Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 turned a summer heatwave into a masterclass in cooling, crowd-pleasing food, with Matt Tebbutt steering a studio packed with heat-beating recipes, bargain wines and one very reluctant vegetable eater. Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson took the guest chair, chefs Andrew Wong, Jess Shadbolt and Seema Pankhania cooked across three wildly different cuisines, and drinks expert Olly Smith poured what he called liquid sunshine into every glass. The theme was clear from the first minute: al fresco feasts, barbecue swagger and dishes designed to keep viewers looking and feeling cool.

The stakes for Ricky were personal from the start. His food heaven was fish and chips, a childhood weekly treat he now barely eats. His food hell was mushy vegetables — courgettes, aubergines and marrows — the kind that swell to novelty size at village fetes. Whether he escaped that fate rested entirely on the public vote, and that tension ran under the whole show like a low hum.

What followed was a genuinely varied hour. Andrew Wong built a mahogany-glazed Chinese barbecue classic. Jess Shadbolt cooked mussels in paper and carried the room to the south of France. Seema Pankhania assembled three make-ahead salads for anyone dreading extra heat in the kitchen. Around them, Rick Stein visited a Cornish charcuterie farm, Marcus Wareing milled ancient wheat in Provence, and both Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson filed segments built on unexpected flavour pairings.

Andrew Wong opened the cooking with a barbecue Char Sui that several people at the counter called the best pork dish of the morning. The two-Michelin-star chef treated it as a lesson in patience and colour. His marinade combined soybean paste, star anise, soy, chicken powder, oil and cornflour, plus a little red rice yeast for what he described as a roasted mahogany colour. He was candid that the yeast is optional. It exists purely for that deep, glossy tone he associates with proper Char Sui.

The cut mattered as much as the marinade. Wong used Spanish secreto, the muscle between the shoulder and the loin, stabbing it several times so the flavour drove deeper and the meat tenderised. He admitted it is an expensive choice. In Hong Kong, he said, people typically reach for neck instead. His pork had already marinated for twelve hours overnight, which is the non-negotiable step home cooks tend to skip.

Wong also built a salad dressing to cut through the richness. It brought together red onions, garlic, spring onion, chilli, oyster sauce, two vinegars — one black, one red rice — plus seasoning and sugar, left to sit for ten minutes so the flavours settled. He roasted the pork off, then rested it on a sugar syrup infused with star anise and dried tangerine, a step that gives the meat its lacquered finish and a texture he compared to ham. The syrup, he explained, is where much of the Char Sui character comes from once the meat has been sitting overnight in its marinade.

Alongside the meat, Wong showed a wood ear mushroom and black bean relish that quietly stole attention. The dried wood ear fungus, rehydrated in water for twenty minutes, is barely a mushroom at all in his description — more texture than flavour, prized for an incredible crunch. He prefers the dehydrated version to fresh.

Soaked in vinegar, they became the dish’s sharp counterpoint, and he balanced the sweet glaze with a black bean relish used in his restaurant. Tebbutt confessed he loved them, and the whole counter agreed the balance of sweet glaze, savoury pork and acidic crunch was the reason Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 landed its strongest plate early. One taster went as far as calling it possibly the greatest pork dish in the universe.

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27

Why Andrew Wong Is Opening A Pub And Closing His Michelin Kitchen

The conversation around Wong’s cooking revealed a chef in transition, which gave the segment more weight than a simple recipe demo. His flagship restaurant, open sixteen years and running on a family site that has served food for forty, is being freshened up rather than closed. He was quick to correct any suggestion of shutting down. The kitchen is getting bigger, the dining room slightly smaller, and his mother, he joked, will inevitably ask how he plans to make money after the shuffle. The restaurant currently runs on forty-five staff.

The bigger news was a new venture. Wong is opening a pub in Shoreditch, a public house he framed as democratic dining — the food he loves to eat when he is not working. He was honest about the nerves, calling himself pretty scared while insisting the project is a beacon of hope in challenging times for hospitality. The menu, two years in development, will centre on an enormous clay oven for barbecue and roasting dishes, built to hit the extreme heat that makes Chinese barbecue sing.

That heat became a running thread. Wong explained that Char Sui is traditionally roasted in a duck oven so tall you can hang whole racks of meat around its perimeter. They get ferociously hot and smoky, which is exactly why almost nobody runs one at home. He owns one in the restaurant. Tebbutt, deadpan, noted he was average height for 1945 — roughly the same as a duck oven — which set the tone for a cheerfully chaotic cook. Wong’s cleaver, meanwhile, is engraved with his name, he said, to stop other chefs touching it. Mildly threatening, Tebbutt decided.

