Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29 delivers one of the warmest, funniest mornings of the summer run, as Matt Tebbutt welcomes podcast duo Jordan North and William Hanson into a studio packed with gochujang prawn pasta, a Cornish summer roast, canned wines and a Food Heaven vote with a genuinely surprising twist. Chefs Poppy O’Toole and Paul Ainsworth handle the cooking, drinks expert Helen McGinn matches every dish with a bottle — or a can — and the archive brings in Rick Stein, Marcus Wareing, Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater.

The chemistry between North and Hanson, the odd-couple hosts of the hit podcast Help, I Sexted My Boss, drives the entire episode. One brings cheeky northern charm, the other brings expert knowledge of etiquette, and together they turn a live cooking show into a running masterclass in mischief and manners. Eight years and hundreds of episodes into their podcast — a show the BBC initially turned down — the pair prove exactly why unlikely friendships make the best television.

By the end of the morning, viewers have decided which guest gets his Food Heaven, William has corrected at least two etiquette faux pas at the table, and Jordan has mouthed a word that earns an on-air apology. Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29 rarely pauses for breath, and that is precisely its charm.

The episode opens with a friendship origin story that sounds almost too good to be true. The two met around fifteen years ago at the BBC, when Jordan was on work experience and made William a cup of tea. William, then just 21, struck Jordan as a man in his forties who probably went home each night to a librarian wife. A mutual friend later warned William that Jordan was “a bit rough around the edges” and predicted they would never get on.

That misjudgement became the foundation of one of British podcasting’s biggest success stories. Help, I Sexted My Boss was initially rejected when they pitched it to the BBC, yet the pair persevered, expecting to record two or three series at most. Eight years and roughly 900 episodes later, the show remains a twice-weekly fixture built on listener confessions, over-sharing and the pair’s genuine — if playfully contested — friendship. Jordan calls them best friends. William concedes only that “best is a stretch. We get on.”

Their dynamic colours every segment of Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29. Every podcast episode famously begins with gin and Dubonnet, a ritual that started when William brought a bottle in for a show-and-tell after hosting a Dubonnet reception at home — a drink he notes the Queen Mother also favoured. When Matt Tebbutt serves it in the studio, William immediately polices the pouring: no clinking, because “it’s common,” and absolutely no extended little finger, which he claims once signalled something far more scandalous than bad manners.

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29

Poppy O’Toole Swaps Potatoes for a Gochujang Prawn Pasta Born at the Hairdresser’s

Poppy O’Toole arrives with a confession that borders on professional crisis. The self-styled Potato Queen, with five best-selling books to her name, has a daughter who spits out potatoes every time she tries them. Poppy’s theory is simple: she ate so many potatoes while pregnant that her little spud has rebelled. Consequently, she pivots to pasta — though carbs, naturally, remain non-negotiable.

Her dish is a gochujang and roasted garlic prawn spaghetti with an epic cheesy garlic bread on the side. The garlic bread takes its inspiration from Korean garlic bread, which went viral a few years ago and traditionally contains condensed milk. Poppy drops the condensed milk to keep things savoury, loading the bread instead with mozzarella, cream cheese and parmesan before dousing it completely in garlic butter and finishing it in the air-fryer at around 170 degrees for ten minutes.

The pasta itself is unapologetically punchy. Two whole bulbs of roasted garlic go into a dish for two, alongside banana shallot, spring onion, cherry tomatoes and gochujang — the fermented soybean, glutinous rice and Korean red pepper paste she describes as slightly spicy and full of umami. She cooks it all in a wok, which she recommends for pasta because everything mixes together easily, and finishes with a drizzle of chilli oil.

The dish’s origin story is gloriously unpretentious. Rather than weeks of development, the idea came from a haircut. Poppy’s hairdresser Roxy mentioned making prawn pasta with feta the night before, then suggested gochujang, and the recipe was born on the spot. Matt calls it one of the nicest things she has made on the show — high praise for a dish invented mid-trim.

There is one hiccup: Jordan doesn’t like prawns. He does, confusingly, like lobster, a contradiction that baffles the studio. William, ever the etiquette authority, recalls politely eating an entire plate of smoked salmon he hated at a dinner because the host never asked about dietary requirements. He sat there, he says, and thought of England.

Helen McGinn’s Cloudy Rosé Called Trouble Proves Its Name Wrong

Helen McGinn’s first wine of the morning pairs beautifully with Poppy’s spice. Trouble Cloudy Rosé, from a French producer and priced at £12 from Marks & Spencer, takes its name from the French word for cloudy. The wine skips the filtering that gives normal wine its clarity, leaving the natural sediment in place. That decision adds extra flavour and a slightly grapefruit-like character.

