Rhubarb fool

This would be the easiest dish in the world were it not for the slight difficulty of judging the consistency of the rhubarb. It should be sludgy, not runny; and that usually means that you have to reduce the liquid it throws off.

The quantities below served 4 people. The rhubarb sticks were thick, and the volume of cream was about a third of that of the rhubarb.

6 sticks rhubarb
1 1/2tbsp caster sugar (or more, or less, according to taste)
284ml double cream
1 tsp vanilla essence

Wash the rhubarb, cut it into short lengths, and throw it into the pan with 50ml water. You need the water to stop it catching, even though you'll find that you have an abundance of liquid later. Cover the pan, and cook over a medium heat. Add the sugar after a few minutes. (If you put the sugar in right away, it might catch on the pan and caramelise.) Turn down the heat once the contents of the pan are cooking properly. Allow the rhubarb to soften - about 10 to 15 minutes.

Drain the rhubarb in a sieve over another pan. Don't throw away the liquid it sheds: boil and reduce it, until you have a liquid with a syrupy consistency. Recombine with the rhubarb, mix it up into a mush, and cool. Add more sugar, if you like.

Whisk the cream, with a balloon whisk, for a minute or so, until it stands in peaks. Be careful: if you go on too long, the cream will get very stiff. Fold the cream into the rhubarb, with the vanilla.

Divide the fool between four glass bowls, cover with cling film, and chill.

Lamb shoulder, potatoes boulangeres

One of the principal ways in which the experience of the home cook differs from the one promised in recipes is that we constantly have to check and adjust our oven temperatures. Even when we're confident about our ovens and utensils, we cannot be sure that a dish put in an oven at gas mark 4/180C for an hour, say, will behave as it is supposed to. This is what I found when I cooked a shoulder of lamb yesterday.

I had studded the joint with garlic and rosemary, anointed it with oil, seasoned it, and left it overnight in a roasting tin in the fridge, with a foil covering. At 8.30 in the morning, I placed it in a gas mark S/130C oven, still with its foil - the theory being that the foil would keep the temperature of the tin below the oven temperature, and so help to cook the meat gently. After a few hours, all was going well.

I peeled and sliced potatoes, and put them into cold water, giving them a good rinse. I then changed the water. I did this because I had decided not to parboil the potatoes, and because I wanted to get rid of as much of their surface starch as possible. Surface starch can cause them to stick, and also forms a tough, rather than crunchy, crust.

At 11.30am I removed the roasting tin from the oven, lifted the joint on to a board, and tipped in the drained potatoes, mixing them with a ladleful of chicken stock and some splashes of olive oil. I seasoned them with salt. I put the joint back on top, covered the tin again, and returned it to the oven. I turned up the temperature to gas mark 3/160C. I wanted the potatoes to steam, before I uncovered the dish and browned them.

After 45 minutes, there was very little activity inside the foil. Eventually, to get things going, I turned the dial right up to 7/220C. I took out the joint at 1.05pm, lifted the tin to a higher shelf, and gave the potatoes 20 minutes to brown, uncovered, while the meat rested.

I have noticed before that a roasting tin, particularly a crowded one, does not heat up very efficiently when covered. Still, the lamb, being a forgiving cut, showed no ill effects from the blasting heat.

Kale gratin

If you have a vegetable box, you probably receive quite a lot kale during the winter months. Last week, it was a vivid purple. But, no matter how attractive in appearance, kale can have a harsh, chewy consistency. Preparing it as a gratin can soften it, and make it palatable even to those who are wary of brassicas. Serves 4.

Bagful of kale
About 50g butter
3dstsp flour
About 350ml milk
100g grated Cheddar, Gruyere, or some such
Scraping of nutmeg
Salt, pepper
2dstsp grated Parmesan

Warm a gratin dish in a gas mark 5/190C oven.

Strip the kale from the stalks, and wash it. Pour water a couple of cms deep into a saucepan, bring it to the boil, shove in the kale, and cook it, covered, for about five minutes, or until wilted. Drain, and squeeze out as much water as you can.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the flour, and cook very gently for a minute or so. (Use more butter if this roux is too thick.) Turn up the heat slightly, and pour in the milk a few splashes at a time, incorporating each addition before pouring in more. Stop when you have a thick but pourable sauce, and let it bubble, while you stir, for a minute or so. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Stir in the Cheddar or Gruyere. Mix the sauce and the kale. (I found that there was a lot of kale in my bag, so I made the mixture a little more liquid by adding some cream from the fridge.)

