370: Julius Roberts

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. It's very hard taking an animal that you've reared and loved and treated like a pet and a friend to the abattoir. You know, that is a real, I call it the betrayal day. And it weighs on me for weeks before and weeks afterwards. And, you know, on that journey there with them in the back of the trailer, I'm like wrestling with the morality of that decision. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Julius Roberts is a chef and farmer living in the idyllic English countryside off the Dorset coast. He's also the author of The Farm Table, a new cookbook chronicling his life cultivating crops, animals, and cooking with the bounty. It's a real delight to have him on the show to talk about transitioning from cooking in restaurants to family farming, daily life on the farm, recipe development, and more.

1:29Julius Roberts, this is Tace. Thanks for coming on the show. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you. It's really fun to have you here. How is it being back in New York so far? Great. I mean, it's only my second time here. So I'm still in that mode where it very much feels like you're in a film. Yeah. I love the skylines and it was pretty special to be here in the snow. Yeah. I mean, that feeling never goes away, I would say. Coming back to New York after your first trip, did you eat anything you needed to try again? or you just are still dipping your toes into the water? I went to Katz's yesterday.

2:00Oh, okay, good. Which is pretty cool. I've obviously seen those sandwiches online for years. I can't believe how big they are. They're gigantic and they're very expensive also because they're just so huge. Can you get a half? I don't know. That's a good question. I would be scared to ask. I feel like they're kind of the old school deli guys that have a certain way of doing things, but you have the accent. So maybe they would let you get away with it. Yeah, I got on with the guy serving. It was quite a quiet day. But yeah, it was seriously good. What did you get? Pastrami? I got just classic pastrami sandwich with the two types of cucumbers and a lot of mustard.

2:34Two types of cucumbers? Yeah, they do. Do you call them pickles? Yeah, sure. They do. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, they are cucumber. Either works. They do a light one, which is very green, which is hardly pickled. And then a sour one. So it's quite nice to get this contrast. You know, to be honest, I feel like Katz's is the kind of place that when you're visiting the city you go to and then if you live nearby or you have a really strong craving for pastrami, then you'll go back. But I haven't been in a couple of years. So the fact that they have multiple pickles, like I'm not even up on my Katz's game, I guess.

3:07Well, yeah, worth a trip back. And I want to try the matzo ball soup. I think I might get that later today. Oh, that is the ultimate like snowy cold weather in New York experience. A couple weekends ago, I had my ultimate solo New York day, which was that it was gray and rainy. And I went to a deli in Manhattan, sat at the counter and had a matzo ball soup and a tuna melt and read my book by myself. And it was my fantasy. That's pretty damn nice. Yeah. I mean, you have a beautiful country life. So that's another kind of fantasy, I guess. And it's really fun to have you back on the show after our little live event that we did in December.

3:39I'm curious if you could maybe just start out the conversation just for our listeners who aren't as familiar with you by saying a little bit about what inspired you to make the shift from cooking in restaurants to farming and how long has it been since you made that transition? So, yeah, it's about eight years ago now that I left working as a chef in London and moved to the countryside to start a small farm. Does that feel like a long time to you? Yeah, but, you know, time really does fly and so much has happened. It's quite a distorted eight years. um so part of it feels like yesterday and then it feels like a long time ago too i'm i'm always especially recently like really craving going back to those simpler days my first few years on the farm when i you know had no idea what i was doing and it was also new were a very special time but the story was that i was chefing in london at a great restaurant called noble rot which is a french inspired wine bar that does seriously good wine they win the wine list of london every year um they also have a natural wine magazine right yeah exactly so they started as a mag and then i think through you know sponsorship and fundraising through the magazine started the restaurant and it does very low-key seasonal simple you know three good things on a plate delicious food um you know english french a little bit of spanish small bit of italian but you know very much english french food um and they were the guys that taught me to cook.

5:03I never went to culinary school or anything like that. I just went straight into the restaurant world, got very lucky getting a job there and had this, you know, wild baptism of fire. It was brutal. Going into a restaurant that's just opening as your first restaurant job is hardcore. Do you remember like a prep job or something you had to do where you realized, okay, maybe I'm in over my head a little bit? It wasn't necessarily individual stuff. It was just the volume of work I had to keep up with and you're just you're you I spent my whole year there chasing my tail I was never caught up with what I needed to do so you I'd be eating my lunch while sitting there chopping trying to just catch up with the list of things and the the pressure of that and the stress of that is insane you know chefs are sadists towards themselves so you went to the famously chill world of farming instead.

