The Michelin Star Restaurant in a 300-Year-Old English Country House - On The Line - Bon Appétit

Ossip is a small farm-to-table restaurant in the English countryside. We are a mission star. People travel even countries to come eat dinner here. As a head chef, I've moved to the countryside just to work at this restaurant. We have our own farm in which we grow a lot of our own produce. You kind of really have to plan your menus according to how farmers grow their crops or how they raise their animals. It really lets nature tell you what you need to put on your menu. Hi, it's Kieran, head chef at Ossip Restaurant. We're going to start our day today by foraging some wild garlic. We're here in Brewton in the English countryside. We're about 10 minutes from the restaurant, so let's get to work. This is Guinness, by the way. Wild garlic. It's like a green leaf, long and flat. It grows everywhere in this part of the world. In London, we'd have to buy the wild garlic from local suppliers. Obviously, this is a lot cheaper and you get it a lot fresher. These ones you can make oil out of and they're really delicious. You make oils and soups. But if you're going to eat them raw, you want to use the fresh, new, young shoots. This wild garlic is going on the chicken pâtivier dish. We dress it in its own oil and it just goes nicely on the plate. And with these shoots, the best way to kind of get them out of the ground is just to use a pair of scissors. If you're pulling at them all the time, you can damage the plant. So that looks like it's enough for a couple of days. It's almost eight o'clock. Time to go back to the restaurant and do some real work. We are at work, which is Ossip Restaurant. This used to be a 300-year-old building. It was an inn before we took it over. We've done heaps and heaps of renovation to it. The whole kitchen got gutted out, ripped out, and put in brand new. The boys here are already working. So I'm going to get changed and then we're going to break down a whole venison. So let's go. So this is the prep kitchen where all the real work gets done. I'm going to go grab the venison and we'll get started. This came in last night, actually. So yeah, super fresh. There's a big old boy. We'll get this whole animal every week. For me, I think it's really important to take whole animals as much as you can. There's way more that you can do with them. You can be very creative with using kind of waist cuts. The less things we can kill, the better, in my opinion. So it's from the Thornberry Estate. It's a 30 kilo fallow, grade A headshot. So we have a guy called Matt. He shoots all our deer for us and brings them in whenever we need them. So we'll take one to two deers a week, depending on how busy we are. Making the most of it should last us. So I'm going to take the back end off first. I'm just going to get the knife at the lower base of the back. Cut through until I get to the bone. So you want to use the knife for soft tissue and then only using the saw just to cut through bone because you want to keep the cuts and the flesh nice and clean. Otherwise, it's going to turn into shredded tuna, essentially. So this is pretty much the back end of game season. We use venison pretty much from November through to late February. So this is for our main venison dish. It's a two-step dish. We use the heart on top of a little taco. You kind of eat that and then it's like a secondary course. The rest of the meat comes and we serve it very simply. We have each kind of component on the plate, which would be the belly, the sausage, the loin. But really, it's kind of focusing on the venison and not messing around with it too much. So it's obviously got its own very gamey taste. It's very lean, even though this one here I'd say is especially fatty, which is really good. This is why we get the best venisons in. It doesn't have the same marbling as beef, but it's very tender. It's got a kind of stronger flavor profile. This is a female, so it's a doe. The does, in my opinion, are a bit better. They're a bit more mild. You can get the stags in the wrong season when they're kind of full of adrenaline, fighting each other. You get this really strong flavor that I don't really like. So this is a tenderloin. If this was beef, this would be the fillet of the fillet. Obviously, it's a venison, so it's a lot smaller. The bottom side will have this kind of layer of silver skin. Silver skin is just a layer of sinew that's connected to the loin. The way I like to remove it is kind of treating it similar to a fish and treating it as skin. I'm just kind of pulling it over, letting the knife do all the work. And then you should get a pretty clean loin. The way kitchens work, or a lot of kitchens work, is that you start on, like, maybe a cold starter section or a larder section, and then you'll move around the kitchen. And usually the most experienced kind of chef de pâtés, we call them line cooks in America, start taking on the grill section, which will be all the animals, meat, fish. And that is generally the section where you learn the most about butchery, I think. So we're going to break the belly down. Any fish or meat butchery, you're essentially trying to get as close to the bone as possible. And yeah, the best way to do that is running a knife super close to the bone and getting it nice and tight. So the belly, we're going to brine them in a kind of pastrami-style brine. And then we're going to cook them overnight until they're really, really soft. And that's going to be served as a kind of skewer to go on the venison dish. Things like getting amazing deer and working really closely with farms makes my life a lot easier. However, from