Is British Food Actually That Bad? We Cooked & Ranked It All

Britain, Britain, Britain. Home of pubs, pies, puddings, bees and pies. Our food might not be the fanciest, tastiest or even the nicest, but it's ours. Hearty, tasty and unapologetic. Today we're cooking, tasting and ranking the best and worst dishes from our green and pleasant land. Starting with maybe the strangest thing I've ever cooked. Stargazy pie. The story goes that Tom Borcok of Mousehole in Cornwall, which is right at the bottom of England, had been a really bad storm for seven days. Tom braved the weather and he caught seven different types of fish. So traditionally this is made with seven fish in the pie. We poached our fish like you would make a fish pie. A layer of bechamel sauce, salmon, cod, smoked haddock, a layer of potato, a layer of eggs, and then a layer of butterflied sardines with the heads poking out the top of the pie. I mean, I love Cornish pasties, but we want to kind of shine a light on other different regional dishes as well. I think this is a really cool one because it celebrates the fish, which is, to be honest, my favourite part about Cornwall and chef's favourite part about Cornwall. It's been egg washed. We've just protected the little sardine heads with a little bit of tinfoil. I'm going to bake it 160 degrees, 25-35 minutes until that pastry lid's cooked. So to carve our Stargazy pie, take it out the pie crust. There we have it, Stargazy pie. Crofty, what do you reckon? Hello, missus. Bacon, onions, egg, lots of different fish, cheese sauce, and then hard-boiled eggs. I think everything looks nice apart from the brown, apart from the sardine. This is just like salmon and white fish. Here we go, chef. I'm going to call it. I think it's a bit lost. I wouldn't cook or eat it again. Yeah, I wouldn't finish it either. Yeah. F*** you, Stargazy pie. The nation's favourite. Origins of this dish is still unclear. Now it's said to have either come from Lancashire, funnily enough, or London. So the first thing we're going to do is just get our chips going. So next we're going to work on our batter for the fish. Baking powder, a little bit of turmeric for colour, plain flour, rice flour, and that's it. For the liquids, we have some beer and we have some sparkling water. I'm just going to whisk this together to form a nice smooth batter. Some of the earliest adaptations of it we found were around about 1840s. Fried fish used to be sold on the streets of London. But back then, the first iterations used to be served with bread rather than the chips like we see today and later on in the 1800s. So while our chips are frying, we've got our fish here. We're just going to coat the fish in a little bit of seasoned flour before we enter it into the batter. So this fish we have here is just a nice bit of cod. So our chips. So we've got our fish here. Our oil is on temp. So we're about 175 on the oil temp. First shop that combined the fish with the chips, because obviously there was shops selling just one or the other before, was said to have been in Bow, East London, around about 1860. Mushy peas, curry sauce. Basics. What are these chips? Are these triple cooked chips? That's not traditional. Yeah, fair enough. Oh, so good. By screaming out for a few peas and a bit of tartar sauce. As it stands, it's lacking something. No, it's got to be there, look. I just think it's not finished without the garnishes. What do you want to go then, B? Seems a bit hard. If you're not sure though, I don't want to. B plus. B plus, room for improvement. It would be really hard to do best of British without talking about a really important part of the UK, which is Liverpool. Scouse is very much their kind of regional dish. I'm going to be super honest. I don't really like Scouse that much. My grandma and my mum are all from Liverpool and they would cook it for me and it was perfectly nice. I didn't say that when I was younger, obviously. I didn't know. I have a clue what I was on about, but I would just wolf it down. But on reflection, having cooked it a few times since, it's nothing crazy. Lob Scouse is a Scandinavian term and there's lots of different variations of a similar dish in either Germany, all the way through to Scandinavia. Liverpool is an incredibly important port. The reason that we call people Scouses now is because of this dish. It's got a lot of parallels between something like an Irish stew and there was a lot of Irish immigrants coming over. I think in the poorer parts of Liverpool as well, they wouldn't even have Scouse. They would have blind Scouse, which was a variation, which basically didn't even contain meat. This is mutton shoulder, which has been diced, seared off in a pan. I remember watching an Action Bronson video where he came and ate a big bowl of Scouse on foot. That's delicious. I don't know. He just looked a little bit disappointed, to be honest. And he's just like, kind