Helen frames it firmly as a food wine — one that comes alive alongside the right dish, particularly anything with spice. Against the gochujang prawns, the pairing lands perfectly. Jordan approves with a grin: “I like Trouble. I like a bit of trouble.”

Her second studio pairing arrives later with Paul Ainsworth’s roast. The Best Grillo Sicilia from Morrisons is a sunshine-loving Sicilian white that Helen describes as liquid sunshine, chosen to echo the Mediterranean spirit of chicken, lemon, garlic and olives. Paul is delighted, declaring it gives the dish exactly the Sicily-meets-Greece holiday feel he built the recipe around.

Paul Ainsworth Previews St Enodoc With a Summer Roast Built on Chicken Fat

Paul Ainsworth’s appearance doubles as a sneak preview of the biggest project of his career. Not content with a Michelin-starred restaurant, a bar, an Italian café, a pub and a townhouse, he is now adding a luxury hotel to his Cornish empire. St Enodoc, a beautiful building dating from 1925, holds its soft opening the very evening of the broadcast — locals, neighbours and everyone who put up with the renovation noise are invited — and Paul heads straight back to Cornwall the moment filming ends.

His studio dish comes directly from the new hotel’s menu: roast chicken with gordal olives, garlic and lemon, a rich sauce built from the bones, and hasselback potatoes roasted in pure chicken fat. The technique matters here. Paul breaks down a whole bird — cheaper than buying pieces, he points out, with minimal prep — and wastes absolutely nothing. Wings and bones go into the sauce, while the skin is rendered down into what he calls liquid gold for roasting the potatoes.

His method solves a familiar summer problem. Instead of roasting from raw, he poaches the jointed chicken in dark stock with rosemary, thyme and bay, meaning the meat is fully cooked and succulent before it ever sees the oven or barbecue. No more anxiously carving into pink meat at a garden party; the final roast simply builds that lovely caramelised finish. Back in Cornwall, he adds Cornish seaweed to the potato boil for extra umami, and the salad leaves come from an amazing Cornish farm supplying the hotel.

Then comes the detail that steals the segment: St Enodoc changes its doormat three times a day. Paul discovered the idea on honeymoon in Singapore, where a hotel doormat read “good afternoon” on arrival — he got changed and waited downstairs just to see the evening version appear. Some of his team questioned the idea when he introduced it at his Padstow townhouse, but they now nail it daily, and the hotel will do the same. William Hanson, unsurprisingly, approves entirely. It is, he confirms, very sophisticated.

The finished dish causes genuine commotion. Matt calls it one of the most delicious chicken dishes he has ever had on the show, the guests practically have to be separated from the platter, and Poppy delivers the definitive verdict on the hasselbacks: potatoes and chicken fat should be the only way to make potatoes.

Rick Stein’s Australian Homecoming Reveals the Personal Story Behind His Career

The archive takes the episode somewhere unexpectedly moving. Rick Stein opens his big trip across Australia with a return to the beach where his adult life effectively began. In 1966, aged 19 and in a bad place following his father’s suicide, he ran away to Australia in search of somewhere sunny and optimistic — somewhere nobody could have the blues.

What he found there changed everything. Though the world associates him with the Atlantic, it was Australia’s astonishing variety and abundance of fish — big ones, colourful ones, species he had never seen — that first hooked him. Catching and cooking that fish, he says, almost kick-started the decision to open a restaurant back in Britain. Fifty years on, he owns a home and a fish restaurant in Mollymook, a sleepy, salty town south of Sydney that he describes as Padstow without the rain, gales and fog.

Stein has watched Australian food transform across five decades, from the pies-and-schooners era of simple British-based cooking through old French, slow food, Pacific Rim, Asian fusion and nouvelle cuisine. Now he senses another seismic shift underway, and he throws a birthday barbecue for foodie friends and neighbours to test the theory. Even the barbie itself proves his point: blokes who once stood around incinerating sausages now want to know what’s in your marinade — his contains fennel, Pernod, olive oil and garlic — and almost everything on the table came from within 100 miles.

His guests confirm the change. One grew up on tinned spaghetti and now talks sun-dried tomatoes; another argues Australia spent fifteen years searching for a national cuisine before happily concluding there isn’t one — just the world’s best produce enhanced with flavours from everywhere. Repeatedly, one destination keeps surfacing: Tasmania. Pristine, unpolluted, producing some of the best apricots and fishing anywhere, the island his guests treat as almost mystical. So Stein resolves to go — to a place he has visited only once, which he suspects is once more than most Australians.

