Recipes

The subcontinent's famous overnight curry, with the bones as the main event

Nihari is the slow-cooked breakfast curry of Old Delhi and Lahore — traditionally left to blip away all night so the meat and marrow collapse into a deep, silky, spice-laden gravy you scoop up with warm naan. This version keeps the bones front and centre. They give up their marrow and gelatine into the sauce, which is thickened the proper way with a little toasted flour, and the whole pot is finished with ginger, chilli and fresh coriander in the last five minutes. It's a project, no pretending otherwise. But it's the kind of pot people remember.

The full British Sunday lunch — puddings puffed in the beef's own dripping

There's roast beef, and then there's roast beef with a tray of Yorkshire puddings rising like golden balloons in the dripping the beef just gave you. This is the project version of the 1.4kg roast in your share, and the schedule works itself out beautifully: the batter rests while the beef roasts, and the puddings bake while the beef rests. Nail the three Yorkshire rules — rested batter, smoking-hot fat, and a shut oven door — and you'll earn the kind of table silence usually reserved for grand finals.

Learn the two-zone truth and own this cut for good

Every T-bone question comes down to one fact: there are two different muscles on that bone, and they don't want the same amount of heat. The steakhouse answer is the butter baste — park the lean fillet at the cooler edge of the pan, spoon the foaming butter over the sirloin side, and let the bone do its quiet insulating work. It takes a thermometer, a heavy pan and a bit of nerve, but master it once and you'll never overcook a fillet side again. This is the skill that makes the grandest steak in the share routine.

Yemen's fiery green herb sauce against charred lamb — one blitzed condiment does all the heavy lifting

Zhoug is the Yemeni green chilli sauce that has quietly taken over grill houses everywhere, and once you've made it you'll understand why. Coriander, parsley, green chilli, garlic and warm spice blitzed into a rough, electric-green paste — sharp, hot and fragrant all at once. Spoon it over lamb chump chops charred on a screaming-hot grill pan, tear open warm flatbreads, and the value chop from the share tastes like the best thing off a Middle Eastern grill. Make the zhoug ahead and the rest is fifteen minutes of cooking. Big flavour, small effort.

The recipe that closes the loop on the bones add-on

Here's where all that homemade lamb broth in your freezer earns its keep. Ladle it, warm and rich, into a risotto and it does something a vegetable stock never could — the rice drinks up real body and a gentle lamb savouriness, and the spring pairing of sweet peas and fresh mint keeps the whole thing bright rather than heavy. This is proper risotto, which means twenty minutes at the stove with a wooden spoon and a bit of attention, no walking away. But it's the payoff dish for anyone who's made the broth: nothing wasted, everything delicious.

Florence's famous steak, at home in Australia

In Florence they cook bistecca over ferocious coals, stand it up on its bone to finish, and serve it properly rare with nothing but olive oil, lemon and salt. The dish is a T-bone — that's not an adaptation, that's the recipe. Ours is Australian-style: a 500g grass-fed steak rather than the kilo-plus slab from a giant Chianina steer, but the ritual is identical and so is the reward — a charred crust, a scarlet centre, and the best argument going for cooking a great steak as simply as possible.

The Japanese table hotpot that turns one steak into a feast for the whole table

In Japan, sukiyaki is built on paper-thin slices of well-marbled ribeye — which is exactly what a scotch fillet is, minus the slicing. The trick is your freezer: half an hour firms the steak just enough to shave it into ribbons with an ordinary sharp knife. Then it all happens in one shallow pot — a sweet-salty broth of soy, mirin and sugar, tofu and mushrooms and wombok simmering in their own corners, and the beef laid over the top at the last minute, where it cooks in seconds and melts in your mouth. Dinner becomes an event.

The real thing — charred, smoky, and nothing like the food court

Proper satay is street food with standards: thin ribbons of well-flavoured beef, a marinade that's sweet and earthy at once, ferocious heat, and a peanut sauce built from actual peanuts rather than a jar of something beige. It's a weekend cook, but an honest one — the marinade and sauce are both fifteen-minute jobs, and the grilling itself is over in minutes. Rump is exactly the steak the satay stalls would choose: full of flavour, firm enough to thread, quick to char. One 320g steak becomes a dozen skewers, and the sauce alone is worth learning by heart.

The bandit's dinner — sealed in paper with lemon and oregano, opened at the table

Kleftiko is named for the klephts, the old Greek mountain bandits who cooked stolen lamb in sealed pits so no smoke would give them away. The modern version keeps the secret-keeping trick: each shank is bundled up with potatoes, garlic, lemon and oregano in a tight parcel of paper and foil, then slow-roasted so nothing escapes. Everything steams and roasts in its own juices, and the parcel isn't opened until it hits the table — a little cloud of lemony, herby steam, and a shank that's collapsed off the bone into the potatoes below. It's a bit of theatre and almost no washing up. Hard to beat.