Cheddars made with a cheese I prefer). See you there x

To access the full newsletter, recipes and my archive, please consider upgrading, claiming a free post or starting a seven day trial.

All my love, Ben xxx

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My wedding breakfast was suspiciously close to how I’d imagined it: at a pub with large cuts of meat and a small group of friends. We sat in the garden of The Drapers Arms, while an excess of food and wine came to the table in a trickle over the four hours we spent there.

My wife lived just around the corner from The Drapers Arms when we first met. I would rush from work to meet her there - it was the height of summer and I felt permanently clammy. When I wasn’t in humid studios shooting recipe books, I was sitting in sun-drenched beer gardens trying to play it cool with someone who was clearly out of my league.

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This week I’m getting granular with crumpets - the hows, the whys, and four toppings I think you might be able to learn loads from. Scroll down for a watertight crumpet recipe, a tuna tartare, potted shrimp, duck rillettes, and macerated cherries over orange whipped ricotta.

To read the post in full, along with archive and chat access, you can subscribe, or grab a free trial.

Love, Ben xx

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I never really understood the pick n’ mix gambit even when I was at pick n’ mix age. Why would you pick n’ mix sweets, when you could just pick n’ mix once, find the best sweet and get a whole bag of the best ones every other time.

For me it was always Cola Cubes - which didn’t taste much like cola at all. Joseph, my school friend, and year six’s first team goalkeeper, would tend to go for a bag of Clarnico Peppermint Creams. They came in white and pastel green wrappers twisted at each end. He would consume so many that balled up wrappers would fly from his pockets when he pulled out coins to pay for them.

I hadn’t given mint creams much thought since then, until I was late for a restaurant opening a couple of weeks ago. I had taken a wrong turn out of Stratford Station into a maze of pathways built specifically for The Olympics and confusing busy people. I turned onto Clarnico Lane, did a double take, thought of Joseph and gave it a quick Google. Clarnico Peppermint Creams had been made at the very site where I was due to eat that evening.

At its peak, between the World Wars, 3,000 people were employed by Clarnico to make over 700 varieties of confection in Hackney Wick. It’s said that everyone in the area had at least one person in their family who was in the business of pick n’ mix. On Fridays, workers could buy sweets at cost price to take home to their families. It was, in its own small way, a democratisation of sweetness.

After the factory relocated in 1955, it became a print works, then fell into disrepair before being sanitised in time for The Olympics in 2012. Industrial decline was at odds with the organiser’s vision. Overhead power lines were buried, industrial drains became clean rivers and soil contaminated with everything from human remains to a worrying amount of mercury became picture-perfect wetlands. The factory was named “The White Building” by an architecture firm responsible for installing two retired fighter jets in the Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries a couple of years earlier.

We sat on long red-lacquered tables at Hon’s BBQ - a new opening with “Texan BBQ at its core, but layered with Asian influence”. Slices of pink duck breast came first, sliced and ready for stuffing into pancakes with a hoisin sauce that tasted as if it may have got the Texan treatment too.

Meat cooked over fire is nothing new in Hong Kong, so the proposition didn’t feel like much of a stretch. The only variable that Hon changed was time. A peking duck can be rendered, lacquered and off the hook within an hour or so. Here, the smoke had hours to work its way past the skin and into duck. Glassy skin was sacrificed for a buttery layer of melting smoked fat that dressed each mouthful.

Mounds of slow smoked meat followed, tarred and feathered with chilli oil and crispy garlic chips came next. Instead of thick sliced white bread, sticky rice arrived to mop everything up.

The last time I had been in the White Building it had then been Silo, the world’s first zero-waste restaurant. At the time, it was one of the most interesting places to eat in the city. They took cheese rinds from the pizza restaurant downstairs and turned them into a garum, in much the same way fish sauce is made. It tasted almost synthetic, like licking your fingers after a big bag of Cheetos. Fig leaves were harvested from the trees outside to make a fig oil, which sat in a divot pressed into glossy balls of ice cream. The surface of the oil split light into colour, the way an oil slick does on a wet road. “It’s the same physics behind soap bubbles,” I was told by one of the chefs at the time.