of like a stew man. No wine, no frills, nothing crazy. Just sweat off vegetables. Then we're going to add our braising liquid with our meat and cook it all down. Okay, so this is nicely roasted now. We've got a little bit of color on the vegetables, but not too much. Whacking our lamb. The potatoes have just started to break down, so it's given it that really nice thickness to the sauce. So this is a lamb neck. So obviously quite a gelatinous cut. Lots of different muscle running through it. Traditionally, you would eat this with something like red cabbage, pickled beetroots or something like that. Dumplings, that with some dumplings behind. I think dumplings is also an added optional. Solid cookery from the Northwest. A lot of Liverpoolians would like. Oh, that's soft, lad. It's not bad. I think it's a solid cookery. It lacks a bit, yeah, a couple of little tweaks. I think it's lacking like a bit of freshness, like fresh vegetables, intensity. C plus. Pie mash jelly deals from London. We've got our pies here. In here, we've got our minced beef caramelized down with carrots, onion and beef stock. Lined our mould with the shortcrust pastry, which has a little bit of lard in it as well. Our pies are glazed. We're now going to bake these in an oven set at 165 until we have a beautiful golden pastry. In the Victorian era, the city became a more desirable place to live. The rich people moved back to the city, pushing the locals East. So the locals couldn't afford to eat in what they used to call Up West. And that's where the pie started to come into fashion as a way of using the cheaper cuts of meat. So it was predominantly made from minced beef. Workers were working long hours. They didn't have time to go home and start making pies. So the evolution of the pie shop came about, where all the workers could go and get a wholesome meal of potatoes, sauce, jelly deals and their pie readily made for them. So this is a liquor sauce. So pie mash and liquor as the dish is. So in here, it's a chicken stock with butter and flour. Around the same time the pie mash shops came about, the Thames was heavily, heavily polluted. And the eel was actually one of the only fish that could survive in the polluted water of the Thames. So hence why it became a staple of the Londoners diet. So we've got our lovely pie there on the plate. No British meal would be complete without the humble potato. Britain on a plate. Oh my God, it's so firm. Oh, it's full of bones. How do you eat it? Oh, that's rank. That is awful. Maybe you put it on a hot pie. No. Hey, get it on there. Actually, it's a bit fishy. It's fishy, but it's not. I don't think a lot of people like that. This pie looks absolutely superb. Good job, chef. Hey, my turn. Oh, that parsley liquor is great. It's actually brand new. That is delicious. Thing is, I'm going to give it a two rating. A, if you add that, C. I think it's A. Yeah, we have to. We have to look at it as a whole, chef. We have to be impartial. There's ******* bones. Oh, let's not be about it. Just cover it in jelly instead. It's actually ******* disgusting, look at that. B altogether. It's a B minus. Hey, B's a B. This is Lancashire hot pot from Lancashire, which is my home county. Northwest of England, so just north of Manchester is where I'm from. But this dish comes from the entirety of Lancashire. And in order to prepare this, what we did was we sweated off some onions, carrots, a few turnips. We braised some lamb. You can use mutton, it's traditional, but also lamb works as well. Then we got some shanks, braised those too. And then we layered some potatoes and then just cooked them in a nice hot oven with a little bit of butter on top. And what you end up getting is this. It's cooked at 160 for about 40 minutes. Sumptuous layer of potatoes with the cooked lamb underneath. I'm obviously a little bit biased, but this is genuinely what I grew up eating. We're going to put this back into the oven at 160 degrees just to finish the cooking and it should come out beautiful, crisp, golden all over. And it's honestly one of the most comforting, beautiful dishes. The name actually comes from the word hodgepodge in the old English. But as we know, the French hot au feu, which has similar ingredients, sort of became a mixture of the two and turned into Lancashire hot pot. Basically means you can chuck in anything you want and it'll basically be delicious. So back into the oven just to finish off the cooking process. Right, so this is what we're looking for. Perfectly sliced, crispy potatoes. So traditionally always made with a lamb or mutton. The lamb fat sort of makes like almost like a thicker sauce. It's delicious. It's very similar to like a pomme boulanger, like the French version, right? But just probably a little bit heartier and a little bit meatier. Like the potatoes not the focus, the meat. That's the question I'm asking myself. Why isn't it? Let's go for it, chef. A