W2 KITCHEN

One-Pot Weeknight Casserole – Outsourcing Time, Not Flavour 🥘

In the first episode of Off-Camera Meals on Patreon, I’m sharing one of the dinners we cook most often on weeknights in our family – using supermarket oven-ready meals and tinned products to shorten cooking time, fridge vegetables and pantry seasonings to build flavours.

▶ Watch the full episode on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/posts/off-camera-meals-127433922

17 hours ago | [YT] | 8

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - ’Tis the Season 🌳

Asparagus season is officially here in England. Here’s a method to make your stalks equally tasty — if not tastier — than the tips! It’s a coin toss.

3 days ago | [YT] | 10

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - It Blew My Mind 🤯

When I decided to cover Beef Rendang, I thought that having just spent two weeks researching, eating, and filming Thai curries, it would be an easy transition. Oh boy! How wrong was I?

With Rendang (that’s right — it doesn’t even have to be beef!), the more I read, the more I realised how much I didn’t know. And thanks to the cultural dispute over its origin, there was A LOT of reading material.

One of the most helpful and fascinating reads for me was an article in the Journal of Ethnic Foods by food historian Fadly Rahman (I will attach the link below), which detailed the evolution of the dish wonderfully.

The depth of flavour the cooking method yielded was mind-blowing — an example of one plus one equals a hundred. Before that day, I didn’t know what coconut milk was capable of. After that day, I swear by it whenever the flavour profile allows.

My one big regret was the “Liam Neeson editing” — a term a kind-hearted viewer once used in a comment — which didn’t do the recipe justice. We bought an extra camera for one of our guest shoots and went through a period of switching camera angles non-stop just because we could. I promise you this will never happen again.

Tracing The Origins Of Rendang And Its Development: journalofethnicfoods.biomedcentral.com/articles/10…

1 week ago | [YT] | 36

W2 KITCHEN

Handmade Nori Noodles | Impromptu Monday on Patreon ✨

For our very first experiment on Patreon, I’m making noodles from scratch—mixing powdered sushi nori into the dough to see if we can add extra umami and a hint of the sea. As with any brand-new recipe, there were a few surprises along the way!

Paid members can watch the full video here: www.patreon.com/posts/handmade-nori-126497813

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 33

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - I Thought I Achieved Greatness 🐐

Plot twist — not really.

In 2017, after successfully cooking a large batch of duck leg confit, which turned out incredible but lasted for only a couple of weeks (because I ate them all), I decided to do a round of chicken leg confit.

Given that chicken legs are a bit more delicate than duck legs, I decided to cook them sous vide, so I’d have more control. For whatever reason, I decided to cook them in glass jars, so that I could just seal them once cooled down and leave them in the fridge for the future. This led to a very interesting discovery that I should have known before, given my high school physics education. About one third of the jar, after the 4-hour cooking, is actually in water form instead of oil — certainly from the moisture in the chicken.

This most likely was not a problem for duck confit, because most traditional recipes call for a bare simmer, which should be enough to evaporate most of the water content. It is, however, very fashionable for modern chefs to confit at much lower temperatures. I wonder if they actually know the end product is probably submerged in 30% liquid.

Preservation capabilities and hygiene aside, the liquid presents one major problem — it destroys the browning capability of whichever unlucky piece of chicken is stuck at the bottom. If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you already know surface moisture (not temperature) is the number one enemy of browning, which translates to the Maillard reaction. And without browning, you might as well boil the chicken and make a soup.

This also makes much more sense, in hindsight, because most sous vide enthusiasts would tell you that cooking sous vide then brushing the meat with oil would achieve the same exact result as confit.

How do we achieve a true confit (meat coated solely in oil) for meat that cannot (or at least should not) be boiled, then?

Enter (or re-enter) high school physics — “Place some water and oil into a container, like a plastic bowl. The oil will rise to the top.”

All we have to do is elevate the meat enough in a jar so that it never touches the water, then cook it sous vide. The resulting product would be an elevated confit-plus-sous-vide experience — an end-to-end perfectly cooked piece of meat that has no surface moisture (unlike in a sous vide bag) and is coated in fat, ready to be browned. And because liquid conducts heat so much better than air, this method has all the benefits of the reverse sear method, but takes less than half the time.

⸻

I have since discovered a fundamental flaw in my ‘invention’. Beef contains a wide range of volatile flavour compounds that are fat-soluble. During the slow cooking, the flavour molecules from the beef can dissolve into the fat, leaving the meat with less flavour. I used a very flavoursome beef (ex-dairy) for this experiment, so I unfortunately didn’t notice the difference. This method is better suited for something like duck breast.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 34

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - 13th Century Tajine Recipe 🇸🇾

When I was preparing for my video on whether tajines really retain more moisture, I came across a very old recipe from 13th-century Syria. It sounded really simple, and I thought I should at least try it once. The recipe is as follows:

“Boil the meat and fry with fresh coriander, onions and hot spices and a little garlic. Then pick out the fennel hearts and cut in half. Put over the meat. Put back some of the broth on it along with sheep’s tail. Boil until cooked and the broth has been absorbed. Remove [from the heat].”

Since the recipe is quite ambiguous, I took the liberty of using lamb shoulder as the meat of choice. I suppose back in the day in Syria, mutton would have been quite common, but I just couldn’t get any today. Nor did I manage to find sheep’s tail, though my butcher assured me oxtail would achieve a better result.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 12

W2 KITCHEN

Behind the Scenes of My First Ever Shoot – Free on Patreon! ✨

We just uploaded a behind-the-scenes video of my very first W2 Kitchen shoot—complete with bloopers and raw footage—over on Patreon, and it’s free for all members. If you’d like a closer look at how this channel started, check it out!

(In case you missed it, we’re still going strong with multiple recipe videos a week here on YouTube. Patreon is simply a bonus space for deeper dives and extra content. Hope you enjoy!)

www.patreon.com/posts/my-first-ever-at-125501815

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 25

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - We Found The Moon! 🌕

Our first ever recipe request on the channel asked for “Shokugeki no Soma Mapo Tofu with egg balls”. It was something I didn’t understand, but since it had “mapo tofu” in its name, I Googled it. It turned out to be a Japanese manga series mostly about students taking part in cooking competitions. There is also an anime adaptation. I tracked down the episode and proceeded to attempt to recreate the famous Countdown Mapo Curry Noodles.

The person who requested the video saw it and left the following comment:

“WOOOO THAT LOOKIN REAL SWIFTY, RESPECTFULLY 🗣🗣🥶BIG W”

Once again, I had to Google. 😂

1 month ago | [YT] | 12

W2 KITCHEN

Impromptu Monday Is Moving To Patreon! 🍳✨

As our channel focuses more on recipe videos and the thought process behind them, Impromptu Monday—our casual, behind-the-scenes food experimentation series—needs a new home. This change lets us create longer, slower-paced, and more interactive videos without worrying about the YouTube algorithm.

Starting in April, we’ll share at least one Impromptu Monday episode each month on Patreon, along with behind-the-scenes posts, community polls, and more. We’d love to have you join us there!

Don’t worry—YouTube isn’t going anywhere! We’ll still post multiple recipe videos every week.

Join us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/W2Kitchen

1 month ago | [YT] | 44

W2 KITCHEN

Throwback Thursday - Pork Belly and Beans 🫘🥓

While researching for our winter minestrone recipe, I couldn’t help but imagine how tasty those beans would be if braised in some rendered pork fat, then baked in the oven (kind of like a cassoulet). So the next day, instead of buying all the in-season root vegetables for minestrone, I bought pork belly and made this video. 😂

1 month ago | [YT] | 18