Supper

The Tomato Salad That Needs Nothing Else

Delphine Roy — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One large platter, as a side
10 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

900 g ripe tomatoes, mixed sizes and colours
flaky salt, more than feels correct
3 tbsp good olive oil
1 tsp red wine vinegar, optional, and only if the tomatoes are dull
torn basil
coarsely cracked black pepper

There is a version of this salad on every restaurant menu between June and September, and most of them have too much in them. Shallots, capers, a mustard vinaigrette, a hard cheese — each one is defensible on its own and together they bury the thing you paid for.

A tomato at the height of its season is already sweet, already acidic, and already savoury. What it wants is salt, fat, and time. Everything else is a hedge against tomatoes that are not very good, and the honest answer in that case is to cook them instead.

Mixed sizes and colours, and none of them refrigerated. This is the entire shopping list.Richard Heinen

Why the waiting matters

Salt does not season the surface of a tomato so much as it opens it. Twenty minutes after salting, there is a slick of pink juice on the platter that was not there before, and it is more concentrated than anything you could have made in a bowl. Pour the oil in and it emulsifies on contact.

This is also why the salad is assembled on the plate it is served from. Tossed in a bowl, the juice stays in the bowl.

What to put beside it

Bread, torn not sliced. A hard-boiled egg if it is lunch. Cold white wine, or a beer, and nothing that needs a knife.

If you want to make it a meal, the focaccia is the right bread, and you can tear it straight into the juice.

No-Knead Focaccia with Too Much Olive Oil

Delphine Roy — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 23 x 33 cm tray
50 min total — Serves 8 — Medium

Ingredients

For the dough

500 g strong bread flour
400 g cold water
10 g fine salt
4 g instant yeast
2 tbsp olive oil

For the pan and the top

5 tbsp olive oil, yes, five
200 g cherry tomatoes, halved
rosemary, picked into short sprigs
flaky salt

Focaccia is the most forgiving bread there is, and it is still the one people most often get wrong — because the two things that make it work both feel like mistakes while you are doing them.

The first is the water. At eighty per cent hydration this dough does not form a ball and cannot be kneaded. It is stirred, folded a few times, and then left in the fridge overnight, where time does the work that hands would otherwise have to.

The second is the oil. Four tablespoons in the tray is not a mistake and it is not a typo. It is a shallow fry, and it is the difference between a crisp, lacquered base and a flatbread.

What the overnight rise buys you

Cold fermentation slows the yeast down and lets enzymes get on with breaking starch into sugar. That sugar is what browns, and it is where the faintly sweet, almost nutty note in good focaccia comes from. A dough proved warm in three hours rises just as well and tastes of very little.

Eighteen hours is the outside edge. Past that the gluten starts giving up and the crumb goes gummy.

Dimpling, and why it has to be firm

Press with the pads of your fingers, straight down, until you feel the tray. Timid dimples close up in the oven and you get a dome. Real dimples hold oil, and the oil in them is what fries those pockets darker than the rest of the top.

Anything you push into those wells should be able to take twenty-five minutes at 230C. Halved tomatoes can. Sliced tomatoes cannot, and neither can garlic.

Eating it

Warm, torn, on its own. Or under the tomato salad, where it does the job bread was invented for.

Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange

Delphine Roy — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 20 cm round cake
1 hr 10 min total — Serves 10 — Easy

Ingredients

For the cake

200 g caster sugar
3 eggs, at room temperature
200 ml fruity olive oil
150 ml whole milk
2 blood oranges, zest only
60 ml blood orange juice
200 g plain flour
50 g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp fine salt

To finish

1 blood orange, sliced into thin rounds
2 tbsp demerara sugar

Butter cakes are a performance. There is a temperature the butter has to be at, a stage the creaming has to reach, and a window in which the eggs will go in without splitting. Olive oil cake asks for none of that. The fat is already liquid, so the batter comes together in one bowl with a whisk and cannot really be broken.

What you get in exchange is a cake with a much longer life. Oil stays soft at room temperature where butter sets hard, which is why this is still good on Thursday when a sponge made on Monday is a coaster.

Choosing the oil

This is the whole decision. The oil is not a shortening here, it is the dominant flavour, and it will be more obvious in the finished cake than it is in the bottle. A grassy, peppery Tuscan oil makes a cake with a savoury edge that I like very much. A softer, rounder Spanish or Greek oil makes a gentler one.

What you cannot do is use something anonymous and hope the sugar covers it. It does not.

The two minutes of whisking

Sugar and eggs, whisked until they visibly thicken and lighten. This is the only aeration the cake gets — there is no creamed butter holding air — and skipping it gives you something dense and slightly greasy. Two minutes by hand is enough, and it is worth setting a timer, because it is longer than it feels.

