Jamie Oliver 5 Ingredients Quick & Easy Food 2/8

Tonight it was Seared Sesame Tuna, Messy Meatball Buns with Pesto, Chocolate Rye Cookies and Hearty Chicken Pot Pie on the second episode of Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients, Quick & Easy Food, TV programme and I watched it as there seemed little else on the telly to choose from!   The series is based around recipes using just 5 ingredients (plus of course a few extra splashes of things dragged out from a store cupboard stocked with things you’ve probably never bought before!).

I’ll be up front, in the main Jamie Oliver’s food and cooking isn’t for me.  I don’t have a hob or oven to start with, or a food processor – and he does seem to use these items quite a bit 🙂  But I do like to watch food I’d consider eating.

So, even though I don’t eat the food Jamie Oliver cooks, I’ll happily watch people make food on the TV regardless!

So, what’s on Jamie Oliver’s Recipes with Five Ingredients tonight?

Seared Sesame Tuna

This recipe should take less than 10 minutes to cook (allegedly ….)
The five ingredients were:

1. Fresh tuna steaks,
2. Japanese miso paste, a fermented bean product
3. Sesame seeds,
4. Spring onions,
5. Sugar snap peas.

So what did Jamie Oliver do with that lot?

• JO said the tuna should be shiny and rosy to be fresh.  He used the sesame seeds for texture, crunch and flavour. To stick the sesame seeds to the tuna use miso paste (which, he said, is a useful to season fish with and is a meaty, salty paste).  Take a big spoonful of the miso paste and spread it on the tuna steak on both sides (with a knife, like butter). To coat the tuna steaks with the sesame seeds, JO said to sprinkle the seeds onto a chopping board (or similar) and lay the tuna down on the seeds and give it a jiggle to coat the tuna, turn and do the other side, then coat the sides with sesame seeds too.  This protects and flavours the fish.
• Using a tablespoon of oil in a medium heat pan, fry the sesame coated tuna steaks for just 1½ minutes each side. Just place them in the pan and give them a little press down to make sure they’re flat. By the time the sesame seeds are golden the fresh tuna fish has cooked.
• Prep the veg while that cooks – slice the spring onions diagonally, abut the same size as your sugar snap peas.
• Remove the tuna from the pan and let the tuna rest for a couple of minutes.  Turn up the heat on the pan and put the sugar snap peas and spring onions into the pan; the pan has hardly any oil in it. at this point – just fry them together for about 2 minutes in the pan, they’ll go a little bit black and charred.  Sprinkle of salt, small splash of vinegar. Toss it all together a bit and tip out onto your serving plates.
• Slice the Tuna steaks into chunky fingers and lay them on top of the peas/onions.  A quick splash of Extra virgin olive oil on top and you’re done!
  Eat

Messy Meatball Buns:

These are like meatball burgers, with mozzarella and take under 20 minutes to cook. “It’s what chefs really cook at home when they’ve got the munchies”

The five ingredients were:

1. 400 grams Minced beef,
2. 4 teaspoons Green pesto, “binds the balls and gives big flavour fast”
3. Tinned plum tomatoes,
4. A small packet of buffalo mozzarella,
5. Soft burger buns (his had sesame seeds on them)

Now your ingredients are lined up, what’s next:

• Put a frying pan on the hob on a medium high heat.
• Jamie used good quality, grass fed, minced beef (but that’s just him!). Add some salt/pepper as seasoning and 4 teaspoons of pesto (this binds the meatballs and adds flavour). Mix the mince and pesto together thoroughly.  Roll the mix into balls and drop into a frying pan with a tablespoon of olive oil for 5 minutes on a medium hot heat, until they are evenly and nicely browned and caramelised. Get a small crust on the meatballs
  TIP: Wet your hands before making the meatballs makes them easier to hand roll.
• He then emptied the tinned tomatoes into the frying pan with the meatballs, catching the tomatoes in his hand Jamie squeezed those to break them up into the pan (to be honest I’d have simply shoved a knife in the tin and given it some random stabs to break them up).  If your ball of mozzarella comes in a sealed pouch containing liquid (the whey) then tip the mozzarella whey liquid into the empty tomato tin and use it to rinse out any stray bits of tomato – and tip all that into the tomato sauce in the frying pan (whey is full of flavour).
• Bring the meatballs and tomato sauce to the boil.
• Slice the Buffalo mozzarella thinly and place a small piece on each meatball (like a hat) so it melts over the meatball.  Lightly season the dish, turn the heat down, put the lid on the frying pan and in a few minutes the mozzarella will wrap around the meatballs.
• Char the burger buns in a dry griddle pan. Remove them from the griddle when browned and spread a teaspoon of pesto on the buns, spoon 3 meatballs onto the buns, put the burger bun lid on.
• You will still have lots of tomato sauce – just spoon that onto the plate, alongside the burger and dunk the burger in the tomato sauce to eat.

