Help SA's top chefs save their eateries by cooking alongside them online

“The ingredient I can’t live without? Butter,” answered chef Karen Dudley of Cape Town restaurant, The Kitchen, without hesitation.

“Mind you, I think it might be lemon because it can rescue anything,” she said, while working a spice rub mixed with crushed garlic, lemon juice and olive oil into a deboned leg of lamb with all the finesse of a professional masseur.

Taking my cue from Dudley, I did the same. Using the neatly-packaged and pre-measured ingredients in my UCook meal kit, I too was making Dudley’s recipe for spicy lamb with a herby chermoula sauce and a sprinkling of toasted pine nuts accompanied by a side of bulgur wheat salad.

This interactive experience was part of the new UCook for Restaurants campaign, an initiative aimed at assisting the hospitality industry, which has been hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The idea is to promote local chefs and their eateries. Each chef provides a recipe and hosts a live cook along on YouTube. All the ingredients you'll need to prepare the dish alongside them are provided in kit form by UCook, and a portion of the proceeds from each kit sold goes to the featured restaurant.

For Dudley, the funds were going to her loyal staff.

A seasoned storyteller, Dudley paused only to sip a glass of bubbly as she guided her virtual kitchen companions through the recipe, step by step, sharing tips and tricks like butterflying the lamb so it could cook through without drying out.

The cooks who’d tuned in at home had the opportunity to ask questions during the hour-long session, which gave us the opportunity to learn more about the top chef on a personal level.

In between soaking the bulgur wheat and chopping parsley for the salad, we learnt that Dudley’s breakfast every day consists of “thin crispy toast topped with avo or hummus”, that she is a Bovril rather than a Marmite fan, and that she made fudge for the very first time this past week.  

Someone asked her about the time former US first lady Michelle Obama famously popped into The Kitchen with her mother, two daughters and a large entourage in tow.

“I knew she might be coming. They closed off the roads and there were sharpshooters around the building,” explained Dudley, as she combined the chopped parsley with garlic and lemon rind to form a gremolata, which was mixed into the now-softened bulgur wheat.

While preheating the pan to cook the lamb — it must be smoking hot, Dudley said — we discovered that Obama had enjoyed a selection of four vegetarian dishes, her mother had adored the restaurant’s sticky honey mustard sausages, and her children had loved the “love sandwiches” for which the Woodstock eatery is renowned.

The aromas of the lamb cooking were irresistible, the marinade forming those tasty brown bits — the best part — in the pan.

We finished off the bulgur wheat salad with baby spinach, garden peas and cocktail tomatoes. I added a ripe avo from my pantry to the mix to give the salad another element of texture — Dudley had talked about the value of including different textures in a dish.

After carving the golden-brown lamb into thin slices, Dudley proudly plated the meal on the very same plate Obama had eaten off. I followed suit: a spoonful of seasoned yoghurt was topped with lamb slices before being finished with a drizzle of chermoula sauce and a sprinkling of pine nuts (the few I had managed not to eat during the cook-along, that is).

The meal was particularly delicious and the whole experience was really fun. I felt like I’d gone out to a restaurant to enjoy a top-quality dinner at a chef’s table, and that I’d had the chef’s attention all to myself.

• The next UCook for Restaurants session will be hosted by celebrity chef Reuben Riffel of Reuben's Restaurant & Bar on July 14. He’ll be preparing his winter risotto. To order the meal kit so you can cook along, visit ucook.co.za