Citrus, and where to put it

Zest goes in the batter, where the oils in it dissolve into the fat and reach every crumb. Juice goes in too, but only one orange’s worth: more and the acid starts fighting the baking powder.

The slices on top are not decoration so much as insurance. They keep the surface from drying while the middle finishes, and the demerara over them turns to a thin, cracking caramel.

Serving it

Plain, with coffee, standing up in the kitchen. Or with a spoonful of thick yogurt and nothing else. If you want something to drink beside it in the evening, it is very good with a small glass of something bitter.

Charred Broccoli with Anchovy Butter

Delphine Roy — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dinner for two with bread, or a side for four
17 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

500 g broccoli
2 tbsp olive oil
40 g cold butter, cubed
4 anchovy fillets in oil, drained and chopped
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
½ tsp chilli flakes
1 lemon, juiced, plus wedges for the table
flaky salt

Steamed broccoli is a vegetable you have to be talked into. Charred broccoli is one you eat standing at the stove before it reaches the table, and the difference is entirely about heat and patience.

Most of the sweetness in a brassica is locked behind a sulphurous edge that boiling makes worse and browning removes. High, dry heat on a cut face converts sugars, drives off water, and leaves something closer to roasted cauliflower than to school dinners.

The flat face

Broccoli is an awkward shape and the trick is to make it less awkward. Cutting wedges through the stem, rather than breaking off florets, gives every piece a flat plane of dense stem to sit on. That plane is what browns. Loose florets have almost no surface that can contact the pan, which is why a tray of them comes out dusty and dry.

Peel the main stalk and slice it into coins. It cooks in the same time and it is better than the florets.

Anchovy as seasoning, not ingredient

Four fillets in a pan of butter melt into nothing visible in about sixty seconds. What is left is glutamate and salt — the same reason a Caesar dressing tastes the way it does without anybody thinking about fish.

If you are cooking for somebody who has told you they do not like anchovies, this is the dish to make them, and I would not mention it until afterwards.

Turning it into dinner

With bread and a fried egg it is a meal for two. With the crispy rice it is a better one. As a side it stretches to four and will still be the thing people mention.

Tomato Butter Pasta in Fifteen Minutes

Delphine Roy — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 bowls
28 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

800 g tinned whole peeled tomatoes
100 g butter
1 onion, peeled and halved, not chopped
1 tsp fine salt
500 g rigatoni or penne
grated parmesan
torn basil, optional

This is a sauce with four ingredients and one instruction, and it is better than most of what I make with twenty. The debt is obvious and worth stating: Marcella Hazan published the tomato, butter, and onion version decades ago and nobody has improved on it since.

What I have changed is only the ratio and the finish — more butter than she used, and the pasta tossed in the pan rather than sauced in a bowl.

Why the onion goes in the bin

Halved and left cut-side down in the simmering sauce, an onion gives up its sugars and its aromatics without ever contributing texture. By the end it is soft, spent, and slightly grey. Eating it adds nothing; leaving it in the pan makes a sauce that tastes sweeter and rounder than anything you can do with soffritto in the same twenty minutes.

If throwing it away offends you, chop it into a frittata the next morning.

The butter is structural

A hundred grams sounds like a lot because it is a lot. But butter is roughly eighty per cent fat and sixteen per cent water, and when it meets starchy pasta water in a hot pan it emulsifies into something that coats every tube. Cut it back to fifty and you get a thin, acidic tomato sauce that slides off the pasta and pools at the bottom of the bowl.

Two minutes short

Pasta pulled early finishes in the sauce, and while it does it releases starch into the pan and absorbs tomato instead of water. That last minute of hard tossing over heat is the only technique in the recipe, and it is the one that makes it look like restaurant food.

What else it is for

Double the sauce and freeze half. It is the base for a tray of baked pasta, the sauce for a quick shakshuka, and the thing to have on a night when the shopping list has run out.

Crispy Rice with Fried Eggs and Chilli Oil

Delphine Roy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2 bowls
20 min total — Serves 2 — Easy

Ingredients

For the rice

400 g cooked rice, cold, from the fridge
2 tbsp neutral oil
½ tsp fine salt

To finish

4 eggs
2 tbsp chilli oil with crisp bits
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp rice vinegar
3 spring onions, sliced thin
toasted sesame seeds

Every rice-eating culture has a word for the crust at the bottom of the pot, which tells you it was never an accident. Persian tahdig, Korean nurungji, Spanish socarrat — the same texture, arrived at independently, and always the part people fight over.

