Michael Wignall Kitchen Confidential

Michael Wignall of The Latymer, the Michelin-starred venue at Surrey’s Pennyhill Park, talks shellfish, smoking meats and the joys of summer

Cooking With

July is a really exciting time. We have fantastic ingredients coming to their best, and they don’t need much doing to them in order to produce bright, clean flavours. The most important thing is not to mask the main ingredient but just let it sing for itself.

During summer we like to use a lot of home-made charcuterie, which tends to provide a lighter alternative to traditional cooked meats. Favourites include lamb leg bresaola, smoked Anjou pigeon pastrami and barbequed veal tongue. We do the curing and smoking ourselves. The lamb is cured for two weeks in a salt, sugar and wine solution, and hung to dry for two to four weeks. The pigeon breast is brined with herbs and spices for 24 hours, drained and left uncovered in the fridge for 12 hours. This enables it to develop a sticky ‘pellicle’ on the outside so the smoke clings to it, giving it a better flavour. Smoking is done two ways – either by a smoke gun, inserted into a cling-filmed container with the food inside; or by igniting hay in a pan on the stove, placing the protein (usually Oxfordshire trout) on top between layers of foil to produce an airtight container. It’s then smoked for four minutes.

We also do a lot of vegetarian dishes in summer, with one vegetable as the star ingredient. There’s a really refreshing tomato dish of marinated, dehydrated and confit tomato, served with chilled celery juice and a Virgin Mary, and cow’s milk ricotta.

Shellfish always features heavily on our summer menus; we love lobster at this time. We like to gently smoke it over Moroccan spices and serve it with peas, Ibérico lardo, and a scallop and charcoal-oil emulsion.

There’s also a great variety of fruit available, and my particular favourites are cherries, raspberries and blood peaches, which we bake so the skin permeates the flesh and turns it dark red. We also use flowers, such as violets, to make ice cream or add a fresh-tasting garnish to a plate. exclusive.co.uk/pennyhillpark

Who i'm using

We mainly use suppliers from the Lake District and Yorkshire for their artisanal produce. Wellocks is our main supplier of fruit and vegetables. I have known James Wellock for ten years now and have seen how he has grown his business (wellocks.com). Our game and some smoked fish come from John at Cartmel Valley (cartmelvalleygamesupplies.com). Neil Udale is another person whom I’ve known for most of my career and he always gets us salt marsh lamb from Cumbria, which has lovely quality meat due to the salty sea vegetables and herbs that make up the lambs’ diet (udale.com).

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