Original subtitles

Autumn is here.

Yay!

HE CHUCKLES

And there's some incredible British fruit and veg

bursting with flavour and ripe for the picking.

Yes. Look at this, what a beautiful plant.

These are the gorgeous ingredients that are best right now.

They're at their most delicious, most affordable,

better for you and the planet,

so if you've got a bit of time to make something special,

I've created some exciting meals for whatever the occasion,

that make the most of what's in season...

A snapshot of deliciousness.

...taking fruit and veg to the next level...

Look at that stringiness.

...celebrating all the ingredients of now.

From epic ideas for show-stopping pies and cracking curries...

Off-the-chart flavour.

...to perfect pastas, stunning soups and beautiful burgers.

It's full of the good stuff.

And sensational seasonal puddings. Hallelujah.

So, join me at home in my shed, as I spend the year cooking

what's in season, in the hope that it inspires you to have

a think about the way you cook, shop or even grow your food too.

What a joy, what a pleasure,

and what a season to cook. Come on!

Conker, good boy.

Yes!

Look at this. What a beautiful plant.

Mysterious, look.

Essex aubergine and, actually, that's a small one.

I remember the first time I grew aubergines in the UK,

I just couldn't believe it cos I'd always seen it in Italy and Spain.

I thought, "We're never gonna do it in the UK,"

but, actually, the smaller varieties,

they do work very well here, and you don't need loads of space to do it.

You can do it on a windowsill, you can just do one plant

and kind of egg it on.

HE CHUCKLES

They grow from June, July, August, September

and now is the time to use and celebrate aubergines, for sure.

And I know we have them in the supermarkets all year round,

but when they're in season, the flavour is so extraordinary.

But, look, that's good. Nice little bounty.

I'm very, very happy with that.

I'm taking these autumn gifts and adding some super cool,

North African flavour hacks from the store cupboard

to create a smoky, creamy puree that is next level.

With seasonal squash and herby couscous,

my smashed aubergine and dukkah roast chicken is a spectacular way

to upgrade a roast when you wanna do something really special.

Look at the shapes and sizes of these aubergines! Amazing.

And many of us love a roast chicken. Crispy skin, juicy,

melt in your mouth.

Yeah, we're gonna have all that, but with a few extra ingredients,

we are gonna take it on a really amazing holiday.

These are flavours that are gonna blow your mind, I promise you,

and we're gonna amplify all of that gorgeousness with seasonal veggies.

The whole things comes together so quickly.

So let's start off with the flavouring of the chicken.

Olive oil in there.

We're then gonna go in with an acid.

It could be lemon, it could be vinegar, but not this time.

We're gonna go pomegranate.

This is from the supermarket.

It's not necessarily typical of the UK, of course,

but pomegranate is an incredible flavour and it's an amazing colour.

Squeeze the juice into the tray.

Like, we're not mucking about here.

Right, so sweetness, sourness, colour.

So, clearly, already we're not in the UK.

I'm gonna take you on a holiday into the regions of, like, Egypt

and North Africa, and you can do that with a few ingredients.

If you go to a regular supermarket, you're gonna see on the shelves

these little preserved lemons, right, and I love that.

As a chef, the ability to have a little time capsule

and take something from the summer and use it throughout the year.

They are extraordinary.

I'm gonna use three.

These will reinvent stews.

You can put 'em in rice dishes, couscous dishes.

It's kind of like orange squash that's gone bonkers.

We'll take these pips out and then we can chop these up.

And I can smell them now.

They're absolutely extraordinary.

So, pomegranates and these lemons are gonna really transform

this chicken.

Look at these colours, come on.

So, pepper, sea salt, one or two chillies,

and just slice these up.

I'm gonna use rosemary as well.

So this takes, like, a minute and a half to do,

and then we take this chicken and we give it a proper little massage,

and this is how you command amazing flavour.

Very, very quick.

So, let me wash my hands.

Take a handful of aubergines, a kilo or so.

Just fill that roasting tray up.

Give it a prick. If you don't prick 'em, they tend to explode.

And a whole garlic bulb.

So I'm gonna roast these at the same time as that,

making full use of the oven, so good for energy efficiency.

When it roasts, the skin's gonna protect the aubergine.

It's gonna go smoky and it's gonna go creamy and curdy on the inside.

Last but not least, we're gonna roast some squash.