Tip into the gratin dish, sprinkle over the Parmesan, and bake for 20 minutes. If you'd like a browner top, finish it under the grill.

Pot-roasted chicken

Pot-roasting enables you to cook a joint when you have a hob but not an oven. But because people like the technique, they pot-roast in the oven anyway - as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall does in this Guardian recipe.

If you follow his advice to the letter, you will need a very large pot. I cooked a 2kg chicken at the weekend, and I found that my largest, oval Le Creuset casserole was only just large enough. The lid was not a snug fit.

The second point worth noting before following this recipe is that a large Le Creuset such as mine takes a long time to warm through. After an hour at gas mark 4/180C, the cooking process is still at an early stage. So the timing Fearnley-Whittingstall gives may not be adequate.

The third point is that 10 minutes at the end may not be long enough to brown the skin - although some browning will have taken place inside the pot. In this recipe, from the River Cottage website, the technique is different: you uncover the dish 30 minutes before the end. Again, I think that his suggested overall cooking time may be inadequate.

I browned my chicken in a little oil and butter first, before throwing in bay, rosemary, onion, and whole garlic cloves.

The fourth point is that, once cooking really is underway, the steamy atmosphere of the pot will cook the chicken more efficiently than would the unmediated heat of the oven. It means that the chicken breast is at greater risk of drying out than it is when roasted conventionally.

It seems to me that if you want to cook your chicken in a pot, you might as well joint it first, add the breast portions just 25 minutes or so before the end, and call it a stew.

Parsnip soup

Is it always necessary to cut the central, woody parts from large parsnips? Yesterday, making a soup, I did not bother, and did not find any woody quality, or woody fragments, in the cooked product. Indeed, the soup had an extraordinarily sweet flavour, reminiscent of marmalade. Serves 2.

1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
Knob of butter
Sunflower oil
2 large parsnips, peeled and cut into small pieces (it's quite hard work)
Stock, or water and half a stock cube
1/3tsp cayenne pepper
Salt

Cook the onion, garlic and cumin, gently, in the butter, with a little oil to prevent the mixture from sticking. Allow the onion five to 10 minutes to soften.

Throw in the parsnips, and pour in the stock (about 500ml, probably - you could heat it first, to save time) to come to the top of the vegetables. Add the cayenne, and salt to taste.

Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook on a low heat for about 15 minutes, or until the parsnips are soft. Pass through a mouli, or put in a blender, or use (as I did) a stick blender.

Cabbage gratin

I have seen many recipes for vegetable gratins, but not one that includes cabbage. Why that should be, I don't know: cabbage works just as well in this context as chard, say, or spinach, particularly with a strong cheese such as Cheddar.

This recipe involves my new favourite method of cooking cabbage. For two.

1 onion, chopped
Butter and a little sunflower oil, for frying the onion
Half a cabbage, such as Savoy, chopped and washed
About 35g butter
2dstsp flour
About 350ml milk
100g Cheddar, grated
Grating of nutmeg
1tsp Dijon mustard
2tbsp Parmesan, grated

Heat the oven to gas mark 8/230C. Warm a gratin dish. (I put mine into the grill section above the oven.)

Cook the onion, over a gentle heat, in enough butter to prevent its catching (the addition of a little oil is helpful). Give it five to 10 minutes to soften and start to turn golden. Throw in the wet cabbage, and cook, on a slightly higher heat and stirring regularly, until the leaves have wilted and softened - another five to 10 minutes. (The green colour deepens.)

Meanwhile, melt a large knob of butter in a small saucepan, and add the flour. (Use more butter if this roux is too thick.) Cook the roux, very gently, for about a minute - this process helps to soften the floury flavour. Turn up the heat to medium, and add the milk, a few splashes at a time, incorporating each before adding the next. Stop when you have a fairly thick sauce (which liquid from the vegetables will thin). Bubble it for a minute or so, and add the Cheddar, nutmeg, and mustard, with a little salt. (Remember that the cheese is salty.)