5:55So yeah, obviously you get very inspired by food and ingredients. And each day the producers would turn up in the morning with their boxes of stunning produce and essentially pitch to my chef about how they grew them because, you know, they're trying to sell to him and he's constantly looking for the best ingredients possible because ultimately there's nothing more important to your food than what you start with. And it was hearing those stories and seeing just the health of these guys, you know, they're country folk brown skin blue eyed like smiling and I'm there yellow dying on my fifth coffee of the morning with haven't seen the sunlight yeah exactly you know you get into work in the dark leave in the dark and it just felt like that was a life that um really appealed to me so I left which was a heartbreaking thing there's a real camaraderie in the kitchen your brothers in arms and I remember you know it took me weeks you know we'd sit outside at the end of our shifts having cigarettes chatting together and i you know was trying to find that moment to sort of say look guys i've got to leave like i can't do this anymore because you the the amount of work that they would have to do to pick up the fact that they'd left a key member is just brutal and that was a very hard thing to do but leaving the countryside is the best thing i've ever done and there's regrets and i i missed the restaurant world but i would also never go back and i'm a true kind of country guy now the city as much as I love little like forays into the city it's it's not not where I'm supposed to be anymore a different pace and and I guess now that you've been doing it for eight years looking back at the early years when you didn't quite know it was happening is maybe nostalgic but I would imagine in the moment it must have been very overwhelming to have to learn how to do so many things did you have like a mentor or how did you kind of get the farm going um it was just a big old leap of faith i'd watched um some tv shows about farming and had some self-sufficiency manuals but really i i bought some pigs and dove in straight at the deep end and yeah you get these days where you're like i am way in over my head i've got no idea what i'm doing i don't know how to fix this you know an animal's ill or someone's escaped and you don't have the like uh past knowledge to kind of fix that um but that like being right there on the edge is a very good feeling um I love learning by doing and I like I've really learned to love failure as a kind of way of learning um so yeah those past days were definitely stressful and there was a ton to learn but it was a very innocent very inspiring time where I was you know a journey of discovery is a pretty epic thing yeah absolutely and i want to talk about the pigs i think they're called mangalitsa pigs yeah so why are those the preferred pig they're not they're not necessarily a pig i'd get again but they were an amazing so they're not the preferred pig they are so when i was in the restaurant world um mangalitsa was this type of pig coming onto the scene because they they have this unbelievable amount of fat on them They're an old school curing pig from Hungary.

8:54In the old days, you didn't just have your pig for eating. You had it for the fat too, which was your cooking, you know, your oil for cooking. It was your oil for candle making, for making soaps. You know, the lard that came off a pig was as much a part of it as the meat. Having that amazing casing of fat also makes them incredible for curing. And when you cure them, they come out much like Iberico ham. and so it was more I suppose uh inspired by a certain chefy pretentiousness I went for mangelitsa and also they're just a great old breed I love the old breeds they're cute also they're beautiful you know they're half wild boar they've got these amazing long noses they have curly hair like a sheep um and they are they're these old breeds are just tough as nails so as a novice farmer it's quite good going for the breeds that look after themselves really um but they did absolutely trash where they lived because they are like bulldozers they have these long noses that just dig so deep and by the time the pigs had sadly moved on and we were eating them the the pen we built them was like a meter and a half deeper than it had been when they started yeah wow so yeah I want to talk about the eating of animals because I think that you know for some people when you say farming like maybe they don't even think about animals they would think about just like growing vegetables or something so did you always know that you wanted to have animals as a core part of your farm yeah I think um so when I moved I moved in the depths of winter and it was too hard to do any digging or any planting too cold chickens felt too easy pigs felt like a really big step that was you know me really putting my foot into this new way of life um so it was it definitely like I do eat meat.

10:41Um, and my belief is very much that like, if you can't eat your own meat, I shouldn't be eating meat at all. It's very hard taking an animal that you've reared and loved, um, and treated like a pet and a friend to the abattoir. You know, that is a real, I call it the betrayal day and it weighs on me for weeks before and weeks afterwards. And, you know, on that journey there with them in the back and the trailer, I'm like wrestling with the morality of that decision you know it is it's a brutal thing to have to do and i i put it off and off and off every single time i have to go it makes me miserable but i love the truth of me being so close and so sad about what i'm doing and i think we've lost a lot of the morality of eating meat in the world at the moment um so i feel quite proud to be so close to that and i love having the opportunity to talk about it because i think it's not something that many people think of but it was definitely always part of the plan and if anything has become even more important to me I don't I eat a lot less meat than I used to because I feel so aware of the cost and the price of eating meat not just financially but morally on the planet all sorts of things and I just think we overindulge meat eating we don't need to eat as much meat as we do less is more and quality over quantity has become my real ethos.