Olly Smith’s Bargain Wines Bring Liquid Sunshine To Saturday Kitchen 2026 Episode 27

Olly Smith built his contributions to Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 around value, warmth and summer drinking. For Wong’s Char Sui he reached for Pinot Noir, a grape he admitted can be tough to find at good value. His pick, a Doudet Naudin Pinot Noir at £9.75 from the Co-op, came from a historic Burgundian house that keeps the price down by growing the fruit in the cooler, higher country near the Pyrenees. Altitude and a cool climate, he explained, make the wine silky, with blueberry notes and just enough fruitiness to stand up to bold flavours without turning heavy.

His logic for pairing wine with Chinese food was practical rather than showy. Char Sui carries sweetness on its crust and savoury depth underneath, and Smith wanted a red with fruit and lift rather than weight. He recommended serving it slightly chilled to push the fruit forward, a trick he tied to an upcoming item on chilled grapes. Chinese food is often difficult to pair, he acknowledged, yet the balance here worked, and the counter agreed the pork’s sweetness sat beautifully against the wine.

Later drinks kept the seaside, summer mood going. For Jess Shadbolt’s mussels he chose an Ormarine Picpoul de Pinet from £8.50 at Majestic, describing vineyards that sit almost on the Mediterranean, their soil laced with limestone. He called it zippy, lemony and invigorating, one of the south of France’s only appellations famous for a dry white, with an image of ocean waves printed around every bottle neck. He positioned it as a brighter, more lemony cousin to Muscadet. There was also an alcohol-free option later — Shorebreak Alcohol Free Hazy Pale, a 2025 World Beer Awards winner at around £2.70 online — which Smith praised for tropical hop character and lasting flavour without any of the alcohol.

Rick Stein Meets The Cornish Farmers Rewriting British Charcuterie

The first pre-recorded film sent Rick Stein to a farm near Bude, where Richard and Fiona Harding left city jobs to build a charcuterie business from scratch. Stein revealed he was their very first client — they phoned on spec, drove down the next morning with a small bundle, and two weeks later received an email from his son Jack saying he loved it. That origin story framed a segment about the difficulty of competing with Spain, France and Italy for a slice of the salami market.

Central to their operation is the pig itself. The Hardings raise British Lop, renamed from Cornish Lop in the 1960s to broaden its appeal, and now the rarest breed in Britain. Once known as Cornish or Devon Lop depending on which side of the Tamar you found them, it is a West Country breed long prized by locals but spurned elsewhere for its ordinary looks.

The animals grow to 330 or 350 kilos, and the farmers deliberately raise them large because charcuterie demands that back fat. Most producers would send these pigs off far younger, but the Hardings need big animals for the fat. Abattoir staff initially assumed they were ignorant for bringing such large stock, until a Royal Cornwall Show visit made the reasoning clear.

Fiona offered a hard truth about the trade: never name animals destined for the abattoir, because there is no place for sentimentality in farming. The pigs, she and Richard agreed, are sociable, nosy and clever — masters of escaping. One, nicknamed the kamikaze pig, used to leap clean over the fence. Stein, feeding them by the bucket, hoped aloud they could not hear the humans discussing their future.

The charcuterie itself impressed even Stein, a man not easily surprised. Rory, the farm’s right-hand man, walked him through a cider and seaweed salami built from lean leg meat, a starter culture for fermentation, seaweed, seasonings and Cornish cider, all smoked over beechwood for forty-eight hours before drying in a room that replicates a Mediterranean climate. Stein tasted the coppa, the seaweed and cider salami, and a lamb salami based on an old Roman recipe. He confessed he had never been taken with cured sheep meat, which can turn overpoweringly sheepy, yet this one won him over. Coppa in Bologna, he said, and now coppa in Bude — a quality that would stand up anywhere.

Marcus Wareing And The Provence Baker Who Refuses To Make Baguettes

Marcus Wareing’s film carried Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 to Provence, to a baker named Henri who grows five varieties of ancient wheat, mills his own flour and bakes his own bread. The wheat, including a variety called Saissette de Provence, is seeded in mid-October to catch the rainy season and harvested at the beginning of July. Wareing was astonished it goes into the ground before winter, but Henri explained these hardy grains survive down to twenty degrees below zero. Being low in gluten, they are also easier to digest and give the flour a distinctive flavour.