Stir the sauce into the cabbage and onions, and tip the mixture into the warm gratin dish; sprinkle the surface with Parmesan, and put the dish into the hot oven for five minutes. (You're just giving it a blast of heat. There's no need to cook it for any longer.) Brown the surface under the grill, if you like.

Don't blanch the lasagne

From a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi, I found a way to ensure that non pre-cook lasagne was properly cooked (as I wrote here). Before that, I had always blanched the pasta sheets before assembling the pasta.

However, last Saturday in the Guardian Ottolenghi gave a recipe for mushroom lasagne, and told us to pour boiling water on to the sheets, leave them for two minutes, and dry them on a tea towel.

This is a very bad idea. The sheets will stick together, and you will have trouble prising them apart.

Use the dry sheets, breaking them up as necessary to fit them in the dish. As I wrote in the earlier entry: cover the dish, after you have assembled the lasagne, with foil, and cook for 30 minutes at gas mark 4/180C, and then for another 30 minutes at gas mark 2/150C. Test the lasagne with a knife. If the pasta is soft, you could scatter parmesan on top and brown the dish under a grill.

Cabbage, sweated not stir-fried

Many recipes, Chinese-influenced ones especially, tell you simply to fry cabbage rather than to boil or steam it first. I find that the flavour of fried cabbage can be a bit assertive. But stir-frying in a wok over a fierce heat is not the only way. For a simple lunch, you can simply cook it over a modest flame, part frying it and part sweating it.

For two people, slice an onion and cook it gently in a tbsp or more of sunflower (or groundnut) oil, with a chopped clove of garlic, until it softens and starts to turn golden. Meanwhile, take half a Savoy (or other green) cabbage, cut that in half, remove the core, slice it, and halve the slices. Place the cabbage in a bowl of water.

Throw the cabbage, drained but still wet, into the pan with the onion. Add a little minced ginger too, if you like. Cook, stirring, for five to 10 minutes, until the water has evaporated and the cabbage is wilted and softened. Add a few splashes of soy sauce, and some toasted sesame oil.

Serve with rice or noodles.

Rice - one further refinement

I shall post this entry, and then I shall shut up on the subject for a while. Since writing last Thursday, I have discovered that you need use only twice the volume of water to rice if you cover the pan. So:

Wash rice (75g a person is a generous quantity) in a sieve, or by giving it a quick bath in a bowl and draining it. Do you need to wash it? I am not sure; but it can be a bit dusty.

(If you do believe that you should wash it, then surely you should wash the rice you use in a risotto as well? Experts tell you not to, in order to avoid losing any starch and in order to ensure that the grains are properly coated in fat before you add the liquid. I doubt whether damp grains would affect the consistency or flavour of the finished dish at all.)

I have a measuring cup which holds the right amount of rice for one person. So, cooking just for myself, I pour two cups of water into a pan, bring it to the boil, tip in the rice, and cover. I start counting 10 minutes from that point. When the contents of the pan are simmering again (steam starts puffing from the lid), I turn down that flame to its lowest.

After 10 minutes, there is usually just a little water left in the pan. Drain the rice in a sieve. You can return it to the pan to stay hot: put a paper towel over the top, and the lid on top of that.

This technique works perfectly with most of the widely available Basmati brands.

Rice again

Since blogging compulsively (see this post, and previous ones) about ways of cooking rice, I have continued to experiment. I have discovered that a lot of what I have written before, particularly in my book, is wrong. Well, not wrong exactly - it won't lead anyone to make disastrous mistakes; but not based on entirely correct premises.

The key point about rice - obvious, really - is not to overcook it. So when I wrote that soaking rice always caused it to go sticky on me, I should have realised that it was not the soaking that was at fault: the problem was that soaking softened the rice, reducing its absorbent qualities and its cooking time. If I then cooked it by the absorption method, I ended up with a sticky mass of overcooked grains that had been sitting together in a covered pan.

Nevertheless, it remains preferable to cook rice in the smallest volume of water possible, to reduce the dispersion of nutrients. So you need to know, with each variety you use, the optimum cooking time, as well as the amount of water it will absorb.