Marcus Wareing Learns a Provençal Family Recipe Unchanged Since 1964

The second archive film sends Marcus Wareing to Provence and the proudly traditional restaurant Où Ravi, where head chef Natalie took over from her father Jean-François eleven years ago. The restaurant opened in 1964, founded by Jean-François’s mother-in-law, and the recipes have passed down through the generations ever since. The family still lives directly above the dining room — all the better, Marcus jokes, for keeping an eye on things.

Natalie teaches him artichokes à la barrigoule, one of Provence’s most iconic vegetable dishes, built on carrots, onions, bacon and one ingredient that stops Marcus in his tracks: lettuce, cooked down like spinach. He has never done it in his career. Natalie’s explanation is quietly devastating for any ambitious chef: sometimes chefs think too much and make things complicated. This is how it has always been done, and she has never changed it. Marcus suspects he knows why — her father is probably always watching.

The artichoke prep is the segment’s masterclass. Marcus admits he always delegates artichokes in his own kitchen, while Natalie peels, trims and turns fifteen portions daily with startling speed. Out comes the melon baller — a serious piece of kit in Marcus’s catering school days — to scoop the inedible furry choke from the heart, and the prepared artichokes are rubbed with lemon to stop them browning. Even the carrots carry memories, cut in the decorative fluted pattern from his classic French training.

The verdict could not be higher. After onions sweated in plenty of olive oil, bacon, patterned carrots, a splash of white wine and the surprising lettuce, Marcus declares it probably the best dish he has eaten in France — so delicious, such pure flavour. Jean-François delivers the family’s ultimate compliment on his daughter’s cooking: almost better than his own.

The Cherry Trifle, the Etiquette Clinic and the Podcast’s Biggest-Ever Disagreement

Between the chef segments, Matt makes a cherry trifle in honour of one of the podcast’s recurring obsessions: William’s late grandmother’s trifle, which he often makes for Jordan and once served at a Traitors final viewing evening. Jordan rates that version among the best trifles he has ever eaten — with an apology to his own mum. Matt’s contemporary take uses shop-bought Madeira cake instead of retro trifle sponges, cherries poached with the liquor reduced back over the top, an old-fashioned custard infused with lemon verbena, and crème fraîche to cut the richness. Naturally, a splash of rosé goes in too. Booze, after all.

The trifle triggers William’s sharpest etiquette work of the morning. He clocks the soup spoon immediately, then corrects the way the dessert is passed: the food comes to us, not the other way round. It joins a growing list of rulings delivered across the episode. Thank-you letters, William reveals, should be started before you even leave for dinner — “Dear Paul, what a marvellous dinner” — then finished with specifics once home. He took Jordan to a fancy London stationer for personalised paper, though Jordan ruined the effect by adding a radio icon to the letterhead.

French exits divide the table. Matt loves leaving parties without goodbyes; William permits it only conditionally. Don’t make a song and dance, don’t assume you’re the main character — but a host deserves a farewell, because a host should know who is and isn’t in their house. On making the bed at someone’s house: offer, don’t assume, though Jordan goes full scatter-cushions-and-scented-candles. And always bring drinks you’d actually want to drink, because if you don’t like what’s on offer, you can fall back on your own Carling.

The richest podcast material comes from a listener dilemma airing the following week — the source of the biggest disagreement in the show’s eight years. A listener went to break up with her dentist boyfriend, only for him to propose on one knee in front of his entire family before she could speak. Months after the painful split, she developed wisdom tooth trouble, found huge waiting lists everywhere, and wrote in asking whether she could ring her heartbroken ex for the extraction — adding it “would be nice to catch up.” Jordan, a veteran of years of wisdom tooth agony, says just get them out. William’s position is unambiguous: pick a lane, and go to a backstreet dentist before going back there.

Canned Wine Takes Centre Stage in Saturday Kitchen 2026 Episode 29 as Helen McGinn Backs Ring Pulls

Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29 saves one of its most useful segments for the drinks table, where Helen McGinn tackles the biggest thing happening in wine right now: cans. Sales have gone through the roof in recent years, and Helen is clear that this isn’t just a millennial and Gen Z trend. The quality inside the cans has genuinely transformed. Where once any old rubbish went into aluminium, companies are now launching that only make canned wine — partly because glass produces around four times more CO2 and ranks among wine’s biggest carbon contributors. Cans, simply, are more sustainable.

Her tasting lineup makes the argument in liquid form. First comes an English pét-nat made from Bacchus grapes grown in Kent and produced at an urban winery in Hackney — pét-nat being the most traditional method of making sparkling wine, and this can one of remarkably few of its kind. Helen braces for eye-rolls that never come; even the sceptics find it savoury, different and genuinely good.