12:03Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that as a meat eater who doesn't have to slaughter my own meat, I like that. I like the idea of people like you that care about the meat that's raising it and that intentionality is a part of it because meat has literally, at least here in America, been subsidized by the government. Like it shouldn't be as affordable to eat as it actually is. And I think that because it is so affordable, it makes it this really easy option for people, which obviously like food costs in general are quite high. and like I don't fault anybody for that but I think that like the real cost isn't something that most people are even aware of so it's interesting to hear your side of it yeah yeah I mean subsidy essentially means that something's unsustainable you know if you're needing extra help to produce something it means that your inputs are bigger than your outputs and yeah that's a mistake in a world where there's resources are finite definitely so I wonder if like thinking back on these early years at the farm if you could like go have lunch with yourself in the first year and give a piece of advice, what's something you would say?

12:58Like I said earlier, I love all the mistakes I made because they've become such a part of my journey. Something Lauren, who I'm working with here in New York, and I were talking about yesterday was, one day I was walking down to the pigs in the morning, taking them a bucket of apples, some acorns, like I'd harvest it from oak trees and their normal feed. And it was the most beautiful winter morning. You know, those days like today where the air is so crisp and the sun is shining but it's cold but that warmth on your skin despite the cold is just the best feeling i thought you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna let the pigs out today i reckon they're so hungry you know they'll just follow me with the bucket around and they can have a bit of a walk we'll have a lovely day so i went down to the pen opened the gate and they sort of looked at this hole that suddenly appeared in their pen do you know the story of plato's cave you know the idea that uh people have been trapped in a cave and they suddenly open the door and your reality just changes so much um that you don't even know like what's left or right and the pigs kind of walked through this hole and were so daunted by this new world they were experiencing and then suddenly this wild look came over their eyes and four pigs went in four different directions at like breakneck speed and i've never i've never been so stressed we lived next to a golf course at that time and they were kind of barreling towards it running through brambles and the bush like you know bulldozers they were kind of finding dead squirrels and pheasants and just eating them and they couldn't have been less interested in the food that I was you know the food bucket that I was trying to shake your precious acorns and apples not not a chance and I'm there and you know big winter boots a huge coat running after them sweating you know throwing off layers as I ran trying to get them back it took four hours or two hours and by the time I got them in I collapsed like I fainted on the floor and sort of came to dizzy a few minutes later and and got so sick you know and you get warm and then cold in the winter such a bad feeling but it's sort of little things like that I don't know there's ever any yeah and then there is you know animals do die and things like that but all the all the mistakes have never been major enough to like want to undo them but the learning from them has always been key right I feel like maybe that's even the lesson although maybe you felt this way back in that moment even that like every mistake was going to be how you know how to do something properly the next time and farming is such a long-term game i think about this with cooking also like i can't wait to be the grandma that's so good at cooking everything because i've been cooking those dishes now and i'm going to keep cooking them that kind of repetition that is a learning yeah you know another one that's obviously like a sort of lovely funny story that ultimately ended with no consequences but you know other times are that time you didn't wake up early enough and you come out and her mother's there with her little lamb that is stillborn, pouring at it, desperate for it to get up, you know, her kind of instincts, motherly instincts, firing, wanting to feed this thing, wanting to nurture this thing, and it's just not moving.

15:48And there's a big part of you that's like, if I'd been there 10 minutes earlier, I could have saved that. Yeah. And those are pretty, you know, that's a hard lesson to learn, but ultimately an important one too. Yeah. And I feel like to me, even on the concept of meat eating, like when you are reminded that death can happen for an animal in so many, or for us in so many different kinds of ways, like at least having that death serve some cause, which is feeding people and feeding them like delicious quality food, like feels like it has more value necessarily than like some of the other things that can happen.

16:19Yeah. And, and that's why it's important that, you know, we don't waste our food, that we appreciate it, that we care where it's come from. We think about where it's come from and we, you know, respect it on the plate as much as we do in the field, you know, and that's, that's what's so special about cooking is your you know nurturing and giving love to friends and family all sitting at the table together the lovely warm conversation it brings yeah i think to eat meat thoughtlessly is a real mistake in a world where you know we the place that we call home is you know having quite a tough time at that at the back of that yeah that's one way to put it so i guess thinking about respecting the food on the plate i'm curious about how you approach recipe development obviously we're here to talk about your wonderful new cookbook the farm table.