In the Uber home, I thought about the lack of bread at Hon’s and how I was glad for it. I thought about the fermentation programme at Silo and how it had inspired so much of my work over the last year. I thought about bread, and bubbles, and bread with bubbles. I wrote the note; “fermented crumpet batter, nail.”

I love a crumpet, and summer is a great time to make them. They rely on batter high in yeast that benefits from sitting at around 25°C and, for reasons I try not to think about too hard, there are now at least three months of the year that my living room reaches those heights.

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Normal service will resume on Tuesday…

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This week my mum’s carbonara and a chance meeting led me to a few recipes. Scroll to the bottom for lamb birria tacos, cherry salsa, perfect homemade corn tortillas and a silky horchata inspired by a bad one.

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My mum used to make carbonara with cream. Egg yolks would be beaten into litres of it in a Pyrex jug, and I’d be allowed to grate in the parmesan. She would fold it through piping hot pasta. The cream loosened the mix, and its fat content kept everything slack no matter how long it sat, no starchy pasta water required. Though I can’t imagine many people this side of Italy were tuned into pasta water in the early 2000s.

Starch helps an egg-and-fat sauce hold together as an emulsion rather than splitting into its component parts. Starch granules swell and gelatinise, thickening the liquid so fat droplets stay suspended. But her carbonara was better for not knowing that. It tasted like cream, and was better for it. Bacon Alfredo, what’s not to like?

I was thinking about that version of carbonara on the Overground to Dalston, trying to land on toppings for a pizza pop-up that, by the time you’re reading this, has already been and gone. I wanted to make a “British Carbonara Pizza” so had to consider stability. Specifically whether parmesan and cream could survive the far more hostile climate of a pizza oven, than my Mum’s pan.

Parmesan’s protein content is unusually high for a cheese, a result of how long it’s aged, and how much moisture is driven out in the process. A dense protein network gives it structure, stopping it from melting into a puddle, the way a younger cheese might. Bind that network to cream, and you’ve got something with a decent chance of holding its shape at 450°C.

I also needed to think about an egg yolk element. I settled on cooking them at around 63°C, low and steady, until they turned into a thick, gel-like paste I could pipe onto the pizza in glossy mounds. At that temperature, the yolk proteins denature slowly enough to set into something spreadable, without tipping over into chalky territory. Picture a piping bag filled with the bit of yolk you always save.

My mum would never have used guanciale - in 2002, it wasn’t so much an ingredient as a random string of letters. But I wanted to lay wafer-thin slices of it over the pizza while it was still hot, and let the residual heat do the rendering for me.

I was on foot by now, walking to the pub to brainstorm with James, who’d done stints at both Dough Hands and Crisp Pizza (about as close as London pizza gets to a joint degree from Oxford and Cambridge) before going on to set up Fresh Hot Pizza on Kingsland Road.

I lit a cigarette on the way, and was stopped by a stranger for a selfie, which turned out to be a video of me posing for a selfie, a distinction he didn’t think worth mentioning until afterwards. He was wearing a gilet branded with my favourite Mexican food supplier, Mexgrocer . So I asked, cigarette still going, what exactly he did for them. He never really answered. He just followed up on Instagram a few days later and sent over multiple bags of Mexican ingredients, unmarked, no invoice, no context. I stared down at my spoils and filed a half-formed note away in my phone: “mexican chillies, layered dish, ready for summer”.

Much of unlocking great Mexican cooking is learning what each dried chilli is actually for, rather than treating them as one broad category of heat. Ancho chillies are mild and sweet, closer to a raisin or a prune, than to anything you’d call hot. Guajillo chillies are tangier and sharper, with a fruitiness that lifts. Pasilla chillies are darker still, almost bitter, with notes of liquorice running through them. None of them do much on their own. But once toasted, soaked and blitzed together, they can become a paste that exudes balance.

