Mark Birchall Kitchen Confidential

Group executive chef for some of Simon Rogan’s top restaurants, including two-starred L’Enclume, Mark Birchall talks spring flavours

Cooking With

At this time of year we include a hotpot on the menu, which is a deconstructed fine-dining version of the Lancashire dish. Ours is made with spherified potato, cabbage and tender lamb bubbles floating in an intensely flavoured, warming and comforting consommé. Some of the earliest recipes for hotpot from the 19th century serve it with oysters, so we include a nod to that.

A more recent in-season ingredient with the wow factor is the beautiful Jerusalem artichoke, which has just come into our kitchen – nice and long with a beautiful pale skin.

My connection with food is a little romantic in that we rear livestock and grow vegetables and herbs on the farm. Dishes are quite natural – we don’t mess around with things for the sake of it. We may use plenty of innovative techniques, but we hide these behind the product. Early spring lamb will feature strongly now.

The first suckling lambs are out – lambing started around a month ago – and very soon we will also get cheese from the milk. Produce-wise, we source everything as locally as possible, and if it is not from the immediate area, it’s always British. Pigs are rare breed and Cumbrian, and lobster and crabs come from Lancaster. Even our sparkling wine, Nyetimber, is English.

Looking forward to late spring and summer, we grow edible flowers, leaves and herbs, which means we can choose what we use – for instance, we could take the floret or the leaves from a cauliflower. We grow microgreens, too: shoots grow from Russian kale seeds and are snipped, then popped straight on the plate. We use feathery chervil with its aniseed taste, edible flowers such as marigolds (for their floral, apple flavor), pea shoots, chickweed, red mustard cress and sunflower shoots.

Right now, we’re excited about rhubarb, which we get from B Tomlinson & Son in Yorkshire. It’s force-grown in the darkness of a shed. For our rhubarb, apple, sorrel and brown butter dish, we cook it under a low pressure, and therefore it boils at about 40°C.

Who i'm using

Cheese from Holker Farm Dairy in Cumbria, and B Tomlinson & Son, fourth-generation grower of Yorkshire rhubarb, kale, Savoy cabbage and chard from Pudsey in Yorkshire. Robert Tomlinson’s family has been growing forced rhubarb since 1850.

Quote

‘Produce- wise, we source everything as locally as possible, and if it is not from the immediate area it’s always British

Recipe

To make spring lamb rump with creamed flageolet beans, boil 250ml milk with a roasted red pepper and 1 cardamom pod. Add 30g butter and blend until smooth, set aside. Boil 250g beans with 300ml whipping cream, blend; take another 300ml cream and reduce by half, then add beans and handful parsley, chopped.

Season and keep warm. Season 4 trimmed rumps, brown in a frying pan and roast in a 160 ̊C/315 ̊F/Gas 3 oven for 14 minutes until medium rare. Divide 120g feta into four and deep fry in tempura batter at 190 ̊C/375 ̊F until crisp, season.

Melt 80g butter in a pan then add 1kg baby spinach. Grate in a clove of nutmeg and pinch of salt then cook for 30 seconds and drain. Slice lamb in three, place on beans and spinach, spoon around 80g yoghurt infused with 0.5g saffron. Drizzle rump with pan juices, add feta then spoon on pepper sauce.