Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25 delivered one of the liveliest, funniest, most food-packed broadcasts of the year, with host Matt Tebbutt steering a Celtic-flavoured kitchen alongside Scottish-based chefs Peter McKenna and Julie Lin, drinks expert Olly Smith, and a special guest who needed no introduction: Sir Lenny Henry. The morning was built around cockles in Café de Paris butter, a Malaysian-Mexican fusion feast, bargain summer wines, a wine-themed murder mystery, and a viewer vote that would decide whether Lenny’s breakfast dreams or his culinary nightmares ended up on the plate.
This Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25 leaned hard into personality from the very first second. Lenny Henry arrived buzzing, reminiscing about the adrenaline of live television, plugging his new stand-up tour Still At Large, and turning nearly every cooking demonstration into a comedy set. Around him, two chefs cooked with serious intent: McKenna with Parisian-bistro precision built on Scottish produce, Lin with the bold, punchy flavours of her Malaysian heritage filtered through Mexican street food. Olly Smith poured wines that punched far above their price, then submitted to a game testing his ability to decode the floweriest tasting notes ever committed to a page.
Food, comedy, and genuine warmth shared the table in equal measure throughout. From a medieval-looking salt tower in Stranraer to a Cornish fish pie, a Provençal chocolatier, Nigel Slater’s tomato pasta, and Nigella Lawson’s slow-cooked short ribs, the episode roamed across an enormous range of cooking while keeping its energy locked firmly on the live studio. By the time the public vote landed, the show had become as much about Lenny’s storytelling as about the recipes themselves.
Peter McKenna opened his Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25 cook with a dish that distilled his entire philosophy: great ingredients, treated simply, and made nice. Having cooked in Michelin-starred restaurants around the world before settling in Glasgow, McKenna built his reputation on Scottish produce served in Parisian bistro style. His studio starter paired beautiful cockles with Café de Paris butter, sprouting broccoli, and a trio of freshly baked breads that became a story in their own right.
The butter was the quiet hero of the plate. McKenna explained that Café de Paris butter contains nineteen ingredients, all storeroom staples most home cooks already have lurking in a cupboard. Anchovies, capers, herbs, and the juice and zest of grapefruit and lemon combine into a punchy, savoury compound butter that melts gloriously over warm shellfish. Crucially, he stressed, the butter benefits from resting in the fridge so the flavours can settle and deepen before it ever reaches a plate.
Bread became its own subplot, and McKenna treated it with real conviction. He insisted every good restaurant needs great bread, and that it’s a shame not to bake it in-house. To prove the point, he name-checked his pastry chef, a trained baker who now produces the restaurant’s most amazing desserts and bakes the bread fresh every single day. For him, it all comes down to the people you surround yourself with, a theme he returned to warmly while noting his team were holding the fort back in Glasgow.
The breads themselves spanned three traditions. He demonstrated a Japanese-inspired milk bread using a tangzhong method, a cooked flour-and-liquid paste that keeps the loaf juicy, fluffy, and fresh for longer than a standard brioche, with far more moisture worked into the dough. Alongside it sat a soft Irish soda bread spiked with a little Guinness, wonderfully flavoursome and impactful, plus the milk bread and brioche. The whole spread arrived with a generous knob of Ayrshire butter, served, as McKenna put it, with the generosity Scotland is known for.
Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25
Why Blackthorn Salt And Whisky-Barrel Plating Define McKenna’s Glasgow Cooking
Some of the morning’s most memorable detail came not from the cooking itself but from the sourcing behind it. McKenna spoke about blackthorn salt, produced at a medieval-looking tower in Stranraer that he compared to something straight out of The Lord of the Rings. Seawater is pumped over blackthorn branches, drawing out nutrients and many of the tannins, and the process produces a uniquely flavoured salt unlike anything mass-produced. Lin, tasting it in rehearsal, called it next-level and a genuine dream.
This obsession with local provenance runs through everything McKenna does. He praised Glasgow’s larder as world-class, with wild foods coming into season, mushrooms appearing, and a community of passionate producers making it effortless to cook seasonally. Everything, he said, is essentially on his doorstep, which removes the friction between sourcing and serving and lets the produce do the talking. The butter itself came from an Ayrshire-cattle dairy, another nod to his belief that the raw materials matter more than anything a chef does to them.