If you have ever wondered why your food doesn’t taste quite like the real deal - dried chillies are well worth an investment.

A few days later we made our way to Elsa, a neighbourhood restaurant in…Fitzrovia. Which is a strange thing to call it, really - Fitzrovia isn't so much a neighbourhood as a maze of media offices, dental practices and post-work drinkers, the kind of place you pass through rather than live in. But somehow Elsa pulls it off, feeling less like it's serving the area and more like it's reimagining one.

It was spring, and we ate thick spears of asparagus, under soft goat’s curd, chervil and toasted nuts. The sort of nuts that have been roasted properly, low and slow, so the colour is even throughout and there’s no chew left in them. The sort of nuts you imagine go into Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

More asparagus turned up in a tangle with artichokes and broad beans, alongside slabs of slow-cooked lamb shoulder under a generous dollop of salsa verde. I made a note below my last: “slow-cooked lamb stew, Mexican layers, summer ready.”

There’s a reason slow-cooked lamb turns up at so many dinner parties and weddings. Its high fat content gives hosts keen to impress, and stressed-out catering chefs alike, a wide margin for error on the drying-out front.

I use neck as well as shoulder for braises because both carry plenty of connective tissue, but neck has more of it relative to actual meat. Braise it long enough and that tough collagen in the connective tissue breaks down into gelatine, and a silky texture is built entirely out of what would otherwise have been the problem.

The meat needs to sit well past the point that you might technically call it done, up around 90-95°C internally so the collagen can break down. It also needs to be held long enough at that temperature, so the collagen actually converts rather than softens. An oven at 130°C tends to be the sweet spot - hot enough to get there within a few hours, gentle enough that you’re not boiling the meat dry in the process.

Lamb also stands up to dried chillies well. Its flavour doesn’t vanish under layers of aroma, and the fat itself is a good carrier. Chillies are high in fat-soluble flavour compounds, so a chilli-heavy braise needs something with real fat content for it to actually dissolve into. That fat clings to your tongue and stays there, coating the mouth so the flavour keeps going long after the bite's gone.

A client asked me for a “wow moment” for an upcoming brand deal a couple of days later, alongside a screen grab of someone eating a mozzarella stick in a parked car. I hate an unnecessary cheese pull, but noted down a very necessary one: “lamb birria tacos, low-moisture mozzarella.”

Social media only caught up with birria tacos a few years ago, but they’ve been eaten in Western Mexico for centuries. When an attention-grabbing visual meets a chance to show off a bit of cultural capital, the internet loses its mind. Think a huge bowl of French chocolate mousse. Crispy strips of pork belly dipped into vivid green guacamole. A bowl of hand-pulled noodles, stretched and slapped down right in front of the camera. But underneath all of that lies a genuinely strong recipe - one with real texture and balance, and techniques that transfer to almost anything else you’d want to braise. Traditionally it’s made with goat, though I knew a lamb version would work just as well here owing to a broadly similar flavour profile.

Lamb birria tacos it was then - but I still needed acidity.

There’s a cherry tree at the end of my road. It bears fruit for just a couple of weeks a year. Small and bright red, with a stone-to-flesh ratio that makes them fairly useless for most applications. I sometimes stew them down with a little sugar, then push them through a sieve to make a sharp puree. This finds its way into the freezer, then onto pavlovas, and under heavy suet sponges come winter. I passed the tree on my way to pick up the lamb for this recipe, and noted: “sharp cherry, cut through lamb, salsa?”

