Rick Stein’s Cornish Briam
Using the best of the UK's late summer produce, Rick Stein's Cornish twist on a briam, a Greek dish of roasted vegetables, is given extra oomph with the addition of chilli and feta.
From the book
Rick Stein at Home: Recipes, Memories and Stories from a Food Lover’s Kitchen
Join Rick as he celebrates the joy of home cooking with over 100 new recipes
From sumptuous main courses to decadent desserts, there is food for any mood
Learn how to utilise local produce to create bold flavours and memorable meals
Introduction
The thought behind this recipe was to come up with a dish that uses all the vegetables currently grown by the farmers who supply our restaurants in late August – things like carrots, courgettes, broccoli and new potatoes. Ross Geach at Trerethern Farm, also known as Padstow Kitchen Garden, grows wonderful vegetables on his land overlooking the Camel estuary. The view alone makes you feel the vegetables will taste really special, which indeed they do. I cooked this for a sequence in my Rick Stein’s Cornwall series, having remembered a lovely slow-cooked vegetable dish called briam from the island of Corfu, and it works a treat. As our local vegetables don’t perhaps have the intense sweetness of Mediterranean produce, I added some chilli and feta to give it a bit more oomph.
Ingredients
| 150ml | olive oil, plus extra for greasing |
| 500g | waxy new potatoes, peeled and cut lengthways into 5mm slices |
| 400g | carrots, peeled or scrubbed and sliced lengthways |
| 2 | large courgettes (about 400g) sliced lengthways |
| 1 | large onion, peeled and sliced |
| 5 - 6 | garlic cloves, peeled and sliced |
| 300g | tenderstem broccoli |
| 4 | large tomatoes (or 6 medium), thickly sliced |
| 1 | red or green finger chilli, sliced |
| A handful of | flat leaf parsley, chopped |
| A few | thyme sprigs, leaves stripped from the woody stalks |
| 200ml | passata |
| 100g | feta cheese, crumbled |
| salt and black pepper |
Method
Preheat the oven to 190°C/Fan 170°C. Grease a roasting tin or a shallow, lidded casserole dish with oil. Spread the potato slices in a single layer and season well with salt and pepper. Layer the carrots on top, then the courgettes, then the onion and garlic, seasoning each layer with plenty of salt and pepper.
Scatter over the broccoli and cover it with tomato slices. Add the chilli, herbs and a final sprinkling of salt and pepper. Pour over the passata and the olive oil.
Cover the roasting tin tightly with foil or put a tight-fitting lid on the dish and place in the oven for about 1¼ hours. Sprinkle over the crumbled feta and return the tin to the oven, uncovered, for a further 15–20 minutes.
Allow it to cool slightly before serving as a side dish or as a main with crusty bread or rice.