17:02Do you cook things just for yourself and then adapt the recipe into something that you think you're going to share, like maybe online or in your book? Or what's kind of your process for taking like the day-to-day sustenance into recipes that are meant to be shared? I mean, I cook for myself, you know, every day and it's generally pretty lovely food that I think people would be interested to try. I'm not dumbing down the food that I make for the internet or for my books. It's just like lovely, simple, seasonal cooking that looks elegant and lovely on the plate, but anyone could make themselves at home um if it's a freezing cold day and i've had a big morning outside i will want something warming and sustaining and make a lovely stew and you know it's as simple as that i just think the days that happen inspire me what's in the garden what's growing in the in the woods or what's in the farm shop that day and you just make something around it um the book ethos is that it's set through the season so everything is you know i like to live and cook super seasonally it's my one like big rule i'm you know once my tomatoes are finished in september october i'm not going to touch another one until june when they're growing again same with courgettes um you know all sorts of things i really kind of live by that for me there's nothing worse than a kind of crap bland colorless winter tomato that you know has been flown across the world and has no life to it whatsoever it's a shadow of what a tomato should be and the joy of waiting for those good tomatoes to come back that anticipation you know massively builds the flavor i get so excited for tomatoes to come back courgettes chilies peppers whatever it is because you are you're desperate for it you know asparagus um you know i can't wait for in a few weeks it'll be asparagus season again yeah asparagus is the first the first thing kind of we get ramps here early in the year yeah but um i mean when you're doing the book seasonally so were you developing every season like for that book and then coming back to it when you were getting new ingredients or how did that kind of work in terms of waiting for to have everything we did book in quite an unusual way so most people would bring a kind of mostly finished skeleton of a book to the publisher photograph it finesse it print it whereas this was because i wanted it to do it season i said right i'm going to start writing now we can publish the book then and you know i i wrote spring tested all the way through then we shot it right at the end of the spring still with ingredients from the garden in the farm shops then wrote summer tested it shot it wrote autumn so it kind of went like that um so the book has this you can kind of feel the way the light changes in it you can feel the you know the colors in the spring chapter compared to the autumn chapter is so different and uh i love that you know it meant we weren't kind of buying anything in from abroad it was super local you know lovely ethos and you know those ingredients when they're of the time just do look and taste beautiful and I think you can really feel that in the book and then it has this lovely seasonal photography of farm life because it was about using food and the seasons as a way of telling the story of the year through the farm yeah I think it really comes across that you must have done something in that way it feels very honest in terms of the images really reflecting like what you're writing about and what the recipes are about did you have a favorite season?

20:13In the book, I mean, I think my winter cooking is probably the best. Interesting. I feel like that's kind of like, I mean, it's a very cozy season to cook, but in terms of the produce, I feel like it's not really a fan favorite. No, it's a harder season to cook in because you're much more limited. But I think it's a season where you really need your food. You know, when it's blooming cold, you're working hard outside. The feeling of something like warm and sustaining when you get back in is just so good. Whereas summer, you know, it's so hot, you almost don't want to eat. I love the cooking of the summer because it's very like off the cuff and fast and, you know, just kind of thrown together onto the plate.