Bang in season right now.

Take the end off.

Be careful.

Cut your squash like that.

Get a spoon and take the seeds out.

You can keep them, you can roast them off,

you can save the seeds and plant them again.

And then just cut them into, like, inch wedges.

Go in with some olive oil, enough to coat the squash,

a couple of tablespoons.

Heavy on the black pepper. Yes, please!

Lovely sea salt.

Pick a nice rustic herb - sage.

The oil, salt and pepper and sage

will just stick to the squash

in the most beautiful way.

Make 'em sort of stand up like that, and the brilliant thing is,

all of this cooks for the same amount of time in the oven.

The oven's been preheated to 180 degrees Celsius, which is

350 Fahrenheit, and this chicken is about 1.6kg,

so about an hour and 20, hour and 30 minutes for all of this.

Halfway through, I'll go in and give this a nice little baste,

and I'll add a little bit of water to the tray to help me

make a nice little simple sauce.

Squash in, chicken in, and aubergine kind of... stuck in.

HE CHUCKLES

The chicken and veggies are nearly done

and I'm gonna show you how to bring the meal together now.

So put some couscous into a bowl.

Lightly season it and then flavour it with a herb.

Here's a little bit of oregano.

And then the boiling water goes on top.

I'm gonna cover the couscous by just over a centimetre,

and that will just plump up.

A tiny bit of olive oil and a lid on top.

That's it.

Now, I wanna tell you about a fantastic little product

that you can get already done for you in little jam jars

in the supermarkets or delis, and it's called dukkah.

Things like beautiful hazelnuts, sesame seeds, pistachios,

pepper, coriander seeds and fennel.

It's got wow factor

and it just makes things a little bit more exciting.

So this is quite an epic meal, in my opinion, with little effort.

OK, let's check the chicken.

Oh, look at this.

Now, that is a roast chicken.

So, let's get it all out and let's get this party going.

I'm gonna let it rest, and we need to sort of look at these aubergines.

Now, they look ugly, they look destroyed, they look burnt.

That's exactly what I wanted

because through all the ugliness, on the inside is beauty.

Take a spoon and use it to scoop out all this curdy,

gorgeous aubergine, and you can see how brilliantly the skin has

protected the aubergines, and we'll do the same to this one.

Look how pearly white that is.

And look at the difference in colour.

And that's why it's quite nice to use different varieties

if you've got 'em, cos you can taste the difference.

It's gonna be amazing, right?

Then we've got the garlic.

Squeeze that garlic out of the skin, like that.

I'm gonna take a little bunch of parsley here.

And I think that's a really nice contrast to the garlickiness.

Now the juice of one lemon.

Then some olive oil goes in, extra virgin olive oil,

and then another little secret ingredient

that is just gonna make this incredible - tahini.

A nice little tablespoon.

It's pureed sesame seeds and that's what you would have in hummus,

right, and we love hummus.

Some people will call versions of this baba ghanoush.

And that is gonna be amazing.

Right, the couscous.

You can see how it's plumped up, right? Let's bring this together.

Nice big platter and put in the beautiful aubergine.

This is like the most incredible welcoming party to this chicken.

Then we've got our lovely roasted squash.

Come on! You know it makes sense.

Go in with a spoon of honey and then this dukkah is gonna stick to it.

A final embellishment - a pomegranate.

This is, like, an autumn spectacular.

It feels like a special occasion dish.

It is roast chicken, but definitely not as you've seen it.

Right, let's serve some up.

That lovely aubergine, which is the best bit.

Bang in season right now.

See how juicy that is.

And then to finish, some of that beautiful juice.

Let's try some, come on.

Wow!

That aubergine, it's so silky, it's so smooth.

It's an incredible carrier of flavours, and it works

so well with the chicken.

That crunchy dukkah, the squash and aubergine,

perfectly seasonal vegetables.

It's a brilliant feast that will fill you with, like,

fantasy and surprise...

...that absolutely celebrates autumn.

Figs I've always felt are a little bit special.

They've pretty much gone now.

I think I've got one or two left.

Might have to do a little bit of climbing.

Hopefully, I don't embarrass meself.

Come here, fella.

There we go.

Agh!

HE CHUCKLES

Beautiful fig.

Juicy inside.

Look, come on, man.

Just gorgeous.

Ohh!