Ten minutes is about right for most commercially available types of Basmati; and I find that three times its volume of water works well. I bring the water to boil in a saucepan, and give the rice a rinse, either by putting it in a sieve and running water through it, or by putting it in a bowl and giving it a quick bath. When the water is boiling, I tip in the rice, bring the pan back to a simmer, and simmer it for 10 minutes (counting from the moment when the rice hits the water - even when there is a large quantity that takes longer to come back to the boil). When or if the water reduces to the level of the top of the rice, I cover the pan and turn down the heat. At the 10-minute mark, I drain away whatever water is left.

You can hold the rice, once drained, in the pan, with a paper towel on top and the lid clamped on top of that. It might clump together a little, though. The steam will continue to cook it for a while - another reason why you need to be careful not to simmer it for too long.

A friend recently brought me some organic rice from Indonesia. It takes about 12 to 13 minutes to cook, and turns the surrounding water very starchy. I find that the only way to prevent this rice from becoming sticky is to cook it in at least five times its volume of water. But, with most other brands I have tried, this ratio is not necessary.

Gluten-free rhubarb crumble

I have mentioned that I now need to cook gluten-free. Yesterday, I tried a crumble with Doves gluten-free flour. It was fine - though softer, less crumbly, than a wheat flour version. I thought I detected a faint, soapy (but not unpleasant) aftertaste. But I'll try it again.

The sticks of rhubarb I cooked a couple of weeks ago were quite thick. This batch was thin, as forced rhubarb usually is. That is one reason why the cooking time is shorter; also, I felt that it needed only to be tender, rather than cooked down to compote consistency.

Serves 2

4 sticks rhubarb, cut into short lengths and washed
2dstsp muscovado sugar
1/2 cinnamon stick
1tsp vanilla essence

80g Doves gluten-free flour
40g unsalted butter, cut into slivers
1dstsp muscovado sugar

Turn the oven up to full heat. Place the rhubarb, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla essence in an oven dish, and bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the rhubarb is tender to the sharp point of a knife. You may want to give the mixture a stir.

It occurred to me that a way to get butter into manageable portions to rub into flour (for crumble or pastry) would be to cut it off the block in slivers. Measure the 80g of flour, and then shave thin pieces of butter to drop on to it until the scales move up to 120g. Rub in with your fingertips - you do not have to be absolutely thorough. Stir through the sugar.

Scatter the crumble on to the rhubarb, and bake for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, or until the top is golden.

Bacon hock

My butcher sells bacon hocks for about £2.50 each. There is enough meat on one to feed three to four people - and it is delicious.

Some smoked hocks are very salty, and require soaking for 12 hours or longer. The ones I get do not. I put a hock into a stockpot (or pasta pan), cover it with water, bring it to a simmer, skim off the froth, and turn down the heat to its lowest. My pot has a heavy base; a low flame causes the liquid (with the pot uncovered) merely to show a few bubbles rising to the surface, rather than to simmer. Gentle heat tenderises the meat without drying it out. (Recipes that imply that meat will remain moist if surrounded by liquid or vapour - from the effect of a foil wrapping, say - are misleading. Indeed the liquid, because it is so effective at cooking, will dry out the meat faster.) I give it two hours.

It seems unadventurous to poach the hock in plain water - though it is hard to believe that a few surrounding vegetables will have much effect. However, you can keep the liquid and use it as a stock; for that reason, I usually throw in an onion or two, a couple of carrots, celery if I have it, and peppercorns.

Lighter batter

Farah, who blogs at Confessions of a Novice Baker, kindly credits as the source (adapted) for her recipe for Yorkshire pudding. I would not put anyone off making a batter in this way; but I am rather inclined nowadays to use half milk (semi-skimmed, too) and half water, for a lighter, less gooey result. Many recipes suggest you use two eggs, or even three, with these quantities of flour and milk. Perhaps egginess is desirable in pancakes; but not in baked batters, in my view.

Another common suggestion is that you should let batters stand, for at least half an hour and preferably longer. When I made a batter some three hours in advance of cooking it, I found it heavy and sticky when cooked, as if the resting period had caused it to become more glutenous. Perhaps I was just unfortunate.

Here is a recipe for toad in the hole.