for Lancashire. Yeah, go on. I've done the North West proud. Anglesey eggs. So we are now in North Wales on the island of Anglesey. And we have a strange dish for you here. So we're going to start off with a humble potato and we have eggs. We have some leeks, which is a vegetable which is very, very Welsh. It's the national vegetable of Wales. So we're just going to peel these quickly. So these have been blanched and cooled. The water going in between those layers is going to help you remove the shell of the egg. So strangely enough, on the island of Anglesey, there was an ancient tradition where children who lived on the island would go from street to street clapping from door to door. And then in reward for their clapping, they would receive eggs, which would then be taken home and take pride of place basically in their homes. To top the eggs and the leeks, we have a, is covered with a cheese sauce. So we've just got a bechamel, which is going to warm through there before we add our cheese. So we're just going to scatter our leeks all over our potato base. So we're just going to take our soft boiled eggs and lay them out nicely. Remembering that you eat with your eyes first. Okay, so we've got our bechamel warmed through. Next, we're going to go in with our cheese. Generous. So we're just going to cover the dish now in cheese sauce. Okay, sexy eggs going in the sexy oven. Just to glaze up nicely. And here we have it. Just because you made it. I like the leeks, they add a bit of freshness. I like the eggs, they add a bit of richness. I like the cheese sauce. It's what I thought was going to be the worst and it's actually perfectly nice. It's nothing to write home about, let's be honest. It's exactly what you think it's going to taste like. There's no surprises there. See? See. Pork pie. A dish that comes from Leicestershire. So Leicestershire is in the East Midlands. This is actually one of the only dishes in the UK that's got a protected dom status. This will never be an actual authentic Melton Mowbray pie because in order to be so, it has to be made in Melton Mowbray or within 25 kilometers of Melton Mowbray. Originally, this dish actually comes from the tradition of fox hunting. So this being a very easy food to put into a travel bag or satchel whilst you're chasing foxes across the countryside. So this is an aspic or a jelly. So obviously traditional in like pate en croute, French cookery as well. But really important for this because you pour this into the hole and then you can preserve the pie for probably a good amount of time, to be quite honest, in the pastry place. And you traditionally would use, you can buy almost like a pie tamper which goes in there and you press it all around. It's a nice water pastry which contains lard as well. Leicestershire is actually well known. It's quite a flat county. It's well known to have a lot of pigs. The fat from that pork goes into the pastry and some of the moisture escapes into the meat. Place your lid on. Impressions with a fork just to finish off the sealing of that lid. So one nice big hole and this is going to allow us to pour the aspic in. Quite important that the aspic goes in hot. This will bake at 160. Aspic will go in as it's cooling down or until it's cooled all the way down. And then you can even top up with another layer of aspic until you'll get this. Pork pie. If you wanted to say to someone coming to the UK for the first time, this is the best of British. I mean it doesn't get any better. I think this is what British food's all about. I actually do. This is what we're known for. People across the pond say British food ain't worth nothing. Time to eat a fresh pork pie though. It's an A. With a condiment it might even be an S. But this is an A. Solid A. Okay next up we have a Cumberland sausage. This sausage is famed for its shape. So this sausage is obviously made in Cumbria in the northwest of England. So in our sausage we have black peppercorns, maize. It's the actual only sausage in the UK which has the PGI status. Meaning it has to be made in Cumbria or the local areas. And it also has to have a minimum of 80% meat content. However more often than not it's usually as high as around 95 to 98. German miners settled in Cumbria. The thought of the Cumberland sausage was that it was a creation of theirs as they wanted to recreate the bratwurst style thick, meaty, juicy sausages of Germany when they came over to this country to assist on the mining works around Cumbria. We're going to serve this with another serving of mashed potato. The nation's favourite. What have we got here then chef? I've got Groffi's big juicy sausage. Why is it so curly? Beautiful British mashed potato, Cumberland sausage and the nation's favourite onion gravy. I think this is probably one of the most archetypal British dishes. I mean we've done a few. Pint of ale, cold, cold day countryside pub. Cumbria's finest coiled sausage with a bit of mashed potato onion gravy. What's better than that? What is better than that? No it's good, it's good, it's good. Is it better than a hot pot? That's what the ratings is for isn't it? No that's what I'm asking myself. Oh okay. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go for A and it's actually an A plus. No I think it's got to be B. B? It's got to be a B plus. I think it's on par with the fish. Not quite got as much flavour and skill as the Lancashire hot pot. I'd be happy with the B chef. B plus. B, B, B, B, B. Right this is the one you've all been waiting for. Chicken tikka masala. Otherwise known as, if you're not a Liverpool fan, chicken tikka masala. India has had a massive influence on British food. My certain, certain go-to takeaway is always Indian. This particular dish is credited to a chef from Glasgow who's a Glaswegian chef with Pakistani heritage. This is Wetherspoon's most popular dish. Wetherspoon, the American audience, is a fantastic place. Steeped in local tradition and it also does pints for about £1.90. We actually marinated our chicken the day before in some yoghurt and spices. Cooked it off over flame grilled and more ginger. We've got some garlic cloves here as well. Ground coriander. This is garam masala. Some turmeric and some Kashmiri chilli powder. So legend has it that someone ordered a chicken tikka which is usually served dry and that when it arrived they complained they said it was too dry and the chef, the chef in question, added a load of tandoori sauce to it and then the legend was born which is basically just tandoori chicken pieces which has been grilled off and then added to a really nice rich sauce. So once you've got that spice blend, what's really important is that you get these onions, the consistency of being really, really nice and caramelised. Once that happens we're going to add our paste, add our chicken, a bit of tomato puree, coconut milk and cook it down. Okay, so now we've got to this stage. Our onions are really nicely caramelised. We're just going to add a small amount of tomato puree in there. Add in your spice mix. Okay and then that's cooked down for about three to four minutes. Then chicken goes in. I add a little bit of chicken stock, a tin of coconut milk, a little bit of cream and that'll be it. So cook down for two hours. We've got that beautiful tender chicken, a little bit of cream, a few sprigs of coriander. It's pretty special. It's banging isn't it? Have we reached S tier do you reckon? I think we might have. The best of British is an Indian slash Pakistan dish from Glasgow. Creamy, it's fragrant, it's spicy, it's buttery, it's rich. S status. You've got to try it. Next up we've got chicken parma from Middlesbrough in the northeast of England. So what we have here is we have a chicken breast. We've battened it out with a mallet, into some flour, then into some egg which has been beaten with a fork so it's nice and fine and then finally into some breadcrumbs and we're just going to fry that till it's beautiful and golden brown on both sides. This dish originates from around about 1960 with a Greek American naval chef and he basically opened like an American grill style restaurant where he served this dish and then the region became famous for it. It's not a dish that you'd usually cook at home but it's sort of like a big dish you'd find on all the takeaway menus around Middlesbrough and the northeast. So once the chicken's cooked it's going to come out of the fryer onto our paper to dry. Originated from chicken parmesan which is obviously the chicken with mozzarella, tomato sauce and parmesan whereas this version a little bit more refined shall we say. It consists of breaded chicken, white cheese sauce and then red Leicester cheese. Humble selection of ingredients. So to our white sauce we've got some cheddar here. I'm just going to melt that very slowly, a little bit of red Leicester in there as well. So we're going to cover our lovely healthy chicken breast with our sauce. Just a light dousing you know a casual Monday night dinner and then for a little bit of freshness we like to just go with a little sprinkling of red Leicester and then we would place underneath our grill but we don't have one. There we have it. If Carlsberg did dinners. My first chicken palma. Never tried it before. Carpet table size you know for a little bit of elegance. There's no way this shouldn't be delicious. My heart's not looking forward to this one. Too intense, too cheesy, too much, just too much. Grease city. Okay so next dish, Welsh rarebit. Although it's now considered probably the national dish of Wales, it turns out it's not actually invented by the Welsh. I think the English invented it to take the piss out of the Welsh. So Wales is on the very west of the country. It kind of borders the Irish sea. It was actually a joke that the English were making about the Welsh. The Welsh