Fresh, sweet, almost like honey, and that in cooking stews,

that in salads with salty things

and beautiful cured meats and cheese is amazing.

And a fig tree, like, they grow in towns and they grow in gardens

all round the country, but it's a short season, right?

August to September, sometimes longer.

You can even use a fig leaf to wrap around meat or fish and grill,

barbecue, steam in it, but the second you apply some heat,

it's the most amazing flavour.

And I've got a nice little recipe that I'm gonna do with the figs

and the leaves right now.

To celebrate the mighty fig, I'm making a couple of epic

but easy mezze-style dishes, flavouring feta with orange

and fresh herbs, before baking it wrapped in fragrant fig leaves.

And serving the fruits with Parma ham

and a cheeky flatbread in a surprising little autumn feast.

My glorious figs and baked feta is the perfect dish for sharing.

I'm gonna put a few little side dishes together

and as a little threesome, this is gonna be a really nice little party.

I'll show you first how to do this baked feta cheese.

I've got the leaves here, fig leaves.

You might think, "Well, where the hell am I gonna get these from?"

If you haven't got fig leaves, you could use greaseproof paper.

So I'm gonna take a few leaves, let's just say four or five.

I'm gonna put just a little bit of boiling water over the top,

just to make them nice and flexible.

They have this ability to almost act like the original

kind of baking paper, right?

You can see how just 20 seconds has made these nice and floppy.

Take the little stalk off.

Olive oil on the bottom.

I'm just gonna lay the leaves like this.

Feta cheese on top.

We'll have a little seasoning of pepper.

Then you can use a citrus.

Orange is really good.

Tiny amount of zest makes all the difference.

That's what I love about cooking.

The excitement, the joy.

I want a herb.

Oregano here, but you could use any herb, really.

Put some nice extra virgin olive oil on, like that.

We'll wrap it up, tuck it in like it's going to bed.

Now, the idea of this leaf,

you're not gonna eat it.

It's for it to burn and crackle and char, but in doing so,

you are exaggerating

those incredible essential oils in the leaf.

But greaseproof paper still gives you that kind of nice,

oozy environment inside.

You won't get the fragrance but it still will be utterly delicious.

It looks beautiful.

It's a little bit bonkers.

I'll put it in the oven at, like, 200 degrees Celsius, which is

400 Fahrenheit, and burn it for like, ten to 15 minutes,

and it'll give you something that, when you tear that open,

is worth dunking bread into and tucking into.

It's gonna be amazing.

It's got really windy all of a sudden but that's all right.

We'll go with that.

So, imagine you'd run out of bread, right?

It's always good to have a cool little flatbread recipe

up your sleeve that takes no time at all.

So, I'm gonna use that bowl that I put the fig leaves in.

I'm gonna go in with four tablespoons of yoghurt.

Having it in a flatbread's interesting.

You get more complexity.

Four. You get a sourness, I really like that.

Add 100g of self-raising flour, a little pinch of salt,

a little swig of olive oil.

Makes it a little bit richer,

and allows you to cook it dry in a frying pan or on a griddle pan.

If it feels a little bit tacky, that's fine.

You can just go and get a little bit more self-raising flour

and adjust it. We wanna create a little dough

that is pliable and smooth,

and then just give it a tiny little knead.

We can divide that into two,

or four little flatbreads might be quite nice.

So, I just roll it into a sausage,

divide it roughly into four.

Roll it into a little ball.

None of it perfect.

I would take a little bit of flour and just dust it.

We can press it down and do a rustic sort of pressed flatbread.

About 1cm thick, and if you wanna roll it out,

you can roll it out with a rolling pin.

But I quite like having

my finger marks on it like that,

cos it's blatantly saying home-made.

So, I'll just place this now into our pan, medium-high heat.

That heat will activate the self-raising agent in the flour

and those flatbreads only need,

like, a minute and a half on each side.

So, baked cheese in the oven. Easy.

Flatbread in the pan. Easy.

Let's just turn it over, and I like that char.

Look at that char.

That's what's brilliant about these.

In no time at all, you've gone from having no bread in the house

to having beautiful flatbreads.

Now I just wanna make an interesting salad.

I've got black figs and a green fig, but it could be any fruit.

Surf the seasons, right, from clementines to blood oranges,

to peaches, apricots, apples, pears.

I wanna make a nice little dressing.

So let me give you the basic principles.