The process turned out to be gloriously low-tech in places. Henri moves wheat into the mill using a household hoover, a detail that delighted Wareing. Inside the bakery, Wareing was transported back to his early training in the bread section of a Paris kitchen, rediscovering the smell, the feel of the dough and the rhythm of the work. The dough, made from flour, water and sourdough starter, proves for close to twenty-four hours, slowed in the fridge before baking in a gargantuan wood-fired oven fired at four in the morning.

The most quietly radical moment was Henri’s stance on the baguette. He does not make them, because he does not like them — a startling admission from a French baker. Some customers walk straight out when they see no baguettes on the shelf. Henri argues his slow-proved sourdough tastes better and lasts longer, and Wareing noted how little kneading the method requires. Unlike gluten-stretched loaves, this sourdough behaves more like short pastry: the less you handle it, the lighter and crunchier the result. The exchange over what Britain calls bread — white, sliced, and destined for bacon sandwiches — gave the segment its comic edge.

Jess Shadbolt’s Mussels En Papillote Capture The South Of France

Jess Shadbolt’s dish was a study in low-effort elegance, cooking mussels in a paper parcel so the steam concentrates every ingredient. The technique, she pointed out, saves on washing up and can be prepared ahead, which makes it ideal for feeding a crowd. She carried the room to Nice with southern French flavours: ginger, generous olive oil, garlic, tomatoes blanched and skinned, plus saffron and the North African spice influence she associates with Marseille. The ginger, she said, brings enough warmth that pepper becomes unnecessary.

Her method rewarded restraint. A gentle tomato sauce, cooked briefly so it never turned jammy, went into the parchment parcel with the mussels, and the real cooking happened inside the sealed bag as it created its own sauce. She built the whole thing on the principle that theatrical food — a parcel opened at the table — feels spectacular for minimal work. Everyone opens their own pocket, she noted, and the drama does the heavy lifting.

Beans anchored the plate. Shadbolt served the mussels with a bowl of flageolet beans soaked overnight and simmered with garlic, tomato and herbs like sage and rosemary. She is an evangelist for pulses, a habit she traced back to her time cooking in the River Café tradition, where big batches of beans were standard. Cook a good bean, she insisted, and it takes you anywhere — puréed with roast chicken, folded into salads, or simply dressed with olive oil. Olly Smith’s zesty Picpoul completed the seaside picture, and the counter dipped bread into the mussel juices with obvious pleasure.

Seema Pankhania’s Three Summer Salads Beat The Heatwave Without Turning On The Oven

Seema Pankhania’s contribution to Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 answered the heatwave directly with three make-ahead salads built for minimum effort and maximum flavour. Her pitch was practical: reduce everyone’s time in the kitchen while keeping food fresh, seasonal and genuinely worth eating across a working week. The whole set was designed to be prepped on a Sunday, with dressings kept separate so nothing goes soggy in the fridge.

The salads showcased her instinct for bright, layered flavour. A smashed tomato and harissa orzo used the water drawn out of salted tomatoes as the base for a dressing of harissa, tomato paste and red wine vinegar, sour and designed to marinate the orzo until it tasted even better days later. A spiced corn and peach salad paired grilled, charred corn with grated halloumi and stone fruit, on the argument that seasonal fruit brings freshness and sweetness to a savoury bowl. The third, a green za’atar salad topped with hot smoked trout, leaned on a dressing of feta, tahini, dill, garlic and za’atar, with a nod that salmon works if trout is not to hand.

A savoury granola tied the whole idea together. Pankhania makes a big batch of nuts, seeds, honey and oats, roasts it, and sprinkles it over everything for crunch without the daily effort — while keeping one bowl cheese-free in deference to the day’s guest. The segment also carried real warmth about her path. She had been studying neuroscience at university, felt it was the right thing to do, then did not get in and realised how much cooking meant to her.

That pivot built a following of around 1.5 million on TikTok plus a substantial Instagram audience, and she now cooks professionally after putting in the hours at Lucky Cat. She also runs a YouTube series for Tesco with a co-host, inviting guests to learn a dish, take it home and report back — a format she treats as a test of her own teaching.

Ricky, memorably, revealed a genuine cheese phobia — not an allergy, he stressed, but a phobia on the level of clowns or sharks. It started at an early age, with no single triggering event, building over time into something he cannot explain, a mystery milk he wants nothing to do with. He has walked out of dressing rooms over a cheese platter and nearly abandoned a festival in Portugal when someone made carbonara. Pankhania’s grated halloumi and feta became a running gag, though the corn and halloumi bowl won unanimous praise at the counter regardless.