thought that they were eating rabbit. So in here is just a bechamel which is made with brown ale. We use a Newcastle brown ale but they would use a Welsh brown ale and then we put a little bit of mustard in there and I've just finished that with a little bit of liam perrins and we put a little bit more on top. You need to use like quite a nice sharp cheddar for this. Okay so we've got our toast here and then we're going to layer on this beautiful bechamel. It doesn't matter if a little bit sort of cascades over the side. Then just go on with a really good hit of cheddar. This is a Montgomery cheddar so nice and acidic but quite strong. Drizzle of liam perrins Worcestershire sauce. It's a very very common but very very British condiment and for all you Americans out there it's Worcestershire not Worcestershire shard eh? One chest star shine. One chest shush shush not Worcestershire shush. So I'm going to bake this in the oven and then just finish it underneath the grill. Welsh rare bit. It's like a boozy croque monsieur. It's simple. The taste is simple Joe. I think that hinders the score for it. C plus? I think it's much better than the stargazer pie. It's on a level with pie and mash. I think we go C. C. Suet pudding. Where I come from up north this is traditionally eaten at a chippy so you'd have a steamed steak and kidney pudding but originally this dish actually comes from Sussex they believe. Suet pudding is animal fat. You had places called knackers yards where people would take bones and animal fat and it would be a cheaper source of fat and cooking protein rather than butter. So you don't want to make it too thin. The thickness of two pound coins put together. Suet pastry is incredibly resilient. Quite a versatile recipe. You can kind of um you know you can kind of be a bit flexible with what you've got. The most important thing is that suet pastry. So just trimming off the excess now around the top. So our filling is a mixture of beef which has been really nicely braised. Got a few carrots in there and a few turnips. And we've cooked it until it's like almost falling apart but not quite. It's going to be super decadent really nice and tender. 100% it's a love it or hate it thing but um I think if you grow up eating suet pudding it's a very comforting dish. And then what you want to do is almost like fuse it to the uh to the bottom half. Finalise that crimp on the outside. We've got this nice lid that goes on top. And then that's going to cook inside the pot for about 45 minutes until the pastry is perfectly cooked. Should have lightly sort of risen up in the mould. So flip it over moment of truth. One tap just for look. Oh look at that bad boy. Nicely held its shape and what we're going to do is just cover that in a beautiful bit of gravy. It's almost glazed. Yeah that's that beautiful gravy mate. Get some more on there. Suet pastry is a lovely thing but it and a dozen and a half had like years on to your life. Yeah I mean a suet pudding is it's a delicious really f*****g great quality British dish. Just because it's not to my taste you know. I feel like it's I feel like it deserves more than a C. I don't know I think it's got a B state that's 100%. Signed off. B! Last but not least my personal favourite the roast dinner. So the roast dinner originating from some say Yorkshire was eaten usually on Sundays after church. Traditionally you always have roast potatoes. We've got here some lovely cabbage and some red cabbage. So usually humble ingredients nothing too fancy on a roast dinner but it's all sort of just cooked simply but the beauty of the dish is when they're all had together. Yorkshire north of England. 18th century when this dish first came about they would serve the Yorkshire pudding as a starter filled with gravy as a way of filling up the diners before they got to the main event of the beef so they would eat less beef. Roast dinners can feature any number of different meats you know most common ones around the country now would be pork belly you'd have ribeye sometimes rump or even in you can do it on more of a budget and they would do sort of top side of beef or thin cuts like that. Pork belly, leg of lamb, chicken. You name it we ******* roast it. Holly I'm home. This is actually the most popular dish in all of our restaurants yeah and I would say probably around most restaurants around the UK. Can you think of anything better than having a nice bottle of red wine on a Sunday tuck it into a nice roast dinner. It's hard to get everything right. Sunday is best food, best day. Yeah I mean it's an S for Sundays but it would be a D on every other day. S status up there with the best. Superstar status. Sunday roast and chicken tikka masala. Stargazy let's not even go there. We've eaten our way around the British Isles. I feel absolutely pooped. Full of potato and cheese. And I feel patriotic. 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