This is the lazy domestic version: no pot, no inversion, no ceremony. Cold rice, a wide pan, and the discipline to leave it alone.

The discipline part

There is exactly one way to fail at this, and it is stirring. Rice crisps because a layer of it stays in continuous contact with hot metal long enough for the surface starch to dehydrate and brown. Every stir resets that clock.

Six to eight minutes of doing nothing feels much longer than it is. Set a timer, walk away, and prepare the eggs while you wait.

Why cold rice

Refrigeration retrogrades the starch: the molecules recrystallise and the grains firm up and dry out slightly. That firmness is what lets them hold a shape under a spatula, and the lower surface moisture is what lets them brown rather than steam.

Fresh rice, pressed into a hot pan, releases water, and water at 100C cannot brown anything.

The eggs are a delivery mechanism

Fried hard and fast in a good amount of oil, so the edges go lacy and brown and the yolk stays liquid. That yolk is the sauce — it runs into the broken crust and turns half of it soft while the other half stays crunchy, which is the actual pleasure of the dish.

What it is really for

This is what you cook on a Tuesday when the fridge has one container of rice and four eggs in it, and it is better than that sentence suggests. Add the charred broccoli on the side and it is a dinner you would serve someone.

Sheet-Pan Chicken with Gochujang Butter

Delphine Roy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 servings with the potatoes underneath
55 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

For the butter

60 g soft butter
2 tbsp gochujang
1 tbsp honey
2 garlic cloves, grated
1 tsp grated ginger

For the tray

8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
700 g small potatoes, halved
1 red onion, cut into thick wedges
2 tbsp neutral oil
flaky salt
2 spring onions, sliced, to finish
1 tsp toasted sesame seeds

The compound butter under the skin is a restaurant move and it takes ninety seconds. Everything else about this is a traybake, which is to say the oven does it and you do not.

The reason to bother with the pocket is temperature. Anything sugary — honey, gochujang, miso, most marinades — sitting on the surface of chicken at 220C is going to be black before the thigh is cooked. Tucked underneath, the same mixture is protected by the skin, melts into the meat as the fat renders, and seasons from the inside.

What the skin is for

Left dry and salted, chicken skin at high heat renders its own fat and crisps. That fat drips onto the potatoes below, which is the actual argument for putting them in the same tray: they fry in schmaltz rather than roasting in oil.

Which is also why nothing goes on top of the skin except salt. Not oil, not more butter, not the marinade.

The potato layer

Halve them and lay them cut-side down. They want contact with hot metal for the same reason the broccoli did — a flat face browns, a curve does not. Onion wedges go in among them to sweeten and half-collapse.

Anything with more water than a potato will ruin the tray. Courgettes, peppers, and tomatoes all belong in a different recipe.

Knowing when it is done

Seventy-five degrees at the thickest part, next to the bone but not touching it. Thighs are forgiving — five degrees over will not hurt them — but the potatoes underneath are the real clock, and if they are not tender the chicken has not been in long enough.

White Bean Stew with Lemon and Dill

Delphine Roy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 bowls, with bread
30 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

4 tbsp olive oil, plus more to finish
1 leek, sliced into rounds
3 garlic cloves, sliced
1 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
800 g tinned white beans, drained but not rinsed
400 ml vegetable stock
1 lemon, zest and juice
20 g dill, roughly chopped, stalks and all
flaky salt and black pepper

Tinned beans have a reputation problem: they are what you eat when you have not shopped. But a tin of beans plus four tablespoons of olive oil and a whole lemon is not a compromise, it is a Mediterranean dish that happens to take twenty minutes.

The thing that makes it work is the same thing that makes most bean dishes work — texture contrast between whole beans and crushed ones — and the thing that makes it taste like food rather than like a tin is finishing with acid and raw oil off the heat.

Crushing a third

Beans suspended in stock are a soup. Beans suspended in their own starch are a stew, and the difference is a spoon pressed against the side of the pan for thirty seconds. About a third is right: enough to thicken, not so much that everything turns to purée.

This is also why the tin liquid stays. Rinsing beans washes away exactly the starch you are trying to recruit.

Lemon off the heat

Citric acid is volatile and heat-sensitive. Squeeze lemon into a simmering pan and by the time it reaches the table it tastes generically sour rather than specifically of lemon. Off the heat, thirty seconds before serving, it stays sharp and floral.

Dill has the same problem, worse. It should barely be warm.

Fat as seasoning

Four tablespoons in the pan, then more raw over the top. The cooked oil carries the fennel and garlic through the dish; the raw oil sits on the surface and hits first. If you have a peppery oil, this is the dish to open it for — and if you are not sure what you have, that is a longer conversation.