20:49But I think they're like slower, more methodical, more technical, not necessarily meaning hard, but like there's a lot more stages in winter cooking. I love the building of flavor that you get in winter. So it's a chapter I'm particularly proud of. Yeah. What would you want to eat today? It's very snowy and cold in New York from the winter chapter. um a recipe that i'm particularly proud of is this uh slow cooked pork belly with prunes and onions and sage um when you've had pork like everyone makes a big fuss over the crispy skin which is lovely don't get me wrong but this is quite a cool way of cooking it inspired by like the more chinese style where you braise it with the skin on and the skin becomes this amazing jellyish texture but instead of soy and mirin and you know all these interesting things it's a more English version of that with like cider and milk and you get this amazing pork that slowly cooks in the cider and milk which reduces down and kind of curdles a bit to this incredible sauce with the like sweetness from the prunes sharpness from the cider you have it with some mash some nutmeg on top and it is I love that recipe so much it sounds really delicious and cozy no wonder it's a favorite from the book I'm curious on the flip side if there's a recipe that you had to test for a long time to get right that maybe it was a little bit more of a challenge yeah loads some of them you kind of first time you were like this is an absolute hole in one i'll make it one more time just to make sure we're safe but this is a winner um but then others you know like the puddings for instance i'm not a pastry chef by trade so the puddings took a lot more work in the book um just because it's a bit you know out of my comfort zone there's some of the recipes i'm most proud of because i put a lot of work into them um but they took a lot more testing one for instance was you know panna cotta yeah so panna cotta is a dish where like i would never really order that in the restaurant i think it can be a bit of a like punch at the end of the meal and often leave you you know quite wasted by you know when they're like too thick and too rich it kind of kills you so i wanted to make a really light panna cotta not too tall quite thin and and it's quite sharp so i was trying different things like using yogurt using sheep's milk and trying to you know sour it up and make it not such a kind of fatty hit and end up doing a buttermilk panna cotta recipe with roasted strawberries with black pepper which is so good with the panna cotta flavored with a bit of elderflower where you just steep the flowers in the in the warm milk before you set it that took a week of like making you know the different percentages and types of cream and milk that i was using you know i'd be taking up a tray of different panna cottas to mum who'd like have a spoon of each and we're trying to work out which was best and by the end of the week like even the chickens were eating panna cotta it was so fun i'd go and you know turn out a kind of ramekin with the panna cotta in there and only had a spoon taken out of it and set it on the ground for the chickens who'd peck at it um it must be very satisfying to watch those little tiny beaks it was so good it was so good yeah and they they hate having messy beaks chickens they're kind of funnily tidy about their beaks and they do this really lovely like wiping thing on the floor on the grass after they're done um the best is watching the meat things like spaghetti but um the panna cotta was very funny do they slurp the spaghetti they yeah they do it in one so it's much like in um what's that film lady in the tramp really yeah wow i felt like i was being like a silly city person by even asking that because i was like there's no way chickens know how to slurp they do they kind of you know it goes down bit by bit yeah um once i think like our postman dropped a load of elastic bands and they thought that was worms or spaghetti and i had to pull these elastic bands out of their mouths that's so funny it's obviously like worms so for them you know which is one of their favorite foods yeah they even jiggle like a worm do they have names i don't name my chickens no it's quite it's quite bad luck to do that i think the minute you name one the fox is going to get it so there's a lovely chicken in the beginning of my book um who we called henny who was just so tame and so sweet but the minute i took a photo of her and kind of immortalized her in the book the fox grabbed her it's funny that you say that because i was about to say that everyone i know that's named their chickens it's been very sad it's a death sentence yeah the coyotes in la people i know that have chickens out there game over yeah so okay you mentioned asparagus let's talk about spring on the farm a little bit what what are the first crops that come up what are you most excited to cook with uh spring's a funny time that the early part of spring is called the hungry gap which is where the winter produce is finishing and the spring stuff isn't quite starting so it can be quite a spartan time but once spring gets going you've got peas you've got wild garlic which you guys called ramps um so is the hungry time like early mark yeah okay yeah even the beginning of april can be quite a tough time yeah um but yeah peas broad beans you have the first little bit of mint you might have some new potatoes spring onions onions um so it's a lovely like green very light delicious time and but it's also the time when i'm like the most busy because obviously all the animals are giving birth so it tends to be quite quick meals in like stolen moments between watching with binoculars while sheep are about to give birth and needing to run in and help.

25:49Yeah. Did you realize you were going to become so much of a sheep midwife? No. I mean, that's the stuff that really takes you by surprise. I've done things that I never thought I'd do. I remember the first time I kind of had to really help out. I had a sheep who had, you see like fluids coming out the back end, let's say, just as you would in mums that we know of. um and sheep are very stoic they don't show their pain they just crack on so you'll have a sheep who's like clearly halfway through giving birth but she's just there eating grass um but you know that something's up you know if you watch and it's been two hours while you've you know just had this you know a little bit of a nose poking out you need to help and get stuck in um often they can kind of tighten up rather than relax and the lamb gets stuck maybe with its head out and it's getting suffocated um i i called you know when i was in the early days i called my shepherdess friend angie and said angie i something's going on here um i don't i don't really know what to do and she said you've got to catch it and you've got to get in there and you've got to pull that out i thought what i do that doesn't the vet do that she was like no no no no you know if you call the vet every time you've got that you're going to be in the red so you spend ages trying to catch this sheep who's got no intention of being caught while they're giving birth um and yeah you just lube up with this special animal you know we have these huge buckets of animal lube glamorous yeah wash your hands and like in you go and you know the crazy thing is when you have twins you've got you you have to you can't just pull a sheep a lamb out like randomly they have to come out the right way um and often what will happen the reason they get stuck is because they've got their arms back which you know if you put your arms back it makes your shoulders very wide whereas if you go into a diving position your shoulders are nice and tight So that's how they're supposed to come out in the diving way.

27:36But if they get their arms pinned, you have to kind of go in and unhook these arms and get them coming out first. But if you've got twins, you've got, what's that, eight legs. You have to work out which ways the hooves are pointing. Make sure that that's from this lamb, not the other. And you're just blind. So that's, you know, that's like quite a classic story in spring. I'll be there with someone on the phone on speaker, someone else holding the sheep and me kind of fumbling about. How many sheep do you think you've helped birth? Oh, lots. You probably get five tricky births a year. But it's the best.