working in London, you can pretty much order things at one o'clock in the morning and they will turn up at eight o'clock in the morning the next day. You don't really get that here. So you have to be a lot more organized with what you order. They give us the animals or the vegetables when the vegetables are kind of perfect, rather than just being able to get it whenever we want, essentially. So the belly, we're going to stick both these parts together. So this is a powder. It's called transglutamase, also known as meat glue. With the venison belly, they're notoriously thin. So we want to kind of have a nice thick wedge. So what we do is we just dust it with this powder and it kind of acts like a protein or like an enzyme and it will stick meat together. So it allows us to get a really nice fat piece of venison belly. You want like a nice even coating. So just dusting it through a sieve makes that possible. You can see all the layers of the belly through sticking them together. You get the top layer, get some layers of fat and you get some layers of meat. It just looks better and it's a lot nicer to eat. So it's 10 o'clock at the moment. I'm going to pass this off to my grill chef because there are some lobsters I need attending to for our lobster course. So let's get to it. Sam, I need a big strong man. Grab some deer, put it in the fridge. So we have beautiful native lobsters here from off the coast in Cornwall. You can see they've got a really nice blue color to them, which is pretty unique. They came in last night. We work very closely with the fish supplier. For lobster, you want obviously alive. It's like one of the most important things. They have to come alive. We also look at the hardness of the shell. It's very important. If you have a lobster where like the shell is starting to get a little bit soft, there's a chance when you cook the lobster, the flesh can go kind of mushy. There's two kind of main techniques to getting lobster out of the shell. One is kind of blanching it in water very quickly and then freezing it also. We freeze these tails overnight, not for very long, just for like kind of four to six hours. Just making a little incision at the top of the shell. You should be able to peel it straight off. And then I like to use the back of a spoon so it's not very sharp. You don't want to kind of hurt the lobster in any way. So just peeling it back very gently and it should just kind of pop out. So the quicker you can freeze it from fresh and then the quicker you can get it out of the shell, the better the product's going to be. And this is going to make them really easy to release the meat from the shell. It means that we don't have to cook it first, which means all of the cooking for the lobster can be done over the charcoal, which is a lot better for a flavour. Obviously, if you just grill it in the shell, you're not going to get the exposure from the meat to the flames. We're going to put it directly onto the kombu. Kombu is a type of seaweed that's dried. It's very thick. It's got loads of natural kind of umami flavour and seasoning. And just by storing the lobster raw on the kombu, it helps dry out the lobster, gives it a bit of flavour, firms up the texture. We carve it into kind of four pieces and we serve it with an egg yolk sauce. As you can see behind me, we've got the most amazing view of kind of the fields and the countryside. Especially coming from London for myself, it's a real treat because after working a lot of kind of like dingy basement kitchens, getting to see this every day is pretty special. So a lot of people travel to the restaurant to work because of the accolades that we've kind of gained over the years. We've recently been named in the Condé Nast travellers hot list. We also have the Mission Star, which is really important for kind of getting staff to work here. We were a Good Food Guys Restaurant of the Year just a few weeks ago. So things are going quite well on that front. From all the claws and the heads and the shells, we make this beautiful lobster ragu. These are ready to go. I'm going to blanch these claws off and then we're going to light the grill ready to smoke some quinces. So I'm just separating the claws from their knuckles because they all take a little bit different time to blanch. So the big, thick, crushing claws will take five minutes just so you get each kind of piece perfectly cooked. So when that timer hits four, I'm going to add the smaller claws. When the timer hits two, I'm going to add the knuckles. This is the quickest way to blanch all three different parts of the claw without having to like make it take 20 minutes. So the ice just stops the cooking. Obviously, they've been like vigorously boiled for a certain amount of time. We get them to the point that we like them. Then we want to chill them down as quick as possible. We're just going to keep them fresh and also it's going to stop the cooking exactly where we want it. And now it's time to light the fire. So we're going to get these away. Here I've got some quinces. They've been roasted in sugar and vinegar and they're about to get smoked. I'm just starting to light the grill. We have a couple fire lighters in the bottom and then we've got these smaller pieces of kindling that set fire very quickly. So we're going to initially get the fire going with those. And then as the fire builds, we're going to transfer to charcoal. Charcoal is what we cook on. It keeps a hotter fire. It's a cleaner fire. But if we're smoking, we smoke over wood. Obviously, wood creates the smoke. Cooking over the live fire, it can be difficult. But once you know what you're doing, I think it opens a