Three parts extra virgin olive oil,

this is three tablespoons,

with one part acid.

So I'll put a bit of lemon juice in there,

but you could also use a vinegar.

Red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar.

As long as it's one part acid to three parts oil,

you're in a really good place.

Then you season it.

Get a fork, mix it up.

So that's it, that's the dressing.

Then we'll put the salad in here and we've got my beautiful fig.

Look at the colours, absolutely amazing.

Marbled, white, purple, and if you just score down like this,

not quite to the end, you can do nice little things

which are really, really beautiful.

Let's pop 'em around a plate.

And then take a little slice of prosciutto or Parma ham,

and get a nice wadge of salad and actually, we can use this ham

to just wrap around it and it just holds it really nicely together.

So that simple thing of pick it up, prosciutto, wrap it up,

plonk it in - starting to look quite pretty, right?

And then if you take balsamic vinegar, which is thick

and sweet and sour, we turn the everyday boring salad

into something that looks pretty special.

If you wanna take just a few walnuts and break them over the top

and then take a little speed peeler

and some Parmesan, and just shave the cheese.

Just a little olive oil, and that is a beautiful little plate.

All of this, you can get from a market or supermarket. Easy.

The flatbreads are looking very, very good.

Let's get that feta cheese out.

I can smell it.

Oh-ho-ho!

I succeeded.

I burnt it.

That's good. That's a good sign.

That is definitely dark and mysterious.

It smells insane.

Just start peeling it all back.

Come on!

And if you get in there, it's just so oozy and amazing.

And all I would do is finish that with a little honey.

Salty, tangy feta with a nice little drizzle of honey -

gorgeous.

So this, next to our little salads here,

with nice little flatbreads...

What a lovely little lunch, light dinner,

and this is a mighty salad.

The salty savouriness of the prosciutto or Parma ham

with the sweetness of the fig and that lovely dressing is amazing.

It's like a match made in heaven. Mmm!

To contrast it, we've got this feta with the herbs and the honey.

Come on.

Oh.

It's got the tang,

but it's got the flavour of fig all the way through that cheese.

Joy. And the lovely thing is, you can bounce from one plate

to another, and you're never really sure which one you love the most.

But more than anything,

it's celebrating seasonal figs at their best.

It's a short season, make the most of it,

and when they're gone, we're onto the next fruits.

Just surf the seasons and get amongst it.

At the end of May, I got basically like a tomato bag

and planted potatoes in it,

just to kind of prove that you could grow potatoes anywhere.

Let's see what we've got.

Yay!

I told you you could grow potatoes in anything.

I've given these no love, no care, no attention.

I think I watered it for a couple of weeks, then forgot it.

You know, life can be very busy, but look at this.

Lovely spuds.

I love this. I'm so pleased.

HE CHUCKLES

So these are actually perfect to go in my lovely runner bean stew.

That has made my day, Conker.

It's the little things in life like potatoes.

Come on!

Look at these.

So, runner beans are definitely one of my favourite veggies

to have at this time of year, an absolute classic.

If you go into supermarkets or markets right now,

you're gonna see runner beans everywhere,

and it's only gonna last for, like, a month and a half,

so go for it, embrace them. We need to eat more beans, fact.

Every one of us.

So most of the country are of deficit in fibre

every single day, so this is what we need.

They're delicious, super nutritious, full of fibre

and they're not just good for us.

When these grow, they have these roots, these root systems

and they set these little nuggets,

these little nodules of nitrogen in the soil,

so they don't just feed us what we need,

they feed the soil what we need.

You can eat the flowers, you can eat the leaves,

and you can eat the beans and the roots.

They're perfect right now.

They're an amazing end-of-summer, early-autumn bean,

and it's not just me that likes these lovely beans.

Look at this little fella as well.

Hello.

There's one more that I wanna show you.

These are called borlotti beans and you'll see 'em in tins

in the supermarket. Look at the colour of those beans.

I mean, that is a picture.

All these beans in all of their sizes, you know,

need slightly different cooking,

but I've got a recipe that embraces all of these

and that I think you're gonna absolutely love.

I'm hero-ing these sweet autumn beans,

giving them a starring role in a Mediterranean-style stew

with show-stopping monkfish wrapped in pancetta.

My runner bean stew and grilled monkfish is perfect for when

you've got a bit of time to create something extra special this autumn.