Baked rhubarb

To retain rhubarb chunks rather than turning them to mush, try baking them. You need a high heat to get them going, though; and you may find that they take 30 to 45 minutes to braise, even on maximum. Keep checking, and stirring. If you cover the dish, you may end up with too much liquid.

These quantities served 2 of us, being greedy; they might do for 3, or even 4.

3 big sticks rhubarb, washed and cut into chunks
Juice of 1 orange
2tbsp muscovado sugar (or more, to taste - check at the end)
1/2 cinnamon stick
Grating of nutmeg
1tsp vanilla essence

Throw everything into an oven dish and bake (uncovered) at a high heat, stirring from time to time.

Cochin coconut curry

Emma Bradford kindly sent me some spice packages from Season & Spice. Each package comes with a recipe card, and consists of just the right quantity of spice to make the dish.

The curry recipe is for 4. I made it for 2, using the same quantity of spice and coconut milk, but cutting back the other ingredients (and leaving out the two tomatoes specified).

1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Sunflower or groundnut oil, knob of butter
1/2tsp grated ginger
1tbsp keralan curry powder (it consists of coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, chilli flakes, star anise, cardamom, and cloves)
400ml tin coconut milk
150ml chicken stock (the recipes gives 200ml water)
Leftover chicken, diced, for 2 (if you use fresh chicken, you probably need to simmer it in the sauce for 20 to 30 minutes)
1tsp mustard seeds
Handful curry leaves
1 lime

Gently fry the onion and the garlic in the butter and enough oil to prevent them from catching, until they are golden. Add the ginger and the curry powder, and cook gently for a further 10 minutes. (You want the powder to lose its powdery taste, but you have to be careful that it does not burn.)

Add the coconut milk and the stock, with salt to taste, and simmer gently, uncovered, for 30 minutes. (You want the sauce to concentrate a little.)

Stir in the chicken, and let it warm through. Meanwhile, cook the mustard seeds and curry leaves in a tbsp of oil until the seeds pop and the leaves wilt. Stir them into the curry, with a squeeze or two of lime juice.

Serve with boiled rice, in bowls.

Christmas things - salt cod, barley pudding, sprouts, chestnuts

I have done an encore in the New Statesman (where I used to write a food column): a piece about Christmas food. It includes a couple of recipes. The first is a brandade of salt cod (it's a rather luxurious way of eating something associated with asceticism on Christmas Eve); the second, an Armenian pudding consisting of sweetened pearl barley.

A brandade is a good deal easier to make now we have food processors. I had a culinary disaster when I tried to follow Richard Olney's recipe in his otherwise marvellous Simple French Food, beating the fish with olive oil in a saucepan over high heat. All that happened was that the flesh firmed up and fried.

Two further Christmas tips.

Sprouts

Perhaps one wants sprouts with the Christmas dinner simply to be steamed or boiled, and tossed in a little butter. But, if the rest of the meal were not so rich, I should recommend steaming (or boiling) them for just a couple of minutes, slicing them, and sauteing them in sunflower oil, with garlic. Stir in a little soy sauce at the end. Some people say that you should not cook them in water at all, but simply shred and fry them.

Chestnuts

Peeling chestnuts is a bit fiddly, but manageable, and worth it - the flavour beats that of chestnut puree. Slit the shells with a knife, and drop the chestnuts in boiling water; turn off the heat, cover, and leave for five minutes. Remove the chestnuts and peel them one-by-one - they will not be impossible to handle. Yesterday, I stuffed some cabbage leaves with sausage meat mixed with chestnuts whizzed with a clove of garlic, and the grated zest of a lemon.

Crackling at high heat

My first entry on this blog, back in 2006, boasted about how I had achieved the perfect combination of tender belly pork and crisp crackling. I should have been mindful that cookery is like tennis or golf: claiming that you have perfected some technique is foolhardy, and likely to be punished. My record with crackling since then has been patchy.

Two recent Guardian recipes have offered conflicting advice. Yotam Ottolenghi's suggests cooking your pork belly at the highest oven temperature for an hour, before turning down the dial. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's, for shoulder of pork, tells you to wrap the meat in foil and to cook it slowly, before slicing off the crackling and crisping it at a high temperature. It is the Fearnley-Whittingstall method that has usually gone wrong for me: the crackling goes from rubbery to burned, without passing through an intermediate stage of crunchiness.