lot of doors. It essentially allows a larger range of heat and it allows you to cook things a lot more slowly. So most of our meat, we will like very gently hang or hold above the grill. And then when we want to like give it surface color and surface flavor, we'll kind of do it after the cooking. So it's kind of like a reverse way of cooking, but finishing it with loads of flavor. We've let the quinces kind of soak in the syrup overnight and they've absorbed everything. It's red wine vinegar, it's light brown sugar. Flavor it with some star anise and some cinnamon. All of the juice and the pectin, which is like the protein, comes out of the quince and turns it into this very kind of dense, jammy red syrup. That syrup, when it goes over the grill, will like cling and thicken over the quinces and you'll get this really nice kind of smoke on there because the smoke can attach itself to like viscous liquids a lot more. They become like a chewy texture. It's almost like cured meat. Then we're just going to hang these above. We could do it in a dehydrator and it would take half the time, but we want to do it naturally and we want to do it where we're imparting flavor onto it. So this is like a very slow process, but in the end, it's super worth it. We're going to let these go. It's about 3 p.m. and we really need to get started on the chicken petivier, so let's move on to that. So just grab some chard. We're going to use this to wrap the chicken for the petivier. Petivier is kind of like a pie and we stuff it with black truffles and then we wrap it in a sausage meat and then we kind of shape it into a nice breast with pastry and then we do beautiful kind of scoring all the way around. This truffle comes from Wiltshire, which is like the next county over. It does change every week, but it will be about £800 for one kilo. So yeah, not to be wasted. We put it on as a supplement. The reason why it's a supplement is simply because they take so long to make. The kind of the skill involved, I don't think we could realistically make enough to like serve everyone it and we wouldn't want to like cut corners. Something is like incredibly laborious, labor costs, probably the biggest overhead that restaurants have. If something takes a long time, you're going to pay for it. This is the fast meat that we've made out of the legs. So all the drumsticks and the thighs we've minced down and we've mixed it with like set powder, all the trim from the truffles and diced lardo and then we're going to wrap that on top and you can kind of just shape it into place. You want it to be as airtight as possible. If there's kind of large air pockets inside, when it goes in the oven, there's a chance it could all explode. The idea is that when you carve it open, you can see every layer that I'm kind of putting in here. So like on a weekend where we'd sell close to 12, this is pretty much all I do. In terms of a normal working day, we get in at eight o'clock. We stop maybe once for some dinner and maybe once in the morning for some breakfast but we can go till one, two in the morning sometimes. It's a tough old day. It's tough on the legs. So this is a sheet of puff pastry with all butter pastry. It's going to go very soft very quickly, especially in like a warm kitchen. So you want to move nice and quick and you want to work from the fridge at all times. You're treating it almost like a ravioli. You're trying to push out all the air from one side, bringing it to the other side so that you don't have any big air pockets. When you cook the chicken in the pastry, it really helps keep the chicken moist. So that's going to go straight back in the fridge and then we can kind of make it look pretty once the pastry is nice and hard again. These are going to chill in the fridge for a while. Later on, we're going to score them and glaze them in egg yolk. I'm going to check in on my team and have our pre-shift meeting. Part of my job is kind of checking in with the team, trying things, tasting new dishes and kind of making sure everyone's running smoothly. I might like this one better. Yeah, I think so. I think it's more like a comfy vibe with the earl grey. It makes it more floral. It becomes instantly more refreshing than what you get. That's good. So now it's 4.30 and we're having family meal. Some sort of tomato pasta. Just that much? A bit more. A bit more? No, I'm hungry. I'm hungry, boy. There you go. Okay, so it's five o'clock. It's time for our pre-service meeting. I'm all changed to my chef white, so let's do this. All right, welcome to Tuesday dinner. So we got 25 people in, starting at six. During the pre-service meeting, I tell the front of house exactly how many portions of the supplements that we have to sell. Just kind of updating them, really. We have seven lobsters, which will be 14 portions. We have six pies. Cut of venison today will be the loin. Sounds right. Let's have a good service. We shall. We're just cleaning down for service. Everything kind of speeds up at the moment. We're all rushing around, setting up for service. So yeah, it's going to get pretty intense. So the way kind of service runs is the dockets will come on here. We slide them. It's kind of like a leather docket rail. And then we've got the two sections, the grill and the garnish section. Everything will kind of come through a funnel, through me. And then we expedite it out the kitchen that way. So it's six o'clock. Thanks for following me. I hope you've got a good idea of what it's like to be a head chef at Osset Restaurant. So I'm going to be here until maybe 12, 1 o'clock in the morning. And you guys don't want to stick around for that. So probably time to go.