Featured recipe

Zurbiyan

Layered rice with chicken or lamb

Zurbiyan is Aden's wedding and Eid rice, cooked in huge pots in southern Yemen and shared by whole streets, and it shows the city's long links with India in its yogurt marinade and layering. Meat is marinated in yogurt and spice, cooked with crisp fried onion and potatoes, then layered with half-cooked rice, saffron and rose water and left to steam until each grain is separate and fragrant. It is rich, perfumed and gently spiced, served with a cooling tomato salad and green chilli sauce. The common mistake is cooking the rice fully before layering, so it turns soft and broken. Chef's tip: boil the rice only until it bends but still snaps in the middle; the steam does the rest.

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45 min

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15 min

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60 min

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30 min

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Pisto manchego is the summer vegetable stew of La Mancha, the high plains of Don Quixote country: onions, green and red peppers and courgette cooked slowly in olive oil, then simmered with fresh tomato until soft, sweet and jammy. Spain's answer to ratatouille is humbler and softer, with the vegetables cooked one after another rather than all at once. In La Mancha it is eaten with bread and very often topped with a fried egg; it is also served alongside rice or potatoes, or cold the next day as a tapa. Chef's tip: be patient with the onion and peppers; give them a full 15–20 minutes over a low heat until really soft and sweet before the tomato goes in, because that slow start is where pisto gets its deep, mellow flavour.

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40 min

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Pimientos de Padrón come from Herbón, near the town of Padrón in Galicia, where they are fried whole in olive oil and showered with coarse salt. They are small, thin-skinned and mostly mild and grassy, but the Galician saying goes 'os pementos de Padrón, uns pican e outros non' (some are hot and some are not): roughly one in ten has a real kick, which is half the fun. They take five minutes and make the perfect tapa with a cold drink, tortilla or bread. Chef's tip: get the oil properly hot and leave the peppers alone for the first minute so the skins blister and puff; stewing them in lukewarm oil makes them soft and khaki instead of bright and blistered.

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Vegetable phoVegetable rice noodle soup

Pho began in the north, around Hanoi and Nam Định, and is now eaten all over Vietnam, often for breakfast. Phở chay is the Buddhist vegetarian version served in temple kitchens and chay restaurants: the deep, clear broth comes from charred onion and ginger, toasted star anise, cinnamon and cloves, simmered with daikon, carrot, sweetcorn and dried shiitake instead of beef bones. Silky flat rice noodles, golden tofu and mushrooms go in the bowl, and everyone adds their own bean sprouts, Thai basil, lime and chilli at the table. Chef's tip: char the onion and ginger until properly blackened in patches and toast the spices in a dry pan until they smell like warm Christmas cake; that smoky, perfumed base is what makes the broth taste like pho and not vegetable soup.

60 min

Vietnamese Soups

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Tofu fresh summer rolls

Gỏi cuốn are the fresh, unfried rolls sold from glass cases at Saigon street stalls and eaten as a light lunch or snack on hot afternoons. Here golden tofu takes the place of the usual prawns and pork, rolled up with rice vermicelli, lettuce, mint, Thai basil, cucumber and garlic chives. They come with a thick, sweet-salty peanut and hoisin dip, as they do in the south. Chef's tip: dip the rice paper for barely a second and let it soften on the board, then lay the prettiest ingredients against the wrapper first, so the tofu and herbs show through the translucent skin and the roll stays tight.

30 min

Vietnamese Snacks & Starters

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Mushroom croquetas

Croquetas are the pride of Spanish home cooking and tapas bars alike: a thick, silky béchamel full of flavour, chilled, rolled in egg and breadcrumbs and fried until crisp. Every family has its own; ham and chicken are classic, but croquetas de setas, made with wild or chestnut mushrooms, are found all over the country and are especially loved in the mushroom-picking regions of Castile and Catalonia. A good croqueta is creamy, almost liquid, inside, with a thin shell. Make a big batch: they freeze beautifully raw. Chef's tip: cook the flour in the butter and oil for a full 2 minutes and then beat the milk in slowly over a low heat for 10–15 minutes; this long cooking takes away the raw taste of flour and gives the creamy centre that makes Spanish croquetas special.

120 min

Spanish Snacks & Starters

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Paella de verdurasVegetable paella

Paella comes from the rice fields around the Albufera lagoon south of Valencia, where it was cooked over orange-wood fires in a wide, shallow pan. Valencians are strict about it: short round rice, saffron, sweet pimentón, flat green beans (ferraúra) and big white garrofó beans, and never any stirring once the rice is in. This all-vegetable paella keeps those rules and adds artichokes and red pepper, as the market gardeners of the Huerta do in spring. It is cooked and served in the same pan, straight onto the table. Chef's tip: listen for the socarrat at the end. Turn up the heat for the last 1–2 minutes until the rice crackles and smells toasty; that caramelised crust on the bottom is the best part of any paella.

60 min

Spanish Rice & Grains

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Churros con chocolateChurros with hot chocolate

Churros con chocolate is Madrid's most famous treat, eaten at the city's historic chocolaterías for breakfast, as a late-afternoon merienda or at dawn after a night out. Churros are made from a simple dough of flour, water and salt piped straight into hot oil, fried until ridged and crisp, and dunked into a cup of hot chocolate so thick it almost holds the churro up. The dough has no egg or sugar, so the churros are light and crunchy; the sweetness comes from the chocolate and a dusting of sugar. Chef's tip: pipe through a star nozzle; the ridges let steam escape so the churros don't burst in the oil, and they create the extra crunch that makes a good churro.

40 min

Spanish Desserts

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Basque burnt cheesecake

This crustless cheesecake was created in the early 1990s at La Viña, a pintxos bar in the old town of San Sebastián (Donostia) in the Basque Country, and is now famous around the world. It's baked very hot so the top caramelises almost black and the sides rise and crack, while the middle stays soft and creamy, almost runny. There's no base and no water bath, and the rough, rustic look is the point: it's lined with crumpled baking paper. La Viña uses a spoonful of wheat flour; cornflour does the same job and keeps it gluten free. Chef's tip: take it out of the oven while the centre still wobbles like a soft set custard; it firms up as it cools, and if it looks set in the oven, the middle will be dry instead of creamy.

70 min

Spanish Baking

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