Tom Kerridges’s Best Ever Dishes review – cookery with a clenched fist

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/oct/03/tom-kerridges-best-ever-dishes-tv-review

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Oi oi! Now you’re going to read this proper, in a West Country accent, because I’m Tom Kerridge and this is Tom Kerridge’s Best Ever Dishes (BBC2). I want to show you how to turn an ordinary dish into something extraordinary. Take it up a notch. Proper food cooked proper.

The best thing about having a party is putting on a top-notch spread for your mates, and I don’t mean rustling up some namby-pamby nibbles. I like to serve proper grub, full of flavour, that might make you a little bit fat, like me, but it’ll be the best grub you’ve ever had. Right tasty. And not a canape in sight.

And I’m going to show you how to say “proper” proper, drop it in every other word, not like some namby-pamby chef from London. Also “top-notch”, “lush”, “proper lush”, “bad boys” – as in “chuck a few of these bad boys in there”, and then a few more, for the lads, wahey. Bad boys can be chillies, glugs of Tabasco, toasted fennel seeds, anything with a bit of flavour to it. And if your mates don’t love it … GET NEW MATES.

OK, you can drop the accent now, unless you’re from the actual West Country – as Tom is of course – in which case you’re allowed to carry on reading like that. I’m me now, though.

And I really like Tom Kerridge’s food. His best-ever crispy potato skins with pancetta, salad and roquefort dressing are making me drool into my keyboard. Likewise his barbecue beef brisket buns, his coleslaw with fennel and beetroot, and his mackerel stuffed with samphire, breadcrumbs, seaweed and anchovies. Mmm, God it looks good.

But is it all served up with just a teeny bit too much laddishness? So the brisket – like the man cooking it – is “a massive piece of beef”; his coleslaw is “hardcore”; pancetta is “just like streaky bacon on steroids, it’s double-hard”, and Tom clenches a fist to show just how hard double-hard is. Am I cooking here? Or squaring up for a fight? With my willy in one hand and copy of Loaded magazine in the other?