What goes with it

Bread, and something bitter and green. It is also very good under a fried egg the next morning.

The Ragù That Improves Overnight

Delphine Roy — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 2 litres — dinner twice, or once with leftovers frozen
3 hr 40 min total — Serves 8 — Project

Ingredients

For the base

3 tbsp olive oil
100 g pancetta, finely chopped
1 large onion, finely diced
2 carrots, finely diced
2 celery sticks, finely diced
3 garlic cloves, crushed

For the sauce

700 g beef mince, 20% fat, not lean
300 g pork mince
3 tbsp tomato paste
250 ml whole milk
250 ml dry white wine
800 g tinned whole peeled tomatoes
1 parmesan rind, optional
2 bay leaves
salt and black pepper

Almost every long-cooked meat sauce tastes better the next day, and the usual explanation — that the flavours “meld” — is doing a lot of work without saying anything. What actually happens is more interesting and it changes how you cook it.

Overnight in the fridge, the fat that separated during the long simmer solidifies on the surface. When you reheat it gently and stir, that fat re-disperses into the liquid as much finer droplets than it managed the first time, and finely dispersed fat reads on the palate as body and roundness. It is an emulsion that has had twelve hours to sort itself out.

Three additions, in this order

The order is not tradition for its own sake. Tomato paste goes in early and gets fried, which drives off its raw metallic edge and deepens it. Milk goes in next, while the meat is still relatively firm, so the lactose has hours to brown and the proteins have hours to work on the mince. Wine follows to deglaze and lift. Tomatoes come last, because acid tightens protein and putting them in early gives you meat that never fully softens.

Reverse any two of those and you will still eat well, but you will taste the difference.

Why the soffritto takes twenty minutes

Onion, carrot, and celery cooked for five minutes taste of onion, carrot, and celery. Cooked for twenty over a low heat, with salt drawing the water out, they collapse into something sweet and unidentifiable that reads as depth rather than as vegetables. This is the free flavour in the recipe and it costs nothing but patience.

Browning in batches

A kilo of mince dropped into a pan at once drops the temperature below 100C and the meat simply poaches in its own juice. Grey mince cannot be fixed later. Two or three batches, each left undisturbed for a minute before breaking up, gets you the crust that the entire sauce is built on.

The pasta is not an afterthought

Tagliatelle or rigatoni, cooked two minutes short, finished in the sauce with a ladle of the water. A ragù served on pasta rather than tossed through it is a different and worse dish, and it takes the same amount of time.

Roast Chicken Over Torn Potatoes

Delphine Roy — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 1.8kg bird, four servings and a carcass for stock
1 hr 35 min total — Serves 4 — Medium

Ingredients

For the bird

1.8 kg whole chicken
2 tsp fine salt, roughly 1% of the bird's weight
1 tsp black pepper
1 lemon, halved
1 head of garlic, halved across the middle

For underneath

1 kg floury potatoes, peeled
3 tbsp olive oil
4 thyme sprigs
flaky salt

A roast chicken has one difficult requirement — skin that shatters over meat that is still juicy — and two things that are usually blamed for missing it: the oven and the bird. Neither is normally the problem. The problem is water.

Chicken skin cannot crisp while it is losing moisture, because evaporation holds the surface at around 100C and browning needs considerably more than that. So the useful work happens the night before, in the fridge, with salt.

Dry brining, in one paragraph

Salt on the surface draws water out of the skin by osmosis, then dissolves into it and is drawn back into the flesh, carrying seasoning with it. Overnight, uncovered, the fridge’s dry air takes the surface moisture away for good. What you have in the morning is a bird seasoned to the bone with skin like parchment, and it will brown in half the time a wet one would.

One per cent of the bird’s weight is the number. For a 1.8kg chicken that is 18g, or about two level teaspoons of fine salt.

Tearing the potatoes

Parboil, drain, steam dry, then tear. A torn potato has a rough, fractured surface with far more area than a cut one, and every one of those ragged edges is somewhere fat can collect and fry. Under a chicken, that fat is rendered chicken fat, and the result is closer to a roast potato than anything a separate tray achieves.

Floury varieties — Maris Piper, russet, King Edward — tear well. Waxy ones resist and stay smooth.

The two temperatures

Twenty minutes at 220C sets and starts the skin while the inside is still cold. Dropping to 190C for the rest means the breast comes up to temperature gently instead of tightening. It is a small thing and it is the difference between good and slightly dry.

No gravy

There is a tin with rendered fat, chicken juices, collapsed garlic, and a roasted lemon in it. Squeezing the lemon and scraping the tin gives you something better than a flour-thickened gravy would, in ninety seconds, and it tastes of the bird rather than of stock.