So I decided to try Ottolenghi's advice, though nervous of cooking meat at such a high temperature (and puzzled that he should surround it with liquid - surely the steam will compromise the crackling?) I had prepared the crackling by leaving out the pork, uncovered, for several hours before cooking; and by sprinkling it with salt, allowing it to sweat, and patting it dry with a paper towel.

My piece of pork was a kilo smaller than his, and was very brown on top after 45 minutes; that was when I turned down the dial, to gas mark 1/150C, and cooked the joint for a further hour and a quarter.

The crackling was not quite crisp. I sliced it off, and returned it to the oven (meanwhile resting the meat, which I covered in foil), at gas mark 7/220C, for another 30 minutes.

It worked very well. The belly pork, being a forgiving cut, remained tender in spite of the blasting; and the crackling was crisp. Perhaps it is the first phase of cooking that is crucial.

Cannellini beans, onion, and harissa

Recipes usually tell you to drain and rinse tinned beans before cooking them; but that seems a bit fussy. You might as well warm them in their briny, slightly slimy liquid, and drain them when warm.

Last night, making a side dish to go with sausages, I gently fried an onion and a chopped clove of garlic in some olive oil and butter. Meanwhile, I warmed through a tin of cannellini beans in their liquid. When the onions were golden, I drained the beans, and stirred them into the onions with a tsp of harissa. (It's easier to warm the beans in liquid than to drain them first and then cook them, dry, with the onions.)

Nigella Lawson's idea, of adding lemon zest to the beans, is probably good. They need a vivid flavour to perk them up.

Cottage pie

As I have mentioned, I am not using much flour in my cooking at the moment. I find that it is quite possible - indeed, an improvement - to leave flour out of many recipes, including ones for which it is often considered indispensable. For example, in Shepherd's (or cottage) pie, in which it is supposed to help the sauce and mince cohere; as in a Bolognese, well-cooked vegetables (in this case, onions) and a slow reduction of the liquid do the job just as well. And the bonus is that you're dispensing with a flavour-deadening ingredient.

For 3 to 4.

200g pork mince
200g beef mince
2 medium onions, chopped
Sunflower oil, butter
2 bay leaves
150ml chicken stock (I used half a stock cube and water)
1tbsp tomato ketchup
Few shakes soy sauce
5 medium potatoes
35g butter

In a heavy pan, and over a gentle heat, fry the onions in just enough oil and butter to prevent their catching, stirring occasionally. Let them become golden brown. This may take 30 to 40 minutes.

The easiest way to brown the mince is to form it into patties (about eight), and to cook them on a hot grill pan for about a minute each side. Transfer to a bowl. Pour some of the stock into the pan, let it bubble and take up the sediments, and pour it into the bowl with the mince.

When the onions are ready, tip in the mince and juice, and add the bay, ketchup and soy. Bring to a very gentle simmer, breaking up the patties with a wooden spoon. Cook, uncovered, until the stew is thickened - moist, but not runny. Check the seasoning.

Meanwhile, peel the potatoes, cut them up (you could cut a medium potato into eight pieces), cover them with cold, lightly salted water, and simmer until soft. Drain, and allow them to dry, perhaps in the hot pan. Mash. If they seem too powdery, add a little warm milk (according to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian recently, cold milk causes mash to turn gluey) - just enough to cause them to cohere.

Tip the mince into a warm oven dish. Spread the potato on top. Rather than mixing the potato with the butter, you can cut the butter into slivers and scatter it over the surface, to brown.

Cook at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, or until brown on top.

Schama's Bolognese

Here is Simon Schama's article from the Guardian about the perfect Bolognese sauce. There are two questionable details: Schama tells you to add the wine after the stock, a procedure that might result in too winey a sauce; and he does not tell you whether to leave the pan covered or not. The Elizabeth David version, at the foot of the piece, tells you to cover the pan: I think that her sauce will be too runny. I like Marcella Hazan's, immediately below the Schama piece: you add milk, and let it evaporate; then wine, and let that evaporate; and then tomatoes, and let the sauce reduce again (with the pan uncovered all the while).

On Saturday, Hugh Feanley-Whittingstall's sauce, to be included in a lasagne, was similar to the Hazan version.