‘There’s a recipe inspired by the mighty Greggs Steak Bake’ - Jay Rayner on reverse-engineering dishes for his cookbook

Virgin Radio

3 Sep 2024, 08:59

Jay Rayner's first cookbook, Nights out at Home, sees the journalist and food critic offer up recipes inspired by the dishes that have stolen his heart over the decades.

Speaking with Ryan Tubridy on his Virgin Radio mid-mornings show, Jay explained: “One of the things I've always done is, if I've gone out for dinner and there's been a dish and I thought, ‘That's a really good idea, I wonder if I could make a version of it at home?’ and I go home and I’d reverse-engineer it."

He continued: “You don't have a whole brigade of chefs in your kitchen, do you? They are ideas inspired by. And they're not the big name restaurants generally, because they all have their cookbooks. You know, you don't need me to tell you how to make a Michel Roux dish. You can go and get one of his cookbooks.”

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The book features a cheat's version of the original Ivy's famed crispy duck salad, and as the author explains: “There is a recipe inspired by the mighty Greggs Steak Bake.”

Explaining the book is “high and it’s low, it's a bit of everything,” he adds that the recipes include a deep fried apple pie inspired by the one at McDonald's and some peri peri chicken livers, courtesy of "my trips to Nando's.”

Jay will be hitting the road in September, October and November on a tour to accompany publication of Nights Out At Home. “It's a one man show,” he told Ryan. “So, originally I was going to be interviewed by a different person every night in a tour around the UK.

“I say this delicately, people who do those interviews on stage, they're not always brilliant. And I realised three would be great and two would be mediocre, and three would be awful, and I'd hate it. So in the end, what I did was I got 15 of my rather well known friends each to ask me a question on video. 

“So it starts with Stanley Tucci saying, ‘Jay, what the hell do you know about anything?’. Rob Brydon, ‘Aren't you just an insufferable snob?’ Nigella, ‘How'd you roast a chicken?’ There's 15 of these and it is a piece of theatre. I explain how I got the job, what the job is, and it leads you through it all. It's about 55 minutes, first half, then a Q & A after.”

As well as being a food critic and journalist, Jay is the author of four novels and seven non-fiction works and plays piano in the Jay Rayner Quartet. On TV, he has been a judge on Masterchef, a panellist on BBC2’s Eating With The Enemy, has presented Dispatches for Channel 4 and was also the resident food pundit for The One Show. 

He told Ryan: “I thought, when I was a teenager, that I wanted to be an actor, and then I realised that a talent for remembering your lines and showing off was not the same as acting, although, when I said that recently to a couple of friends who were actually actors, they said it'd be great if a few more people in the business realised that early!”

Jay is the son of actor Desmond Rayner and beloved advice columnist Claire Rayner. “I'm deep, deep glazed in privilege,” he told Ryan. “People say, ‘Oh, you know, you're only doing what you're doing because of what your mum did.’ In a way they're right.”

He continued: “When I was growing up in my house, my dad had been an actor, he was a painter. He was my mother's agent. My mum was a novelist, a broadcaster, a newspaper columnist and all these things. So the real privilege of my life, apart from a bit of money growing up and all that stuff, was that I saw that jobs, which for other people looked unobtainable, were just what people did. So when I saw them as things to do, I thought, ‘Well, I'll just do that.’

“It took me, I have to tell you, 20 years, to come up with a line to answer the thing, ‘You're just a product of nepotism,’ the Nepo baby, which was ‘Why having a mother who was an expert on premature ejaculation should get me a job on MasterChef, I don't know.’”

Jay Raynor: Nights Out at Home is out on 5th September

Listen to The Ryan Tubridy Show on Virgin Radio UK, weekdays from 10am-1pm.