Short Ribs Braised in Red Wine

Delphine Roy — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 large servings
4 hr 30 min total — Serves 4 — Project

Ingredients

For the ribs

1½ kg bone-in beef short ribs
2 tsp fine salt
2 tbsp neutral oil
2 tbsp plain flour

For the braise

2 onions, roughly chopped
2 carrots, cut into thick lengths
6 garlic cloves, peeled, left whole
2 tbsp tomato paste
750 ml dry red wine, something you would drink a glass of
500 ml beef stock
1 star anise
3 thyme sprigs
2 bay leaves

Short ribs are what you buy when you want the effect of a rib of beef for a quarter of the money. They are almost entirely collagen and intramuscular fat, which makes them useless for anything fast and close to unfailable over four hours.

The whole recipe is two decisions: brown them harder than feels sensible, and do not drown them.

Browning is not a step to hurry

Eight to ten minutes a batch, in a pan hot enough to be slightly alarming. Every bit of dark crust is Maillard product, and Maillard product is where the sauce’s colour and about half its flavour live. A pale sear gives you a pale, one-note braise that no amount of stock will rescue.

The light dusting of flour is there for two reasons: it dries the surface further, so browning starts sooner, and it thickens the finished liquid enough that you will not need to do anything about it later.

Why the wine gets reduced

A bottle of wine is roughly thirteen per cent alcohol and a lot of acid. Both need driving off before the long cook, because alcohol left in a covered pot cannot evaporate and stays as a raw, solvent note through the whole braise. Boiled down by half first, the wine turns into concentrated fruit and tannin.

Use something you would drink a glass of. Not because it needs to be expensive, but because anything with an off note will have four hours to concentrate.

Two-thirds, not covered

This is the difference between a braise and a stew. With the top of the meat above the liquid, that surface continues to brown and dry in the oven’s heat while the underside gently poaches, and the two textures are what makes a braise taste layered. Fully submerged, everything comes out uniformly soft.

The day-ahead trick

Cool it, refrigerate it, and lift the solid fat cap off the next morning. You will remove more fat in thirty seconds than twenty minutes of skimming a hot pot achieves, and the sauce will be glossier for it. Then reheat gently, reduce, and serve.

A Pot of Chickpeas Worth the Soak

Delphine Roy — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 1.2kg cooked chickpeas plus a litre of broth
1 hr 55 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the soak

500 g dried chickpeas
1 tbsp fine salt
2 l cold water

For the pot

1 onion, halved
1 head of garlic, top sliced off
2 bay leaves
1 strip of lemon peel
100 ml olive oil
1 tsp fine salt, plus more at the end

There is nothing wrong with a tin of chickpeas — the bean stew is built on tins and it is a good dish. But a chickpea cooked from dried in an aromatic, oily broth is not the same ingredient. It is creamier, it holds its shape while being soft all the way through, and it tastes of something.

The reason to make a whole pot is that the effort does not scale. Five hundred grams takes exactly as much of your attention as one tin, and it feeds you for a week.

Salt in the soaking water

For years the received wisdom was that salt toughens the skins. It is the opposite. Sodium ions displace the calcium and magnesium that hold pectin in the cell walls rigid, so salted-soaked pulses cook faster and more evenly, with skins that soften at the same rate as the interior rather than bursting first.

A tablespoon in two litres is enough. Rinse before cooking, since the soaking water carries away some of the compounds that make legumes hard work.

The ten-minute hard boil

A short violent boil at the start pushes foam and scum to the surface, where you can skim it, and gets the pot to temperature quickly. After that, hard boiling only breaks the chickpeas up. Everything else happens at a simmer so lazy you have to look closely to see it.

Cooked means cooked

A chickpea that is soft on the outside and faintly chalky in the middle will ruin whatever it goes into and cannot be corrected by more cooking once it has cooled. Test three from different depths, and when in doubt give it another fifteen minutes. Over-cooked chickpeas make excellent hummus; under-cooked ones make nothing.

What to do with them

Warm, in a bowl of their own broth with olive oil and pepper, is dinner. Drained and roasted hard, they are a snack. Blitzed with tahini and lemon they are the best hummus you will make, and they go straight under the whipped feta on a table before dinner.

Everyday Sourdough Without the Ceremony

Delphine Roy — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 900g loaf
1 hr 15 min total — Serves 12 — Project

Ingredients

100 g active starter, fed 6 hours earlier and risen
350 g water, at 28C
450 g strong white bread flour
50 g wholemeal flour
10 g fine salt
rice flour, for dusting

Sourdough acquired a culture of precision it does not need. Hydration to the gram, folds to the minute, temperature probes, spreadsheets. All of it is real and some of it matters at the margins, but none of it is the difference between good bread and bad bread at home.