If you go around the Mediterranean particularly, you're gonna see

all kinds of different recipes and different cultures embracing beans

in all their different forms, really treating them with love,

care, attention, so I wanna kind of get you into that spirit.

So, first up, nice big casserole pan.

Let's get this on a medium, medium-high heat.

I'm gonna go a little thin layer of olive oil.

I wanna scent the oil so it's minty and delicious

and I wanna make these mint leaves crispy

so I can put 'em over the top to give you a nice little crunch.

At this time of year, in autumn, it is beautiful.

The light is very different.

It seems like it's always lower,

and it's such a privilege to cook at this time of day,

in the afternoon. I love it.

Put those to one side.

I'm gonna have this on a low heat.

Let's have two or three cloves of garlic...

...and just finely slice it.

And this comes to join the lovely minty oil.

Finely slice a red chilli.

So, garlic, mint oil, chilli.

Some nice capers here, just a teaspoon.

I've got some anchovies.

A couple, that's all you need.

They're gonna melt away and transform the humble bean.

But, look, it's sunny but it's raining so hard.

It's completely bonkers.

Welcome to autumn, where the weather goes mad.

Now, next up - leek.

Before I chop this up, I've got a feeling... Yes!

Look at that.

A beautiful rainbow.

Actually, not one rainbow, got a double rainbow.

Got to be good luck.

Right, let's get back to cooking.

So I'm just gonna go for the white part of the leek.

This I'll use for soups and stews, that will not go to waste.

And then I'll strip it down the length

and give this a little wash.

Always wash away from the stalk.

I'll just finely slice these, like that.

A beautiful beginning to this bean story.

Remember, I've got some borlotti beans here,

so I'm just gonna put a few in, straight in.

They're fresh, they shouldn't need too much cooking.

It doesn't matter if you use fresh beans, jarred beans,

tinned beans or even frozen beans, like,

what's nice is that you're putting the love and the care into it.

Right, our little base here is doing very nicely.

I've turned the heat up a little bit

and I'm gonna give it a little wine.

So we're going from frying now to simmering

and we'll cook that wine away.

Right, the potatoes.

Let's nick all the small ones.

And then with the bigger ones, cut these into 2cm dice.

I've got two tins of good-quality plum tomatoes.

A little basic seasoning of salt and pepper.

Gonna just get a little bit of water in here.

That helps to clean the tin as well.

OK, let's prep some more beans.

This is a dedicated runner bean cutter.

There's a really tough bit that runs down here

so if you put it through here, what it does is throw out these

tough bits, genius, and then cut the whole inner bit.

If you haven't got one, get a speed peeler,

get rid of that horrible stringy bit

and then what we do is we can just cut it into little diamonds,

and I rather like that as well.

And now we just let that slowly tick over for, like, 20 minutes or so.

So, lid on.

Right, fish.

How can we make fish utterly delicious?

Now, this is a piece of monkfish, but you could apply this principle

and this recipe that I'm gonna do to any white fish.

We're gonna roast this

and treat it almost like a roasting joint of meat.

I wanna do a little rub, a little seasoning.

So I'm gonna take some rosemary, which is often associated with meat.

And take a little bit of parsley,

and get a fine grater and you want just the zest of the lemon.

Then just finely chop it.

Black pepper, not salt, I'm not gonna use any salt at all.

And then roll it up like that.

Let me give you a handy little tip

to make your everyday fish extraordinary.

A little bit of olive oil on there.

I've got a pack of pancetta from the supermarket.

You could even use British smoked bacon.

Lay it out.

I'm gonna wrap this beautiful monkfish.

The natural fats here are gonna render and go golden,

and it's gonna baste the fish for you.

It's kind of protecting the fish

and it's gonna really guarantee you some really good flavour.

I love recipes like that.

I've got one last thing that I wanna do and that's some Parmesan.

Not even 30g, right, and this is gonna make it taste great

and stick to the fish.

Get your fish like that.

We're gonna roll it up.

Just peel it off, like that.

That's why we put the oil on it,

and roll it up nice and tight.

Put a little oil in the pan,

put it onto a high heat.

Get yourself a little bit of rosemary, some garlic,

maybe a chilli in there.

Slice up a lemon in that lovely oil.

The second it starts to sizzle,

we can turn this off and get it straight into a screaming-hot oven.

It's about 200 degrees Celsius, which is 400 Fahrenheit.

