IT must be a hard life being a TV chef. No sooner have you released your latest tome of recipes, over which you’ve doubtless slaved for months, and already your audience is clamouring for you to dream up some more.
It must be like being a mum, but to a family of thousands.
Yet it must be done. TV cookery, it seems, has a similar tenet to academia: publish or perish.
Among the more prolific chefs of recent times are cheeky Northern chappies Si King and Dave Myers, better known as the Hairy Bikers. They are rarely far from our screens, whether they are packing their pans in their panniers and embarking on their Europe-wide “Bakeation”, helping us to shed the pounds as the Hairy Dieters or to put them back on over Christmas, Si and Dave have demonstrated a tremendous quantity of recipes from the corners of our living rooms.
For every gastronomic adventure they embark on, there is a book to go with it.
The duo’s latest book cropped up for pre-order online in November, giving a taste of what their next series may entail.
In their Asian Adventure, they look likely to cause a stir fry as they pack their bags and head East to explore the roots of some of their favourite Asian dishes.
They are kicking off in Hong Kong, where they learn about the incredible versatility of the wok when used in Cantonese cuisine at a street-food stall.
At breakfast time, they find out that the most important meal of the day reveals a surprising legacy of British rule, before the duo are sent on their way with a traditional Chinese good luck ceremony.
Elsewhere in the series, they are heading to places as diverse as Thailand, South Korea and Japan (their take on the Japanese pork dish tonkatsu is, we’re promised, something special). While many in the UK tend to lump “Asian food”
together, through this series we learn there is a tremendous amount of variation between the countries’ cuisines.
“One thing that we hadn’t realised was the amount of regional variation,” says Si.
“Thailand, for example, is almost as big as France and has as much diversity in its cooking. The food in Tokyo is so different from the meals we had in the more traditional city of Kyoto.”
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