The difference is three things: a starter that is actually active, a bulk fermentation judged by looking at the dough, and an oven hot enough.

An active starter

The single most common cause of a dense loaf is a starter used at the wrong moment. Fed and left, a starter rises, peaks, and falls; you want it on the way up or just at the peak, roughly four to eight hours after feeding depending on your kitchen. It should be domed, webbed with bubbles, and smell of yogurt rather than acetone.

If a spoonful floats in water, it is ready. If it sinks, feed it and wait.

Watch the dough, not the clock

Every published bulk time is wrong for your kitchen, because fermentation roughly doubles in speed for every 8C. Five hours at 22C might be three hours in August and seven in an unheated January kitchen. What does not change is what the dough looks like when it is ready: fifty per cent larger, domed rather than flat, wobbling as one mass, with visible bubbles around the rim of the bowl.

Under-fermented dough bakes tight and pale. Over-fermented dough spreads and tears. Both are visible before the loaf goes in the oven.

The fridge is a scheduling tool

A cold retard slows the yeast almost to a stop while the bacteria carry on producing acid, which is where the sour comes from. It also firms the dough up, which makes it far easier to turn into a screaming-hot pot without deflating.

And it means the loaf waits for you rather than the reverse. Shape at nine in the evening, bake whenever you like the next day.

Bake it dark

Twenty minutes with the lid on traps the loaf’s own steam, which keeps the crust soft so the bread can expand. Then the lid comes off and the crust dries, browns, and finally starts to blister. That last ten minutes — the part that looks like it might be going too far — is where the smell comes from. Take it out when it is the colour of an old penny, not before.

Buttermilk Scones for a Slow Morning

Delphine Roy — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

8 scones
28 min total — Serves 8 — Easy

Ingredients

350 g plain flour
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
¾ tsp fine salt
115 g butter, frozen solid
240 ml buttermilk, very cold
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

A scone is an argument about butter. Everything else on the list is a rounding error.

The goal is discrete pieces of solid butter still present in the dough when it enters the oven. In the heat, each one melts and its water content flashes to steam, pushing the surrounding dough apart and leaving a void. Hundreds of those voids read as flakiness and lift. Butter that has been warmed and rubbed into the flour, by contrast, coats the starch and gives you something short and sandy — pleasant, but a shortbread, not a scone.

Why grating works

Rubbing in by hand takes minutes, during which your hands are transferring heat. A frozen block on a box grater produces uniform shards in about twenty seconds, and the butter never softens. Toss them through with a fork and they stay separate.

Undermixed is correct

You are looking for a dough that still has dry flour in it when you stop stirring. Every extra turn of the knife develops gluten and, worse, smears the butter. The folding step then brings it together and builds layers at the same time — three letter folds is plenty, and each one should feel slightly less shaggy than the last.

If the dough looks smooth and elastic, it is already too late.

Cut, do not twist

A twisted cutter drags the edge of the dough round and pinches the layers closed. Straight down and straight up, with a floured cutter, leaves the sides open so the layers can climb.

Heat

220C, and get the oven there properly. Scones need the butter to melt and the steam to be generated faster than the structure sets; a moderate oven gives the butter time to leak out into the tray instead, and you get flat, greasy discs.

Shaved Fennel with Citrus and Mint

Delphine Roy — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A side for four
15 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

2 fennel bulbs, fronds kept
2 oranges
1 lemon, juice only
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp honey
20 g mint leaves, torn, not chopped
40 g toasted pistachios, roughly chopped
flaky salt and black pepper

Raw fennel divides people, and almost every conversion I have managed came down to thickness. Cut into wedges it is aggressive, fibrous, and unmistakably of aniseed. Shaved to a millimetre it is delicate, faintly sweet, and mostly a texture.

The rest of the dish is a lesson in not wasting anything: the juice that runs out while you segment the oranges is the dressing, and it is better than anything you would have built from a bottle.

The mandoline argument

A mandoline gets you consistent, translucent slices in ninety seconds and is worth owning for this alone. A sharp knife will do it, but “as thin as you can” with a knife usually means two or three millimetres, and that is a different salad.

If you are using a knife, halve the bulb through the root first so you have a flat face to stabilise it, and slice across the grain.

Iced water

Fennel is mostly water in rigid cells. Sliced thin, those cells lose turgor within minutes and the slices go limp. Ten minutes in iced water reverses it — the cells take water back up by osmosis and the slices curl and stiffen.