Presentation carried the same storytelling instinct. McKenna revealed that his breads arrived plated on a section of whisky barrel sourced from Islay, the product of years working with whisky companies across Scotland, the country he affectionately called whisky central. He asked for some of the spent barrels and turned them into a striking serving piece.
He set up The Gannet in Glasgow back in 2013, closed it last year to reinvent his style after a long run, and now runs the more relaxed bistro Eleven Fifty Five, a name nodding to the moment just before midnight, or, as he joked, just before getting ready for lunch. The cockle dish, he argued, captures that new direction perfectly: great Scottish produce with a confident touch of bistro flair.
Julie Lin’s Malaysian-Mexican Sambal Pork Brings Bold Fusion To The Studio
Julie Lin turned the kitchen in a completely different direction with a dish that fuses Malaysia and Mexico into something genuinely new. A self-confessed big fan of McKenna’s restaurants, Lin cooked a rich sambal pork using slow-braised pork shoulder that shreds down beautifully, balanced by a fresh pineapple salsa and lime to break up and cut through the richness. The dish came from Tacos Lah, her Edinburgh outlet whose name plays on the Malaysian habit of adding “lah” to the end of sentences, a quirk she noted the Scots happen to share.
The inspiration came from London’s extraordinary access to global food. Lin described eating at a place called Proper Tacos and realising how closely the big, bold, punchy flavours of Malaysia mirror those of Mexico. Using the taco as a vessel felt like a natural bridge between the two cuisines. Her sambal builds depth from tomato paste, a generous mix of spices, sugar, and lime to bring everything into balance, a sauce she and Smith first bonded over during time spent together in Malaysia.
Practicality sat at the heart of the recipe. Lin championed the humble pressure cooker, urging viewers not to fear it because there are far scarier things in life, while noting the pork ideally cooks for around four to five hours until meltingly tender and gorgeous. She reassured the table that the pressure cooker delivers the same result as the slow oven method, simply faster, and that you can equally marinate the meat, then leave it in a low oven for a few hours and forget about it.
The genius of the dish is its flexibility. Lin explained that you can cook one big batch and serve it three ways across the week, as a taco, a burrito, or a rice bowl, making it the perfect thing for a midweek dinner that never feels repetitive. She used fresh blue corn tacos, praising their lovely texture, and demonstrated dipping each one into the cooked pork so it soaks up every drop of flavour. Tebbutt’s contribution was a turmeric-golden rice studded with coriander, plus the pineapple salsa, completing what Lin proudly billed as the Tacos Lah experience brought to a national audience.
Olly Smith’s Bargain Summer Wines Prove Great Bottles Don’t Need Big Budgets
Olly Smith brought what he called a duet of summer sunbeams to Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25, matching wines to each chef’s dish with his trademark theatricality. For Julie Lin he chose a German Scheurebe, and for Peter McKenna a southern French white. His enthusiasm for the latter became a running joke, as his exaggerated, mid-Atlantic, almost Hollywood pronunciation of “Peter” repeatedly sent the studio into laughter.
His headline value pick was a Minervois Blanc, which he declared the best available at just nine pounds. Smith made a persuasive case that the south of France, long famous for its reds, represents the future for crisp, characterful whites. He described the wine as bright and peachy, full of dazzle, with a mineral, limestone quality and cooling sea breezes running right down to the coast, drawing approving nods for tasting notes that, for once, actually matched the promise on the label. He added that the same freshness lets these wines work nicely with reds as well.
Later, paired with the spicy keema balti, Smith reached for an Australian Grenache from the Co-op, a Bethany Old Vine bottling drawn from a historic vineyard whose vines were planted in 1852. He praised its light character and texture alongside masses of flavour, arguing it could comfortably handle all the spice in the dish. The detail about those ancient vines visibly impressed the table, with the studio calling the idea of fruit from such old plantings genuinely insane in the best possible way.
Throughout the morning, Smith’s underlying message stayed consistent and useful. Brilliant wine doesn’t require a big budget, just a willingness to look beyond the obvious regions and grapes, to trust unfashionable appellations, and to treat the supermarket shelf and the independent shop as places of real discovery rather than compromise. It was budget-conscious advice delivered with the flourish of someone who clearly adores his subject.