So, cook that for about 15 minutes until the pancetta is golden

and gorgeous, and then I'll pair it up with that incredible

runner bean stew, and that is gonna be a match made in heaven.

Oh, the smells.

It's sizzling away. Look at this.

Just angle the pan so it gathers all the lovely fats

and just baste it over, like that.

Just let that rest for a little bit.

Let's serve up this beautiful stew,

celebrating that beany bounty from the garden in autumn.

And then this incredible monkfish.

We've let it rest.

Just slice it.

Ohhh!

Pearly-white juicy fish, crispy bacon.

Right, I wanna do a little portion.

Do you remember these? The little mint leaves.

Let's have a try.

Mmm.

Those beans are a joy.

Big flavour.

The mint, the garlic, the capers, the anchovies.

Really, really beautiful.

Mmm.

Those potatoes have absorbed so much flavour, as have the beans.

Right, let's go for a little bit of that monkfish... with the bacon.

Such a joyful thing, and such an honour to cook in the wind

and the rain and the rainbows.

That is something very, very special.

So, if you've got a big celebration meal coming up, maybe consider this.

Mmm.

What a lovely day.

So much of our favourite fruit and veg

are at their very best in autumn,

which can mean too much of a good thing unless you can preserve them.

So I wanna share some of my techniques to extend

the joy into winter and beyond.

Come and have a little look at this.

This is quite cool.

So, beautiful blackberries that I got just yesterday,

and a thing I love, love, love to do is you take nice vinegar,

white wine, cider vinegar, red wine vinegar, whatever you want,

get it in a nice little jar

and you're gonna make a blackberry vinegar.

Well, why would you do that?

I'm telling you, because you capture a snapshot of deliciousness.

I honestly think vinegar is the most underrated part of the kitchen,

whether it's marinades, dressings, salsas,

a little spritz on top of a perfect roast potato

just lifts, lifts, lifts it.

Put it in there with maybe just a bit of rosemary

and a bunch of peppercorns, and after a month, you've got, like,

an infused vinegar that will transform everything you use it for.

Next up, chilli, chilli, chillies.

At this time of the year, you can see they're starting to dry

actually on the plant, and whether you're growing your own

or you see 'em down the supermarkets, what we can do is just

string 'em up. I do this to preserve it.

Just grab a fruit, take a needle like this

and put it through the stalk, like that,

and thread it through.

I hang 'em up in the kitchen, and not only have you preserved

the fruit for use in your cooking, but you've preserved the seeds

so you can plant them again and next year, you've got more chillies.

It's windy, and at this time of year, the weather's on the turn

and the pears are ready.

If you go down the supermarkets or markets,

you're gonna see loads of them.

These are nice little Conference pears.

These used to be called butter fruit because they were so buttery

and tender. They're one of the fruits that you pick

when they look perfect but they're not ripe,

and then they'll ripen after they've been picked.

There's so many different varieties, over 3,000 varieties.

I love to cook with these, I love them raw, I love 'em roasted,

turned into jams and chutneys.

There's so many things you can do.

Look at that.

It's utterly beautiful.

Right, let's go.

To bring out the best in this beautiful autumn fruit,

I've got a dessert that's a total show stopper,

perfect for a special occasion.

I'm poaching pears in caramel,

adding exciting flavours like citrus,

bay leaves and vanilla,

and finishing it off with almonds and puff pastry.

My tutti frutti pear tarte Tatin is so easy and it's utterly delicious.

Some beautiful dishes are happy mistakes,

just like tarte Tatin, an absolute classic dessert

invented or created by the Tatin sisters in France.

They were making an apple pie.

Apparently, they burnt it a little bit and put pastry on top,

popped it in the oven. "What am I gonna do with it?"

Turned it upside down, and there it was, the tarte Tatin.

A thing of joy, a thing of beauty,

and chefs make it all the way around the world

and of course it's evolved,

and I'm gonna do a dish now not with apples but with pears.

We're gonna start off in a pan with 150g of sugar.

Regular white sugar.

I'm gonna put it on a medium-high heat.

I'll add just a couple of tablespoons of amaretto,

which is almond liqueur, and don't touch it.

It'll go into a syrup and then a lightly-golden caramel

and then it'll get darker and darker.

While that's happening, let's get five nice pears.

I'm just gonna use a speed peeler just to remove the skin.