Nigel Slater And Nigella Lawson Prove Unexpected Pairings Win

Two of the show’s most recognisable voices filed segments built on the same principle: familiar ingredients used in unfamiliar ways. Nigel Slater riffed on the idea of surf and turf as a dessert, landing on sea salt chocolate snaps. He melted dark chocolate the old-fashioned way over simmering water, refusing to stir and simply pushing the solid pieces into the melted, letting residual heat finish the job. Toasted almonds and pistachios, a little sugar for caramel depth, flaky sea salt and crystallised rose and violet petals produced what he called little explosions of sugar and salt against the earthy chocolate — chilled crisp for fifteen to twenty minutes.

Nigella Lawson took inspiration from a holiday in Thailand and a noodle dish she could not stop thinking about. Cooked originally by a chef named Tum, it married prawns with cinnamon, star anise, cloves and Chinese celery — spices more often associated with baking than seafood. She built a dark, spiced base with soy sauces, oyster sauce, ketjap manis and chicken stock concentrate, poached frozen prawns in the bubbling liquor, then tossed through glass noodles. The result, she said, was comforting and unfamiliar at once: Thai seafood as viewers had never tasted it, and proof that technique, not novelty, is the essence of cooking.

Both films reinforced the episode’s quiet argument. Great cooking rarely needs new ingredients. It needs a cook confident enough to combine old ones in a way nobody expects, whether that is salt on chocolate or cinnamon in a prawn stir-fry.

Ricky Wilson’s Fish And Chips Finale And The Grease Immersive Musical

The public delivered its verdict and it was decisive: 73% voted for food heaven, sending Ricky Wilson toward fish and chips rather than deep-fried courgettes and aubergines. Tebbutt built a yeasted beer batter from lager, sparkling water, yeast and flour, letting it rise like bread so the fish is dipped into a light, airy top layer. He served proper mushy peas made from marrowfat peas — dried, not frozen, which is why they are chunky rather than bright green — cooked with bicarbonate of soda, onion, bay, thyme and mint, alongside triple-cooked chips doused in vinegar and salt.

Wilson’s food philosophy gave the finale its character. He only trusts a chip shop that does nothing but fish and chips — if it advertises pizza or burgers in neon, he walks. The one exception he allows is the battered sausage, which he rates among the greatest things ever. He wants staggering amounts of salt and vinegar, and he remembers the grubby, never-changed chip fryers of childhood that stank precisely because the oil was so overworked, which, he argued, is exactly why the chips tasted so good.

The interview also spotlighted Wilson’s next act. Twenty years into the Kaiser Chiefs — dog years in pop music, as he put it — he is playing Teen Angel in Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, running 22 July to 13 September in Battersea Park. Audiences pick a character, dress up, and move through a working funfair with rides, arcade games and a big wheel, plus a burger shop, watching the film before Wilson performs his song live in the break.

He framed the role as a soft opening into musical theatre, a form he had quietly fancied but found too much commitment; this version, one song a night across twelve weeks of six-days-a-week rehearsal, suited a father of young children. There is a neat symmetry, too. He appeared in a school production of Grease as a child, landed a part too small for his liking, and now returns as, by his reckoning, the only professional singer from that original cast.

Wilson’s stage persona ran through the whole chat. He described himself as an extrovert for cash — not a show-off in normal life, but transformed the moment thousands of people are watching. He is fitter now than in his twenties, sometimes so unbothered on stage that he has to fake looking shattered, though the knee slides at parties still punish him the next morning.

He once cried over a rack of ribs while touring America as a vegetarian, a story that resurfaced when Tebbutt cooked beef ribs with a dry rub earlier in the show, finished under the grill with barbecue sauce and served with a malted roasted strawberry milkshake in full American-diner spirit. Tebbutt, for his part, shared that Kaiser Chiefs soundtracked family Sundays at his old Welsh pub, where his young children stood on the furniture and cranked up I Predict A Riot at full volume, unable even to pronounce the word predict.

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27 closed the way it opened — warm, funny and firmly in summer mode. Tebbutt thanked Andrew Wong, Jess Shadbolt, Seema Pankhania, Olly Smith and Ricky Wilson, flagged that there would be no Best Bites the following morning because of the tennis, and promised to return live the next Saturday with Donal Skehan. For an episode built around a heatwave, it delivered exactly what it set out to: cool food, generous drinks and a guest who, in the end, had nothing to worry about.

FAQ Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 27