The Wine Crime Game Tests Olly Smith’s Powers Against Outrageous Tasting Notes
Olly Smith’s debut novel provided the morning’s most inventive segment. Newly published that very week, Death by Noir is a wine-themed murder mystery set in his home town of Lewes, starring a wine-shop owner named Barclay Flint who runs a shop called the Bottle Bank. Smith admitted the hero blends a bit of himself with a lot of his famously jolly father, plus a dash of Roger Moore, a touch of Uncle Monty, and a squeeze of Tom Hollander. His father, he said warmly, was always so jolly growing up, and there is a great deal of him on the page.
The book inspired a genuinely funny challenge for the studio. The team contacted independent wine shops blessed with great names, asking them to send bottles so Smith could test his powers of definition against deliberately florid descriptions lifted from the novel’s pages. Lenny Henry took on reading duties, delivering the over-the-top tasting notes with relish, including one describing a wine as like surfing a peach slice on a wave of lime splendour that would improve your whole day immeasurably, the kind of language that walks a fine line between poetry and pure nonsense.
There was a playful real-world wrinkle too. Smith noted that an actual independent wine shop called the Bottle Bank exists in Cambridgeshire, joking that a lawsuit might be pending, before insisting there was no similarity whatsoever between the real shop and the fictional one in his book. It was the kind of self-aware aside that kept the segment light while quietly flattering the independent trade the show was celebrating.
The game’s payoff arrived through a verdict delivered with mock gravity, with Lenny eventually crowned a “wine gladiator” once the Bottle Bank reference landed and the studio declared he had not let anyone down. Beneath the comedy, the segment made a real point about how subjective and theatrical wine description can be. Smith emerged with his reputation intact, the novel earning warm praise from the table, with one reader admitting to being halfway through and urging viewers to go and get it immediately.
Lenny Henry’s Food Heaven Keema Balti Wins The Viewer Vote In A Landslide
The episode’s central thread was Lenny Henry’s food heaven and food hell choice, decided entirely by viewers at home. His food heaven came from a memorable afternoon in Birmingham’s Balti Triangle, where he and his writing partner Max Davies devoured a keema balti served with a naan so vast he compared it to a duvet that covered the whole table, lingering over the meal for two glorious hours. The flavours kept building and building, spicy but not too spicy, utterly delicious, and he insisted he could have happily eaten it all day.
His food hell was gentler in spirit but firmly held. Henry confessed that Thai green chicken curry had disappointed him repeatedly across the last four or five attempts, describing it as a bit watery and a bit bland, while stressing he meant no disrespect to anyone running a Thai restaurant. The dish simply never delivered the punch he craved, which left Tebbutt with the choice of either honouring the Birmingham memory or trying to prove that Thai green curry doesn’t have to disappoint.
The two competing dishes were spelled out clearly for voters. Food heaven meant a lamb keema balti cooked in a traditional balti pan, packed with chillies, fenugreek, and an array of Indian spices, and served with a homemade naan big enough to share. Food hell meant a punchy, fragrant Thai green curry, its paste built from galangal, garlic, lemongrass, and chillies, used to braise chicken thighs in coconut milk and finished with coriander and Thai basil. Lenny’s bafflement at unfamiliar ingredients like fenugreek and galangal became its own comic seam, the latter inspiring a riff about an imaginary album by two Jamaican women.
The public sided decisively with comfort. With sixty-two percent of the vote, viewers chose food heaven, sending Tebbutt to cook the lamb keema balti while Lenny himself helped finish the naan. The cook descended into joyful chaos, Tebbutt openly confessing he couldn’t remember anyone’s name and leaning on a cue card that listed the whole crew, while the team scrambled, with one runner dashing around the studio to find peas. Big knobs of butter went in at the end for velvety richness, the spices were dashed in with abandon, and Henry pronounced the finished balti absolutely sensational and one of his favourite meals, genuinely honoured that it had been cooked just for him.
From Rick Stein’s Cornish Fish Pie To A Provençal Chocolatier In The Archive
The studio cooking was threaded with standout film inserts that broadened the episode’s range enormously. Rick Stein returned to Tresillian House in Cornwall, a nineteenth-century country home with a magnificent orchard of rare apple trees and a walled Victorian kitchen garden, to cook a classic British fish pie for the estate’s legendary head gardener, John Harris. Stein built his pie from freshly caught pollack and his signature addition of smoked haddock, poaching the fish in milk, double cream, onions, cloves, and bay before flaking it carefully and checking obsessively for bones.