Fruit is used extensively throughout Mexican food - mango and pineapple turn up raw in salsas, tamarind gets worked into both drinks and sauces, and dried fruit like raisins and prunes sit at the heart of a lot of moles. Fruit and rich meat have a similarly long history in Britain, if you go back far enough. Medieval cooks paired fatty meats with sharp, cooked fruit sauces, and the Cratchit Family ate goose with a sharp apple sauce come Christmas Day in “A Christmas Carol”. In professional kitchens, I’ve stuffed lamb’s hearts with a farce sweetened by dried apricots, and served game with a plum sauce.

I knew cherry would work the same way here, cutting through the richness of the lamb and giving the lime and chilli in a salsa something sweeter to sit against.

It’s hard to find fresh masa in London, which is close to essential if you want a decent tortilla. To make it, corn is first nixtamalised - cooked and steeped in an alkaline solution, which unlocks nutrients and softens the kernel - ready to be ground into a smooth paste. I went well out of my way for this recipe, to a Mexican shop right where London starts to become a sea of American candy shops. But they were fresh out of masa.

What they did have was a breakfast bar within the shop, serving horchata in plastic cups - ice-less, full fat-cola-sweet and thin. I peeled my hands from the sticky tablecloth and noted “horchata, but better.” I rarely complain in restaurants, let alone breakfast bars, so my notes app generally hears from me in times like this.

I thought about the last time I’d blended rice into a batter, which had been for a dosa - the thin, fermented rice and lentil crepe eaten across South India. It gets left to sour overnight, the rice and lentils breaking down under their own wild yeast and bacteria much the way a sourdough starter works, building the tang. I added one more note: “ferment drink like dosa, overnight.”

Thanks for getting this far, and do let me know how you get on with the recipes xxx

Lamb Birria Tacos // Makes 8

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This week, I’ve developed a pasta dish specifically for summer - not only in terms of what goes into it, but how little heat it requires you to endure while making it. Naturally, this means taking a bit of a deep dive into confit.

Paid subscribers can read the full piece, get all three recipes and follow the thinking that turned a few random notes into supper. So, if you were considering upgrading, this would be a particularly good week to do it.

Ben x

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My fiancé recently reminded me that I needed to spend time doing something that didn’t involve food. For the past fifteen years or so, I have forgone hobbies and engagement with popular culture to focus on becoming a better cook. I host a great dinner party, but make for an awful conversationalist when talk diverges from what we might be eating. So, recently, I decided to funnel a little energy into a six-week ceramics course with the aim of making plates, bowls, and things to eat from. Friends were quick to point out this wasn’t much of a deviation away from dining, but it has made a fantastic talking point at parties thus far.

Learning something new in your thirties is quite a vulnerable experience. Thankfully, this was softened by the discovery that, before throwing anything on a wheel, clay must be kneaded like a low-hydration bread dough to remove as many air pockets as possible. I sat at a large wooden table with my new classmates, making small talk and resisting the urge to mention bread dough more than once.

Our instructor explained that kneading also helps to align the crystals in the clay. “Like chocolate,” I said and immediately regretted. Nobody had asked. Tempering chocolate is, after all, an exercise in coaxing cocoa butter crystals to form in the correct structure, so that it sets right and has a snap rather than becoming dull, soft or streaky. It’s the difference between a glossy truffle and a floppy millionaire’s shortbread at a village fête.

We started throwing the suitably molested clay into a few simple shapes. I had been slightly stressed all day, but at the wheel it all fell away. I began to understand why so many worn out parents end up making mugs, spoon rests, and little dishes for keeping rings in. Clay forces you to move slowly and concentrate on one thing at a time - the antithesis of the school run.

I noticed my whole body cooling down. Until then, I had been sweating gently but persistently, all day. Yet there, in a hot repurposed railway arch, hunched over a spinning lump of clay, I felt completely calm. Not cool exactly, but no longer actively weeping from most pores.