28:11I cannot describe to you how good a feeling it is. It is unbelievable when you save a life like that and you're so close to a birth. yeah and and i think like initially the the ewes you call them as a female sheep have have no intention of being caught but they do there is a moment where they understand you're there helping and when you pull this lamb out that was stuck um you do this thing where you like grab a blade of grass and tickle their little nose and that tickling can really like snap them to life um uh and and you hear these first kind of choked spluttery weak breaths and the mum hops up and starts licking it and you get these beautiful like sensitive instinctual reactions happening that's the thing that has brought me so close to my animals and given me such a respect for them they are so sensitive and loving and caring and individual you know about how they do things and and so like us it's kind of the most beautiful but also sad realization to have because you know a lot of those animals just don't even get the chance to ever show that sensitivity or individuality in in the modern world um so yeah it can be very powerful very poignant it's my favorite time of year yeah it sounds really beautiful i would imagine the like hormones are all swirling around from the animals and us and you know we are animals so it kind of feels the same i also i'm a twin so now i'm just kind of having sympathy for the sheep twins i'm glad that i didn't have to be birthed that kind of way necessarily yeah so i guess um I'm curious about what the seafood is like living on the Dorset coast.

29:45What kinds of things are you catching and eating? It's incredible. Yeah, very lucky to live right by the sea. I eat a lot of crab. We have amazing crab where we are. And one of my farm shop sells beautiful hand-picked crab for pretty good value. So I eat that a lot. A recent thing I've been seriously loving is, maybe you've had crab mayo on toast before, but there's a really fun thing where you do a curried mayo. Oh, is this coronation mayo? yeah kind i just learned about this when i was in london yeah everyone was saying oh coronation mayo as if i should have known what it was but it's really good for someone for someone who's not had it can you maybe explain what that is so like the the classic english thing is called coronation chicken which is a kind of curried mayo with chicken and um mango chutney and you have in a sandwich or with like rose potatoes it's really good and it was made for a royal coronation yeah so every time there's a coronation a special dish gets made um and it's one of them and it's probably the best one of them some of them are pretty dodgy like this year was an odd curried quiche thing um that didn't really land at all but coronation chicken has become like that is a big time british like comfort dish but you can do it with crab and and and uh make it a bit more like you you kind of fry off some butter add the spices in render them off in the butter and add sultanas and coriander and all these things and stir that through crab and have it on toast with some chili and it is so so good it sounds really good yeah it's it's amazing i have to try that so i had i guess coronation mayo which is just minus the chicken just the condiment at 40 moppy street when i was in london which is an amazing restaurant just an amazing restaurant they nailed it i had it i think it was with cauliflower fritters you just dipped them in and we were sitting right at the counter so we were watching them make everything and kind of eventually pluck up the courage to say sorry what is coronation mayo and we got the whole download but um i like the idea of doing that with crab that's really special quite a kind of it's a good snazzy like nibble to have with drinks before you have dinner if you're ever into that kind of thing yeah it's on like a thick cut toaster i i quite like yeah like um not too thick but like sourdough that's quite well toasted um yeah so so so good i like that idea i don't know if it's easy to get milk bread where you are if that's something you would ever make but i would imagine it would be really good on milk yeah yeah i've made milk bread but no we don't we aren't able to get that around us.

32:05Countryside is like, oddly, it's where all the best ingredients are, but the cooking is very simple around where we are because it's old school farming country. Right. But then also you get to make everything, all the delicious things. So I guess to close today, I want to play a little taste test with you. So I'll ask you some questions and you'll give me the first answer that comes into your head. Sure. Okay. Favorite cookbook? My favorite cookbook is called A Messy Business by Raoulie Lee. It's a fantastic, fantastic book i love it to bits what is the messy business um i suppose he's referring to cooking as a messy business um and it has this beautiful cover of a chopping board with a crab claw on and a hammer and he he's an old school like very um scene defining british chef like one of the godfathers of british cooking and it's just a very purist very beautiful staggeringly delicious book.

32:57Cool. Favorite vegetable to grow? To grow? Courgettes probably, zucchini. They are the most rewarding vegetable. Like you will not be able to keep up with your courgette plant. They're impossible to kill. They're tough as nails. And yeah, it'll make you look like an amazing gardener, but secretly they're just awesome plants. They're just popping. I love them. Okay. Your favorite vegetable to eat? I've recently fallen in love with Romanesco broccoli. you know that beautiful broccoli that does the kind of spiralization yeah i mean firstly the coolest looking thing that ever grew um but they are just so delicious i'm obsessed um a thing i've been doing lately is so you just kind of briefly boil that in salted water and then mix it with a slow-cooked onion with anchovy garlic and herbs and olive oil toss that together and you can have it through pasta have it on top some white beans have it with a steak it's so good i love that i'll have to try it okay your favorite food focused like tv show or movie food focused tv show movie i mean i love chef uh ratatouille i love the food in like um studio ghibli films yeah that's such a popular thing i feel like it always the animation somehow looks so like real and delicious yeah cool okay your favorite season for cooking well like i said earlier i'm i think i'm definitely better that like autumn winter kind of food and autumn is an amazing time to cook uh because you have the the end of summer produce in the beginning of winter produce so it's where you have all of the ingredients to hand so that's probably my favorite time something that you'll never make from scratch uh maybe like miso or puff pastry i i would love to make puff pastry because i love croissants more than anything in the world but I've never made puff pastry yet.