The pie came together in generous, comforting layers. Stein topped the fish with cooked king prawns and thickly sliced boiled eggs, the ingredient he cheerfully admitted no one can agree on, then added chopped parsley and a béchamel made from the reserved poaching milk. After chilling to set, it was crowned with creamy mash enriched with egg yolks for a golden colour, furrowed with a fork for crunch, and baked hot. He served it to his favourite Cornish food critic, John, with nothing more than garden peas, in a charming exchange where John bristled at being told he needn’t eat it all.
Marcus Wareing travelled to Provence to learn from a chocolatier named Joel, whose alphabet-themed menu assigns a flavour to every letter, from A for almond onwards, all infused into his speciality seventy-four percent dark chocolate. Joel creates thirty-two different flavours and never stops experimenting, changing his range as the seasons shift, and has been shaping his chocolates into their signature squares since he was around six years old. Wareing tasted lavender that bloomed like a perfume on the finish and a rosemary square so strong it startled him.
The lesson that stuck with Wareing overturned something he’d always believed. He watched Joel break what he’d been taught was a cardinal sin, adding water to melting chocolate, only to discover that with repeated mixing the fats bind back together again, the point where, as Wareing put it, the science begins. Together they produced an almond and olive praline, painted in cocoa butter and milk chocolate like plastering a wall smooth before the final dark coat. The unusual pairing left Wareing smiling, the olive drawing the fruit out of the chocolate in a way he found genuinely delightful.
Nigel Slater’s Tomato Pasta And Nigella Lawson’s Short Ribs Close The Feast
Two more beloved cooks rounded out the archive and showed the breadth of the show’s reach. Nigel Slater opened with a love letter to seed-saving, keeping his treasured seeds in an old church collection box that once held coppers from the harvest festival and now holds his own. From there he moved into his summer vegetable bed and a deceptively simple smoky tomato pasta, championing characterful varieties like the gnarled French Marmande over tomatoes bred purely for sweetness.
Slater’s method was all about restraint and texture. He grilled halved tomatoes with olive oil and seasoning until he could smell them, then crushed them roughly rather than blending, preserving a rustic, big, and beefy quality with no unnecessary refinement. He balanced their sweetness with a mellow red wine vinegar, or a pinch of sugar if they leaned too sour, then tore in masses of fresh basil, a pairing he simply cannot imagine apart. Black olives went in whole, and he gently chided the British habit of swamping pasta in sauce, tossing his only lightly as he served.
Nigella Lawson brought the morning to a rich, aromatic close with Asian-spiced beef short ribs. She spoke about her compulsion for beautiful Asian ingredients, building a braise from Chinese rice wine, which she likened to dry sherry mixed with a little brandy, plus hoisin for umami and balancing sweetness, soy, sesame oil, grated garlic, and a generous hit of five spice and dried chillies. The chilli, she reassured, brings warmth rather than fire and won’t blow your head off.
The magic was in the patience. After a long, gentle braise sealed under a covering to trap every bit of flavour, Lawson chilled the dish, lifted off the hard layer of set fat, then reheated the ribs until piping hot. The result was meltingly soft meat that still held its shape, finished with nothing more than coriander, a few pin pricks of chilli, and a spritz of sharp lime cutting through the richness, in what she reverently called the sacred anointing.
Why Saturday Kitchen 2026 Episode 25 Captured The Show At Its Most Joyful
What made this Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25 special was the chemistry between expertise and personality. Lenny Henry treated the kitchen as a stage, panicking over a bagel, freezing under pressure, mangling pronunciations, and turning the demonstration counter into a comedy bit, yet his stories carried real emotional weight too. He spoke candidly about his knighthood and the surreal moment his sister sailed through security without ID, about his return to live performance, and about his late brother Seymour, whose funeral in Jamaica he recalled with disarming humour and tenderness.
The cooking never lost its substance beneath the laughter. McKenna’s reverence for Scottish produce, Lin’s clever fusion thinking, and Smith’s gift for finding flavour at low prices gave viewers genuinely useful ideas, from the tangzhong bread technique to the batch-cooked sambal pork and the nine-pound Minervois. Each chef brought a distinct, clearly articulated point of view, and the live format let those personalities breathe rather than flattening them into dry instruction. Even the archive films pulled their weight, teaching real technique while celebrating gardeners, chocolatiers, and home cooks alike.