With clay, nothing could be rushed or forced; you apply the gentlest pressure and let time do the heavy lifting. It occurred to me that this was also the only sensible way to cook in summer. By late July, I was already a little bored of cold, raw food, but had no desire to introduce any more heat or agitation into my life. I wanted something properly cooked without turning the kitchen (or myself) - into a furnace.

I wiped my hands on my apron, pulled out my phone and typed the obvious conclusion: “confit.”

To confit food is to let it cook slowly in fat, almost without appearing to cook at all. Depending on what needs cooking, the oil might sit anywhere between the temperature of a warm bath and just below boiling. Fish tends to occupy the gentler end of that spectrum. While working in restaurants, we would sometimes reach briefly into pans filled to the brim with warm olive oil to coax soft fillets of cod to the surface. Tongs or slotted spoons could break their delicate flesh.

With meat, the low temperature gives collagen time to dissolve into gelatin without forcing the muscle fibres to contract too violently, which is why a duck leg can become yielding rather than dry. Vegetables behave differently: the heat gradually weakens the pectin-rich material holding the vegetable’s cells together, softening it, while the absence of boiling water prevents water-soluble flavour compounds and nutrients from leaching away into the fat. In both cases, the oil is less an ingredient being absorbed than a very steady way of moving heat around.

A few days later, we went on a gallery date and became peckish, though not in a way that could be satisfied by a dry croissant and a cappuccino from the museum café. I locked onto my phone’s map, searching for somewhere suitable while sleepwalking through the galleries and nearly disturbing a circular arrangement of flint on the floor. I was now, not only ignoring culture, but nearly literally kicking it in pursuit of food. Som Saa, somewhere near the top of my unwritten Thai restaurant rankings, had space.

We ate fragrant meatballs, deep-fried so that the oil met every part of their surface, driving off moisture and encouraging the browning reactions that gave them a crisp, deeply savoury crust. They came with bitter radicchio for balance and a sprig of mint that we nibbled between bites. There were skewers of chicken too, their sweetened marinade catching against the heat and leaving small pockets of caramelised flavour across the surface, followed by a fiercely hot papaya and crushed tomato salad. Chilli, ginger, garlic and sourness ran through almost everything we ate: flavours that make more sense the hotter the day becomes.

I jotted down: “tomatoes, chillies, ginger, garlic - confit. SE Asia confit.” I knew that these ingredients would give as much to the oil as the oil would give back to them. That heat would draw gingerols from the ginger, capsaicin and fruity esters from the chillies and - provided the garlic had been cut or crushed - allicin, which would soon break down into delicious sweet compounds. These molecules are much more at home in fat than water. The same ingredients appear, across Italian cooking too, where they already have great chemistry with olive oil. This was the point at which the dish became clear. An Italian confit of sorts, pulled further into summer by the aromatics that run through Thai cooking.

I threw my backpack into the boot of the Uber taking us home, where the driver had stowed an inexplicable quantity of tinned sweetcorn. I decided not to ask, preferring to imagine that he was the Green Giant’s smaller, less green brother - or that, somewhere within the North Circular, a gargantuan tuna pasta bake was waiting for its textural contrast. My mind wandered next to the cold tuna-and-sweetcorn mayonnaise spooned over baked potatoes at school - a combination that made little sense to me then, and somehow even less now. From there, it drifted further into tuna, and I wrote: “tuna in confit oil. from Uber sweetcorn, baked potato, tinned tuna.”

Tuna loin is lean and prone to drying out, so cooking it gently in fat keeps the temperature even and limits the tightening of its proteins, meaning less moisture is forced from the flesh. I sometimes find it easier to think about fish and meat like a sponge full of fat and water: apply too much heat and the structure contracts, squeezing out the moisture it was holding. It’s for this reason I wince when I watch anyone press down on a steak with the back of a spatula while it fries.

The oil also carries fat-soluble aromas from the garlic, chilli and ginger onto the fish as it cooks. It will not penetrate deeply, but it leaves the tuna softer, richer and far more fragrant than dry heat would. By this point, I knew I wanted to make full use of the warm, aromatic oil from the tomatoes by slipping thick slices of tuna into it to cook.