Chocolate Rye Cookies (makes 20-24)
These are simple biscuits that are crispy on the outside and gooey in the middle, taking about 28 minutes.  He made the cookies with a bought loaf of rye bread.

The 5 ingredients were:

1. 100 grams Rye bread, has a beery/malt flavour to it
2. 100 grams quality dark chocolate
3. 100 grams Unsalted butter
4. 50 grams caster sugar
5. 2 eggs

Method:

• Melt the chocolate – Jamie did it in a glass bowl over a pan of hot water, to melt the chocolate slowly and without it burning.
• Put the rye bread into a food processor and whizz it up to crumbs (the bread is taking the place of flour).
• Add the eggs and sugar to the breadcrumbs and mix up in the food processor.
• Remove the melted chocolate from the heat and stir the butter in. Once the butter has melted into the chocolate, mix the chocolate into the rye breadcrumbs and make sure they’re fully mixed/combined.
• Put all of that into a piping bag and pipe the mix onto baking trays that are lined with baking paper.
• Use a spoon to flatten the top of the cookies a bit. Bake for 10 minutes at 200°C/400°F.  Don’t be tempted to overcook, they should be a bit squidgy. Put a small pinch of sea-salt  onto the top of each cookie to bring out the taste of the chocolate.
  Crunchy on the outside, squidgy/gooey in the middle.

Hearty Chicken Pot Pie

This is a chicken pot pie that’s cooked on the hob, then you place a pastry lid on the contents, still in the frying pan and put it in the oven for the pastry to cook. Note: What he NEVER tells you is that you can’t put all frying pans into the oven, with many the handles will melt, so make sure your frying pan handle doesn’t melt in the oven before you try this!

The five ingredients in the chicken pot pie were:

1. 600g boneless and skinless chicken thighs (six pieces)
2. 2 large white onions
3. A supermarket punnet of mixed mushrooms
4. 2 small bunches of fresh thyme
5. A standard packet of supermarket ready made All Butter Puff Pastry

And here’s how Jamie Oliver mixed these 5 ingredients to make this recipe, he used two separate frying pans:

• Chop the onions and cook them down in a large frying pan with a tablespoon of oil. Season with salt & pepper at the start. Caramelise the onions until they are sticky.
• Cut four of the chicken thighs into large chunks, cut the other two much finer – this creates texture.  Add chicken to the onions already in the frying pan and fry together for 6 minutes.
• Chop up the mushrooms however you fancy it – then dry fry them in a separate frying pan until they are charred a little bit and add the mushrooms into the chicken/onion pan. This is best done in small batches of mushrooms, transferring them to the chicken/onion pan as they’re charred. Dry frying the mushrooms individually will bring out a nutty flavour and add depth of flavour.  Once charred, add to the chicken pan.
• Pick the thyme off the stalk and put the pieces into the chicken/onion pan.  Discard the stalks. Add 150ml of water into the chicken.  Add a dribble of red wine vinegar into the chicken mix.
• Roll out the ready made, bought, all butter puff pastry; do this inside a folded sheet of greaseproof paper so you don’t need flour and won’t make a mess. Roll it out to about ½cm thick and so it’s about 2cm wider than your frying pan and roughly circular in shape.
• Lay the pastry on the top of the chicken mix and tuck the sides down inside the pan to seal it; that is tucking it INSIDE the frying pan to seal, NOT over the top and down the outside.
• Take the second sprig of thyme and brush it through a splash of oil then use that to brush the oil over the pastry. Stick the whole thyme sprig into the middle of the pastry to create a vent for the pie steam to escape (else you’ll get a soggy crust)
• Bake the chicken pot pie at the bottom of a pre-heated oven at 230°C/425°F for 15 minutes, until the pastry is browned and cooked.  The filling is already cooked by the time you added the pastry lid.

More Recipes from The Series:

• Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients Recipes: Jamie Oliver 5 Ingredients Recipes.

 

Jamie Oliver’s Quick & Easy Recipe Book

All the recipes from the TV programme on Channel 4 will be available in the book that accompanies the show, which you can pre-order from Amazon UK.  The book contains over 130 recipes, which are organised into chapters by type.

Jamie Oliver, 5 Ingredients, Quick & Easy Food, as seen on Channel 4.

Currently priced at £9.99 on Kindle and £11.99 for the hardcover – no wonder he’s laughing on the cover! And there’s not even a “Look Inside” option at the time of writing.  I think he’s seeing us coming 🙂

ISBN: 9780718187729

There are a couple of reviews on the Amazon website, from food reviewers who have viewed a copy of the book prior to publication.

E&OE

#Quick&EasyFood

This programme was re-run on Sunday 22 October 2017