34:45I make a thing called rough puff which is like a cheats puff pastry. It counts, yeah. Your favourite London restaurant? Probably St. John or Kiln. St. John is like with Rowley Lee like Fergus Henderson is the king of British food. He was Anthony Bourdain's favourite chef and then Kiln is this awesome like fast-paced Thai restaurant which I just particularly love like that kind of food because I don't get to eat that kind of stuff in the countryside at all. I went when I was in London in December And now I'm thinking that maybe you mentioned it at the other podcast. I might have. Yeah. I don't know if I think a lot of people recommended it to me, but I loved it.

35:19It's so good. I sat at the counter and just ate like all of the little grilled skewers. It was really fun. Yeah, I love that. Okay. Your favorite London wine bar. It's tricky. I mean, you know, I'm so not a part of the London scene anymore. I really am just a country boy. So I think out of loyalty, I'd have to say Noble Rock just because it is, there's nowhere better to go and have a glass of wine. Yeah, you got to say it. um okay and to close like something that would never grow on your farm in terms of like climate or geography that you wish could grow very well on your farm um i mean i was just in mexico uh eating like avocados every single day that tastes better than any avocado i've ever eaten um it would be pretty special to have a avocado tree in the garden that's probably like the best answer or mango i mean yeah we were eating mangoes too and they just they are just mind-blowing when that good.

36:05Yeah, well, I'll manifest like a hybrid avocado mango tree that grows in Dorset for you. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming by, Julius. This was so fun. It's a pleasure. Love being here.

36:24Hey, Liza, what is up? Can you tell me about your trip to Mexico? I can because it's very rainy and gray here in New York and I was very hot for the past week. So I would love to reminisce on the mic with you about it. Let me like back up a bit, zoom out, so to speak. When you're thinking about Mexico, you've been many times. When you're thinking about this trip, what was your goal? My goal was really to just be on a beach and be sweaty and hopefully like eating a fish taco and drinking a Corona. And I'm happy to say that I achieved all of those things. And I do feel like I'm bragging to all the New Yorkers right now who have been cold, but But that was goal of the trip.

37:00I went to Zipolite, which is in Oaxaca on the coast, kind of by Puerto Escondido. I was there for a couple of days, went to Mexico City for the weekend and then came back. So it was kind of a quick trip, but definitely like a nice way to kind of get away from the winter and just like be happy and warm. So where should we begin on the recap of this trip? I think we should start with Oaxaca and Zipolite and the towns around there. because while I flew through Mexico City, I just changed planes and we went straight to the beach from there. So that was kind of my first integration in. And it was really special.

37:34I went to this town called Zipolite that is like a kind of hippie beach town that first rose to popularity in the 70s. There are a lot of restaurants that are just right on the beach. You can kind of walk up to anywhere and get a chair to watch the sunset as long as you're buying like a beer or like a snack or something like that. But so there were a couple cool places. One of them is a recommendation from Julius Roberts, actually, who when we were recording the episode, he had been in Mazunte, which is the town right north of there. So it's this breakfast place called El Sueño de Frida, which has just really classic Oaxacan breakfasts like chilaquiles, huevos rancheros.

38:10I was doing a lot of smoothies because I'm not a big egg person. I thought that was really special. And there also was a really good breakfast place in the town of Zipolite called Las Flores de Oaxaca. That was also a family run third generation breakfast place. And then kind of surprisingly, there was like a very good Thai restaurant in Zipolite called Mau Mau. This is a very small town. You have to drive for an hour and a half probably from the closest airport. It's not very easy to get to. And I think that like to have a really exceptional Thai place kind of struck me by surprise. But everyone was recommending it.

38:41And we really had a special meal there. They were doing really good pad ki mau. They do pho sometimes. They don't do just Thai food, I guess. They kind of do. Southeast Asian fusion. Southeast Asian in general, but it really was just like quite special and fun. And I think those are a lot of my highlights. Although really, I think the highlight of Zipolite is just kind of sitting on the beach watching the sunset. Yeah. I mean, the beach sounds like that's the vibe. Now, I've heard about Oaxaca City. Your recap is void of mole and void of mezcal. Yeah. OK, there was mole and mezcal involved. I'm sure.