Wednesday is a good day to visit my new local greengrocer - and I should know. I spend an inordinate amount of time learning the rhythms of deliveries and replenished shelves in my favourite food shops, like a fastidious fisherman staying up for the shipping forecast. I gently squeezed yellow pineapple tomatoes, just soft, and brushed my hand over bunches of radishes with their peppery tops still intact - a rarity at almost any greengrocer. I tested the courgettes too, their firm flesh and the still-sharp spines on its stems offering a slightly painful reminder of how recently they had been picked. I noted “courgettes in confit?….strips like pasta”.

I can’t stand courgetti, and it might be a trauma thing. In two significant relationships, the spiraliser has been something of an omen for impending heartbreak. Realistically, spiralising vegetables is the culinary equivalent of joining a gym. A blatant sign that someone has decided they need to make some changes. Big ones. Involving you.

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Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the bacon sandwich, with four recipes designed to work together: the perfect white loaf, bacon made from scratch, a smoked butter and a ketchup built for preserving tomatoes at their best.

This was an especially fun one to develop and write. Paid subscribers can read the full piece, get all four recipes and the thinking behind them, so now might be a very good time to upgrade if you haven’t already.

Ben x

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Our train back from Totnes was delayed by an hour or so. This would have been a bind had there not been a caff perched just above platform one. We sat on faux leather-lined chairs and ate bacon sandwiches made with worryingly juicy back bacon, margarine and cheap white bread. Diet Cokes were mainlined, followed by white chocolate Magnums to complete the ‘this might cure my hangover’ trifecta. What had begun as a delay became a kind of emergency recovery session.

I’m not particularly picky when it comes to bacon sandwiches. I generally deploy them in circumstances where I don’t much care how sustenance arrives: quick service station stops, flights, the morning after a big night and, for that matter, before one. They are also almost impossible to truly eff up. Stale bread? Use more ketchup. Overcooked bacon? I think you’ll find it’s crispy. Undercooked bacon? I like ham sandwiches.

That being said, once aboard our Paddington-bound train, I opened my Notes app and typed: “Bacon sandwich, make it better.” What followed was two weeks of fairly whimsical development, built on the idea that even the food we turn to without thinking can be made considerably better by thinking about it.

There is an East Asian supermarket in Paddington Station, where I picked up an onigiri stuffed with cooked salmon. It was two in the afternoon, and I realised that everything I had eaten that day had been some kind of solution. Not very sexy.

Opening a packaged onigiri can be a struggle. There are strings, tabs and stickers that must be peeled away in a particular order, and one false move can take you from sushi to a very loose arrangement of rice and fish in seconds. I fashioned my mistake into a cohesive ball and ate it like an apple while waiting for the tube. With my free hand, I added another note: “Japanese bread. Small bubbles. Not too soft. Maybe lard. Good for bacon.”

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Hello again,

For the best part of two decades, I’ve made a living turning ideas into recipes - for books, publications, brands, and now, my own patch of the internet. But everything generally starts with a phone note: from fully formed moments of inspiration, hashed out on the commute, to typo-heavy restaurant recommendations I don’t remember jotting down in smoking areas.

My notes are a place to catch an idea before it disappears, or a reminder of something I don’t understand yet. And when those things are explored, great food tends to follow.

Each week, I’ll share a few notes from the past seven days. Where I’ve been, who I’ve seen, what I’ve cooked, what I’ve got wrong, and how it all gradually turns into something edible. Each newsletter will culminate in a genuinely useful recipe inspired by those notes, built to be cooked again, and again.

99% of the newsletter will be for paid subscribers, with a public post from time to time so you can get a feel for it. So if you are game, you can jump right in, or test the water with a seven-day trial.

I really hope to see you there,

Ben xxx