Then they have to be dried, thoroughly, in a towel or a spinner. Wet fennel dilutes the dressing and it will pool in the bottom of the bowl.

Honey against the fennel

A teaspoon is not there to sweeten the salad. It is there because fennel’s anise note reads as slightly bitter, and a small amount of sugar rounds that off without making the dressing taste sweet. Leave it out and the whole thing is sharper and less friendly.

Where it goes

Beside anything rich. It is the correct thing next to the roast chicken, and it cuts through the short ribs better than any green salad would.

Roast Carrots with Yogurt and Dukkah

Delphine Roy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A generous side for four
50 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

For the carrots

800 g carrots, halved lengthways if thick
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp honey
flaky salt

For the yogurt

300 g thick Greek yogurt, cold, from the fridge
1 garlic clove, grated to a paste with a pinch of salt
1 tbsp lemon juice

For the dukkah

3 tbsp hazelnuts, toasted and chopped
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
½ tsp cumin seeds, crushed
½ tsp flaky salt
dill or mint, to finish

This is a plate built on one idea, which is that hot food on cold food is more interesting than either on its own. The carrots come out of a 220C oven and go straight onto yogurt that has been in the fridge, and for the first two minutes on the table there is a genuine temperature gradient in every mouthful.

It is a trick borrowed from a hundred Levantine and Turkish dishes, and it works with almost any roasted vegetable. Carrots are the version I make most because they are always in the house and because they concentrate so obligingly.

Sweetness by subtraction

A carrot is around nine per cent sugar and a great deal of water. Roasted hard, the water leaves and the sugar stays, so what tasted mild raw tastes almost candied after half an hour. Push it further than feels safe: proper black at the tips is where the flavour is, and pale roast carrots are the most common way this goes wrong.

Halving thick carrots lengthways is not about cooking time. It is about creating a flat face that can sit against hot metal.

Honey at the end

Sugar added at the start of a 220C roast is burnt sugar by minute fifteen, and burnt sugar is bitter rather than sweet. A teaspoon tossed through in the last ten minutes glazes rather than scorches.

The garlic has to be a paste

Grated on a microplane and worked with salt until it is genuinely a paste, not chopped. Raw garlic in visible pieces in cold yogurt is harsh and keeps getting harsher; dispersed as a paste it is savoury and even.

Dukkah, and why it should stay coarse

The point of dukkah is that it crunches. Blitzing it in a processor releases oil from the hazelnuts and you end up with something closer to a wet crumb. Chop by hand, keep it uneven, and add it at the last second so it stays dry on top of the yogurt.

Charred Cabbage with Brown Butter

Delphine Roy — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A side for four, or dinner for two with bread
32 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

800 g hispi or savoy cabbage
2 tbsp neutral oil
80 g butter
2 tbsp capers, drained and patted dry
1 tbsp lemon juice
30 g hazelnuts, toasted and chopped
flaky salt and black pepper

Cabbage costs almost nothing and is treated accordingly, which is a shame, because a wedge of it seared black on both faces and dressed in brown butter is as good as any vegetable dish I make.

Two techniques, both simple, both easy to rush.

The core stays in

Cut the cabbage in quarters straight down through the stem so each wedge keeps a piece of the core. Two things happen. The wedge holds together in the pan and can be turned in one piece, and the core — which most recipes tell you to cut out — softens and sweetens into the best bit. Removing it gives you a pan of loose leaves that steam rather than sear.

Black is not burnt

Five minutes on one face without moving it. What you are after is a mottled, genuinely blackened surface, not an even golden one; those dark patches are where the flavour that makes this dish worth making comes from. Cabbage has enough sugar to take it.

The splash of water and the lid at the end are what get heat into the middle without the outside going further.

Brown butter, with a stopwatch

Butter is about sixteen per cent water and one per cent milk solids. Over heat the water boils off — the loud foaming stage — and then the milk solids toast. Toasted, they smell of hazelnut and taste of almost caramel. Twenty seconds later they smell of burnt and taste of it.

The lemon juice is the brake. It drops the temperature immediately and stops the reaction, and it also cuts the fat, which at eighty grams for four people it needs.

Capers

Dry capers in hot butter fry, blister, and go crisp and intensely savoury. Wet ones cool the butter and stay soft and vinegary. It is worth the thirty seconds with a piece of kitchen paper.

Whipped Feta with Hot Honey

Delphine Roy — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One generous bowl, for six with bread
13 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the feta

250 g feta, in brine, drained
100 g thick Greek yogurt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 small garlic clove
black pepper

For the hot honey

4 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp red wine vinegar
toasted sesame seeds, to finish

This is the dish I make when people are coming and I have not planned anything, and it has never once failed to be the thing that gets finished first. It takes ten minutes and three of them are the food processor running.