39:14I'm sure. But these are I only ask these as like the basic questions because I typically think of that region as having being home to two of these items. Yeah. So the hotel that I stayed at was attached to a mezcal bar. So I did have mezcal there at night. But I think because it was so hot, I was kind of more in like the cold beer vibe. And then in terms of mole, I did have a really good like mole, like tamales were good. And like for breakfast, there was a lot of mole and eggs and that kind of thing. But because we were just so close to the ocean, I was kind of in more of a seafood vibe there.

39:47But when I went to Mexico City, I did have some good mole there also. Yeah. So, I mean, Oaxaca, it sounds like there's multitudes there. There's a coast. You can drive 90 minutes from the airport or you can stay more local, like closer to the airport. Oaxaca City, right? That's where. I flew into Huatulco, which is on the coast. If you were going to go to Oaxaca City, you would fly in somewhere else probably. I got it. But it's kind of up in the mountains. We rented like a little scooter and we could kind of drive around, go to the other beach towns. I got stung by a bee while I was on the scooter.

40:14But besides that, it was really great. Success. I mean, not the bee sting, but just like being on a beach and being hot and sweaty. Yeah, exactly. What a great trip. It was really great. A lot of like cold, fresh coconuts right on the beach that they just smash open, pour some mezcal in. That's really great. But when I went to Mexico City, I had a lot of really good Asian meals there that I wanted to talk about. I went to Macan, which is a Singaporean restaurant that was just really phenomenal. did like laksa they did roast duck and this chili crab that was like so rich and delicious and the staff comes around and ties crab bibs onto you before they serve it to you which is just kind of fun to have an accessory while you're eating yeah so i thought that was really special um also that was special was this uh japanese place called kora that i had udon at one night when like so when i was dining with their stomach was a little off and we just wanted like kind of a gentle noodle situation.

41:04So I thought that was really fun. I also met up with Abina Anamsamwa, who does the Cherry Bomb podcast, who is based partially in Mexico City. And she took me around to a couple of good bakeries. We went to Odette, which is in Condesa, which does kind of classic French style patisserie, but with Mexican flavors as well, like a really good guava pastry. We also walked over to this bakery Saint because she was trying to get baguettes to make for lunch. I had another coffee there. So it's just kind of fun to walk around and have like lots of little bites and things. And I also would say that I went back for Lucha Libre, which if you're going to Mexico City, is just kind of a must do.

41:41And you can get these very large micheladas when you're there. Oh, that's fun. And I saw you showed me a video. It's like a major stadium where they're doing Lucha Libre. It's not like a small. Yeah. I mean, so I went to Arena Mexico. They have a couple different stadiums. They do Lucha Libre three nights a week. Or actually, it's in the afternoon on Sundays, which is the family day, which is very cute because there's lots of little kids dressed up wearing their favorite masks. But it is just kind of spectacular. And afterwards, we went to get late night tacos at Orinoco. And I would say that like half of the line were people who had also come from the match, which was really fun because everyone was kind of like talking about their favorite luchadors like Mystico, who actually is a former WWE wrestler and like waiting up to get these giant tacos.

42:26So it was all just very fun. Let me ask you about tacos. You mentioned you went after the luchador moment. But like, that's what I associate with Mexico City. Yeah, I had a lot of really good tacos. I also visited my favorite quesadilla lady, Jenny, who's on the corner of like Colima and Merida. And she's definitely become quite popular over the past couple of years. I had to wait in line this time, which I've never had to wait in a long line before. But they are churning out a really high quantity, really fast on the street corner with beautiful blue corn tortillas that are being made by hand.

42:58And I got Huila Coche, which is my favorite, which is kind of harder to find here in the U.S., but it's that corn fungus. So it has these really soft corn kernels with the fungus attached to it as well. And I went to a bunch of other taco places that, honestly, I couldn't really tell you the names right now. It was kind of just walking by. You smell something delicious and you're like, oh, I guess I could have another al pastor taco right now. So I had a lot of al pastor, had a lot of campechano. It was all really great. Oh, my gosh. What a great trip. Are you going to move there? You know, I don't think I'm going to join the ranks of New Yorkers to Mexico City, but I would love to go back again and again.

43:35I think that there is so much beautiful like art and design and dog watching and all of that. And it's just a really special city to have the opportunity to get to go to. Yeah, I love talking to you about Mexico. You have such a knowledge and just a fondness and respect for the culture. And I really just love hearing your thoughts on it. Thank you. And now that I'm back, I'm just going to have to go back to my favorite taco places here, too. Great. Well, thanks a lot for sharing.