Next, an organic Sicilian white at £3.30 from M&S, from a company founded by two friends — one a wine trade veteran who hated seeing glass go to landfill — with Ed Sheeran, an old schoolmate, also behind the venture. Jordan drains his sample entirely, despite not being a big white wine drinker. A French orange wine follows at £5.50, made with skin contact the way red wine normally is, which Helen recommends as a gentle, not-too-funky starting point for orange wine newcomers. Putting French wine in a can, she notes, is still a big deal — very few producers dare.

The rosé comes from Laylo, a company built around bags, boxes and cans for sustainability reasons, priced at £4.50 with can artwork by an artist painting Provençal lavender. Finally, a slightly chilled Côtes du Rhône red at £3.50 from Waitrose wins William over completely — he likes a full-bodied red and finds himself warming to the chill. Helen’s picnic advice seals it: on a hot day, a light chill makes red delicious. The practical case is just as strong: cans are perfect single-serve options when you only want one glass, hotels are already stocking them in minibars, and you rarely pay much of a premium over an equivalent bottle.

The Saturday Kitchen 2026 Episode 29 Food Heaven Vote Splits the Nation Between Curry and Beef Wellington

With two guests in the hot seat, the show graciously removes Food Hell from the equation — good manners demand it — leaving a straight fight between two very different heavens. Jordan, a proud Lancashire man, champions curry, though he insists it requires 24 hours of mental preparation; nobody can simply spring a Monday-night curry on him. Matt’s version promises a whole jointed chicken cooked with warming spices, lightened with coconut milk, courgettes and cherry tomatoes, served with a refreshing mango, tomato and coriander salad.

William’s heaven is beef Wellington — “because it is dead posh,” as Jordan puts it — reimagined for summer. Matt’s take wraps beef fillet brushed with Dijon mustard in a duxelles of blitzed chestnut mushrooms combined with ricotta, herbs, lemon and wilted spinach, all encased in puff pastry, served with a raw shallot salad and tarragon cream. There is a mischievous catch: the raw onion salad targets Jordan, who loathes raw onion in any form — pizza, sandwich or quiche — while William refuses to eat anything on the bone, which rules him firmly out of the curry camp.

The public delivers a 54% verdict for beef Wellington. William celebrates; Jordan mouths something that prompts an official on-air apology, with Matt insisting he is just the messenger. Jordan’s incredulous protest — who wants a beef Wellington in this weather? — gets a swift answer: 54% of the population, and besides, it eats beautifully cold or at room temperature for a picnic.

Matt’s live execution is genuinely instructive. The pastry-wrapped fillet is chilled, glazed with egg wash, then baked at 200 degrees for around thirty minutes until the core temperature reaches 45 degrees. Resting carries it up roughly another five degrees for a perfect medium rare. Nerve-racking on live television, he admits — but the result draws cheers from the studio. Helen’s pairing breaks convention beautifully: rather than the expected red, she pours Tesco Finest Premier Cru Rosé Champagne at £23, arguing that a summery Wellington deserves a perky, fruity pink fizz. The Pinot Noir supplies the colour, the Chardonnay the elegance, and given today’s soaring champagne prices, she rates it serious value.

Toy Story 5, a West End Debut and Adele in Row Three

The final stretch of Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29 doubles as a career-news bonanza. William is currently starring in a West End show — a role previously played by Tom Allen — running until Sunday the 26th, despite being, by his own admission, an etiquette coach rather than an actor. He laughed when first asked, then said yes, and describes the cast as friends for life. Jordan watched from the audience like the dad in Billy Elliot, and days later Adele sat in row three, close enough that the entire cast fought the urge to check whether she was laughing at the jokes.

Jordan’s announcement tops even that. He has landed the starring role of the garden gnome in Toy Story 5, telling his agent: anytime, anyplace, any price. Their podcast colleague plays the pink flamingo — something Jordan only discovered three or four days before recording, having been told simply that another UK talent was involved. At the premiere he found himself in a cast photo alongside Tom Hanks, still slightly bewildered to be there. Ranked against interviewing Robert De Niro and meeting Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, he places the gnome right at the top: no one can ever take it away from him.

Jordan’s radio life is thriving too. He heads to Greece the next day before returning after the break, buoyed by a show enjoying a genuine buzz — celebrities texting to ask if they can come on, mates joining the chat, and what he calls the best job in the world: being on the radio every morning with your friends.

The episode closes with warmth all round. Matt wishes Paul luck for that evening’s St Enodoc opening, thanks Poppy, Helen, Jordan and William, and points viewers to the recipes at the Saturday Kitchen website. Best Bites returns on BBC Two the following morning at 9:55am, and next Saturday brings Scott Hallsworth, Paul A Young and Nick Knowles to the studio. As a snapshot of everything the format does well — real cooking, real friendship and just the right amount of trouble — Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29 is the summer run at its absolute best.

FAQ Saturday Kitchen 2026 episode 29