Arnaud Bignon Kitchen Confidential

As spring approaches, chef Arnaud Bignon celebrates fresh flavours and seasonal British seafood at The Greenhouse restaurant in Mayfair

Cooking With

A good plate of food should always have an element of lightness to it, and with so much excellent seafood around at this time of year, there’s a whole array of dishes we look forward to serving. There’s also a lot of lovely citrus fruit about during the winter months, and it’s amazing how it can be used to lift a dish.

I like to oven roast wild salmon on a low heat for hours, then pan-fry it at the last minute and serve with yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit). Our tandoori scallops are glazed with ginger, and served with blanched Savoy cabbage and lemon confit. You get crunchiness from the cabbage – which contrasts with the velvety scallops – and that hit of lemon cutting through it all: it’s delicious. It’s worth making use of limes too; we do a ravioli using spider crab that’s garnished with kaffir lime zest. We pour a consommé made from crab shell over the top, and it becomes infused with the flavour of fresh lime.

This is also the perfect time of year for cockles and razor clams. They taste incredible on a bed of smoked mashed potato, which I like to top with a cos foam; I blanch a few cos leaves, blend them with their own cooking juices and add a little liquid lecithin. It makes a wonderful sauce and is very pretty on the plate.

Of course everyone gets excited about lamb as we begin planning our March menu. Mine comes from the – wild milk-fed breeds have a beautifully delicate flavour. I use Pyrénées shoulder joints a lot, either slowcooked with plenty of rosemary, garlic and thyme and served up in the roasting pot, or rubbed with ras el hanout (a Moroccan spice mix) and paired with a red pepper coulis.

One vegetable that works in a number of dishes is cauliflower. Panfried in chicken stock, heirloom varieties are delicious with simple fregola pasta. Blanched and thinly sliced, cauliflower makes a good starter with a little Mimolette cheese – the French kind of course, it’s aged for 25-36 months and has much more flavour than the Dutch variety! This is great finished with a drizzle of olive oil and slices of blood orange. Again, it’s amazing how the acidity from the citrus fruit completely elevates the flavour of the dish (greenhouserestaurant.co.uk)

Who i'm using

All our vegetables come from Mash, which does a lot of work with specialist suppliers across the UK (mashpurveyors.com). For fish, the best place I’ve worked with is Marrfish (marrfish.co.uk). It’s a solid family business and delivers very good langoustine and smoked salmon.

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