By the close, the morning had achieved exactly what the best instalments of Saturday Kitchen 2026 aim for: serious food made approachable, a guest who gave everything to the room, and a public vote that ended in pure comfort. Tebbutt signed off by thanking Julie, Peter, Olly, and Lenny, pointing viewers to the studio recipes online and teasing next week’s line-up of Ben Lippett, Ravinder Bhogal, Nokx Majozi, and Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson. This Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25 was Saturday cooking at its warmest, where food, friendship, comedy, and good wine shared one very lively table.
FAQ Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 25
Q: What is Café de Paris butter and why does Peter McKenna use it with cockles?
A: Café de Paris butter is a savoury compound butter built from nineteen ingredients, including anchovies, capers, herbs, and the juice and zest of grapefruit and lemon. McKenna pairs it with cockles because the punchy, herby richness melts beautifully over warm shellfish. He rests it in the fridge first, letting the flavours settle and deepen before serving.
Q: How does the tangzhong method keep milk bread soft and fresh?
A: Tangzhong is a cooked paste of flour and liquid, a Japanese milk-bread technique that locks extra moisture into the dough. McKenna explained that it keeps the loaf juicy, fluffy, and fresh for longer than a standard brioche. The result carries far more moisture than traditional enriched bread, which is exactly why his studio milk bread stayed so light.
Q: What makes blackthorn salt from Stranraer so unusual?
A: Blackthorn salt comes from a medieval-looking tower in Stranraer where seawater is pumped over blackthorn branches. The branches draw out nutrients and many of the tannins, producing a salt with a flavour unlike anything mass-produced. McKenna compared the tower to something from The Lord of the Rings, and Julie Lin called the salt next-level after tasting it in rehearsal.
Q: Why does Julie Lin combine Malaysian and Mexican flavours?
A: Lin noticed that the big, bold, punchy flavours of Malaysia closely mirror those of Mexico. After eating at a London spot called Proper Tacos, she realised the taco made a natural vessel for Malaysian sambal. Her Edinburgh outlet Tacos Lah builds on that idea, serving slow-braised sambal pork with pineapple salsa and lime through a Mexican lens.
Q: Can a pressure cooker really match slow-cooked sambal pork?
A: Lin confirmed a pressure cooker delivers the same tender result as the slow method, simply faster. The pork shoulder ideally cooks for four to five hours until meltingly soft, but she encouraged viewers not to fear the appliance. Alternatively, you can marinate the meat, then leave it in a low oven for a few hours and forget about it.
Q: What budget wine did Olly Smith recommend on Saturday Kitchen?
A: Smith championed a Minervois Blanc at just nine pounds, calling it the best of its kind. He described it as bright, peachy, and full of dazzle, with a mineral limestone quality and cooling sea breezes. Importantly, he argued the south of France, long famous for reds, now represents the future for crisp, characterful white wines.
Q: Which wine pairs well with a spicy keema balti?
A: Smith matched the keema balti with an Australian Old Vine Grenache from the Co-op, a Bethany bottling. The fruit comes from a historic vineyard planted in 1852, giving masses of flavour alongside a light character and texture. He argued the wine handles all the spice in the dish, proving old vines can deliver serious depth at an accessible price.
Q: What did viewers choose for Lenny Henry’s food heaven or hell?
A: Sixty-two percent of viewers voted for food heaven, sending Matt Tebbutt to cook a lamb keema balti. The dish was packed with chillies, fenugreek, and Indian spices, cooked in a traditional balti pan and served with homemade naan. Henry’s food hell, a fragrant Thai green chicken curry, was rejected after he described past versions as watery and bland.
Q: Why did adding water to melting chocolate surprise Marcus Wareing?
A: Wareing had always been taught that adding water to melting chocolate was a cardinal sin that splits the cocoa butter. However, the Provençal chocolatier Joel showed that repeated mixing binds the fats back together again. Wareing called it the point where the science begins, admitting he had learnt something genuinely new about chocolate work.
Q: How does Nigella Lawson make her short ribs so tender?
A: Lawson braises beef short ribs gently and slowly with Chinese rice wine, hoisin, soy, five spice, garlic, and chilli. After cooking, she chills the dish and lifts off the hardened layer of fat, then reheats until piping hot. The long, slow method leaves the meat meltingly soft while still holding its shape, finished with coriander and sharp lime.