Why it needs the full two minutes

Feta is a curd cheese with a crumbly, granular structure. Blitzed briefly it becomes a paste of smaller crumbs; blitzed properly, with fat and acid present, the protein network breaks down and reassembles around the oil and yogurt into something aerated and genuinely light. The transition is sudden and it happens well after the point you would assume it was done.

Stop at forty seconds and you have made a slightly wet feta. Run it to two minutes and you have made something that looks like it came from a restaurant.

Brine matters

Feta sold in a block in brine has been kept wet and has nothing added to it. Pre-crumbled feta is dusted with potato or cellulose starch to keep the pieces apart, and that starch is why it goes claggy rather than smooth in a processor. It is the single most common reason this recipe disappoints people.

Hot honey, quickly

Honey held over heat for more than a minute darkens and starts to taste of caramel rather than of honey, and the chilli goes bitter. Thirty seconds is enough to loosen it and bloom the chilli oil. The vinegar off the heat is what makes it a dressing rather than a syrup.

Ridges, not a dome

Spread it wide and drag a spoon through it. Honey poured over a smooth mound runs off to the edges; poured into a landscape of ridges and wells it stays where it lands, and every scoop of bread gets both.

Warm flatbread, torn focaccia, or raw radishes and cucumber if you would rather not have bread at all.

Blistered Shishito Peppers with Lime

Delphine Roy — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A bowl for four, with drinks
10 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

300 g shishito or padrón peppers
1 tbsp neutral oil, not olive — it will smoke first
1 lime, cut into wedges
flaky salt, more than seems polite

The shortest recipe on this site, and one of the two or three I make most often. It is what to cook when people arrive and you want something on the table in the time it takes to open a bottle.

The pan has to be genuinely too hot

Blistering is not roasting. You want the thin skin of the pepper to char and lift away from the flesh underneath in patches, which happens fast and only at high temperature. A moderate pan cooks the peppers through evenly and gives you something soft and green and dull.

Cast iron holds the heat best, because three hundred grams of cold peppers will drop the temperature of a thin pan the moment they land.

Neutral oil, not olive

Olive oil’s smoke point is well below where this needs to happen, and it will fill the kitchen with acrid smoke and taste of it. Groundnut, rapeseed, or sunflower.

Salt while the oil is hot

Salt sticks to hot oil and slides off cool peppers. Tip them into the bowl and salt them immediately, tossing, and use more than you think is reasonable — these are eaten with fingers, one at a time, and each one needs to carry its own seasoning.

The lottery

Shishitos and padróns are mild cultivars that occasionally, unpredictably, produce a fruit with real capsaicin in it — usually reckoned at about one in ten, though it varies with the season and how stressed the plants were. There is no visual tell.

Serve them with a cold drink and let people find out.

Marinated Olives and Warm Almonds

Delphine Roy — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two bowls, for six
22 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

For the olives

400 g mixed olives, with stones, drained
5 tbsp olive oil
2 strips of orange peel, pared with a knife, no white
2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed, skin on
1 tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp chilli flakes
2 rosemary sprigs

For the almonds

200 g blanched almonds
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp flaky salt
½ tsp smoked paprika
¼ tsp caster sugar

Everything on this site takes longer than this and almost nothing gets eaten faster. It is also the only recipe here that is genuinely better made in advance.

Infusing is not frying

The temptation with a pan of oil and aromatics is to hear something. Resist it. Above about 60C, rosemary turns medicinal, garlic starts to brown and go bitter, and the orange peel loses its top notes. Eight minutes on the lowest flame your hob will hold extracts the fat-soluble aromatics without cooking any of them.

If it sizzles, take it off, let it cool a little, and start again lower.

Orange peel, pared not zested

Cut strips with a knife or a peeler and check the backs for white pith, which is bitter. The oil in the coloured layer is what you want, and it is the ingredient that makes a bowl of supermarket olives taste like they came from somewhere.

Two hours minimum, three days better

The olives are already cured and salted; what the marinade does is displace some of that brine at the surface with flavoured oil, and that takes time. Two hours is noticeable. Overnight is much better. Three days is the point at which people ask where you bought them.

Room temperature throughout. The fridge is the enemy of this dish.

The almonds, and toasting them dry

Nuts toasted in oil from cold fry unevenly and the oil takes on a slightly stale note before the centres are done. Toasted dry, they roast from the inside, and the oil goes on at the end purely as a vehicle for the salt and paprika.

They should be warm when they reach the table. It is a small thing and it makes an ordinary bowl of nuts into something somebody comments on.