Compost that.

And I'm going to just halve the pear.

So I'll probably keep, you know, two of them in halves

and then I'll put these three into quarters.

And then take that little core out.

If you get a little teaspoon and rotate it around,

then you remove it beautifully, like that.

So once you've got the cores out of these pears,

have a look at the syrup and give it a light shake.

Don't touch it. This'll be really hot.

And at this stage, we're gonna break that cooking with 50g of butter

and it will sizzle, right, it'll start to melt,

and if you wanna add just a little bit more amaretto, you can now.

So, what's really beautiful is the butter, the sugar

and the amaretto create this incredible kind of butterscotch-y,

almondy sauce, and we'll go in now with the beautiful pears.

What we're essentially doing is poaching pears in caramel,

which has got to be one of the best things to be poached in.

Now, I want tutti frutti vibes which, for me,

are things like vanilla,

bay leaf, a couple of those.

Citrus zest, so orange zest.

You don't need much.

Not the white bit, the white bit's bitter.

A little bit of lemon.

And when you do this combination,

something truly magical happens.

Cut down your vanilla pod,

take that lovely vanilla-y part out the centre, like that,

and just put that in.

This is all flavour.

This looks so autumnal.

The colours and the smells are amazing.

But, look, it's getting dark now.

The nights are closing in, which is a little bit sad,

but also I quite like putting a jacket on,

I quite like getting a bit sort of chilly and getting warm.

I like getting in front of a fire, getting cosy, and we can do that

with our food as well, and this is a classic dessert for that.

So, look, let this cook now for, like, five minutes

and let that caramel there go to the same colour

as this chopping board - a nice golden caramel.

So, look at this.

It's really got quite a lot thicker now, beautiful.

I'm gonna get a little handful of flaked almonds,

just to carry on that lovely story, and we can stir that through.

And now, at this stage, however I leave these pears,

that's how you're gonna see a reverse

when you turn it upside down, OK?

So, you can put the halves, distribute it nicely,

so you can kind of see a little bit of everything.

And then our nice little cheat's ingredient here - puff pastry.

When you buy it from the supermarkets, it's all rolled

out for you and the only problem is, is that it's not round,

and that's a 28cm pan,

so what I do is just take an inch and a half off the end,

like that,

and then very simply stick it to this side

to make a square. Now, the square ain't a circle, but that's OK.

Just take this and lay it into this pan evenly

and then, so you don't burn yourself,

use a little spatula to tuck in the pastry,

so you get the most incredible kind of caramelised rim.

And then the square becomes a circle.

This goes into the oven for 20 to 25 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius,

which is 400 Fahrenheit, until golden, caramelised and delicious.

Let's do it.

Smells amazing.

Look at that.

Golden and crisp and, very importantly,

while it's still warm, safely, with a cloth,

I want you to put it onto a platter or a board like this

and you need to turn it out, so you can put something on top

and flip it, or you can just flip it, like this.

You do a little prayer...

Hallelujah.

If you leave the tarte in the pan and it starts to cool down,

it'll never turn out.

Look at this. Look at the edges.

Ho-ho-ho-ho! Come on!

I mean, it really is a picture and it looks completely autumnal,

and those bay leaves,

it literally looks like leaves that have fallen off the tree.

That, my friends, is an incredible dessert.

Let's cut a portion.

It's probably still a little bit warm, but I can't wait.

Oh, it's got a nice crunch.

Very elegant. Look at this. Come on!

Absolutely beautiful.

A very, very classy dessert.

I know you can't eat this vanilla

but you can suck on that, and that's delicious.

Let's put a little bit of bay here,

and then some beautiful creme fraiche.

Rich, tangy.

So there you go, a homage to the humble pear, a great autumn dish.

I hope the Tatin sisters would love that.

Let's have a try.

Now, for me,

I always take it from the back cos it's got that lovely crispy rim,

so I'm gonna get in there and that's just the best bit, honestly.

Oh-ho-ho!

Oh, yeah.

That is decadent and it's so crunchy.

Utterly delicious.

I love it.

What's really nice as well is by having a pear as a half

and some as quarters, you kind of get different flavours from it.

Some are more mushy and some are holding their shape.

Mmm!

Pear Tatin with those tutti frutti flavours - pure joy.

It's gone.

In seconds, it's gone.

It's so good!

You gotta give that a try.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media