Filming Saturday Kitchen

(by peter)

This week the Saturday Kitchen wine team jetted off to Hendon, in north London, to take in the sights and hunt out some food-friendly wines at affordable prices.

In the gaps between getting repeatedly lost on the North Circular (the gravitational pull of Brent Cross shopping centre is strong here) we popped into Waitrose and Sainsbury’s.

We also found time to spend a very enjoyable few hours at RAF Hendon, a fascinating insight into aircraft past and present.

But the real fireworks this week are gastronomic ones.

The dishes come courtesy of Saturday Kitchen debutant Simon Hulstone, of The Elephant in Devon, and the legendary Adam Byatt of Trinity, Clapham.

Simon’s cooking a brilliant roasted halibut glazed with lardo served with parsnip purée and a verjus and spring onion butter sauce. Adam’s is a similarly fishy theme, comprising baked fillet of sea bass fillet with parsley mayonnaise and a walnut and truffle pesto.

The wine choices for these two quite subtle but full-flavoured dishes were not obvious. So Susie cooked the dishes up and I cracked open a fair few bottles of wine…and, after some pretty delicious experimenting, we got there in the end.

Without giving too much away, I can promise two great value whites: one from Burgundy and one, perhaps surprisingly, from Puglia in southern Italy.

As ever, the show goes out on BBC1 from 10am this Saturday, 15th January 2011.