Ahead of a brand new series of Off-Duty Chef kicking off on RTÉ One on Wednesday, 26 April, at 8pm, I caught up with chef Mark Moriarty over Zoom to find out what he has in store for viewers.
"I never want to use ingredients that people aren't going to have in their fridge," Mark explains. "It always comes back to getting the supermarket statistics of the chicken breasts, the mince, the rashers, tinned tomatoes - so we always start with that for our recipes."
A firm favourite of home cooks nationwide, Off Duty Chef brings viewers into the chef's home kitchen to see how a pro would tackle a basic family dinner at home.
Aiming to save money and reduce waste, the show also plans to show viewers how to perfect their baking skills - even showing them exactly where they might have gone wrong in their pursuit of the perfect scone.
"I have a photo that I think really sums up my cooking shows: it's all the most simple baked goods we do in the series; it's a cookie, a cupcake, a wedge of Victoria sponge, a scone, and a raspberry tart - all of them lined up like they would be in a really high-end, Parisian kind of bakery on marble.
"For me, it sums up what I do, and what people seem to like, which is the chef's tips and the restaurant background to the most simple, recognisable dishes that people are making anyway."
As well as showing the Instagram-worthy results, Mark will show the baking fails that many of us face in the kitchen, with explainers as to what happened with each one.
"We've done a s**t version of every product," he laughs. "We've got four brownies that are all terrible and then one good one, same with cupcakes, same with sponge cake."
To make the process as professional as possible, Mark recruited the help of Laura 'Lalii' Gonzalez, a pastry chef working in the two-Michelin-starred kitchen of Chapter One. As it turns out, asking one of the country's finest pastry artists to make bad cake was tricky.
"It broke her heart," he insists. "I told her we needed everything but s**t versions of everything. She struggled, but it was fun."
Eventually, Lalii gave in to the project and produced brownies that were over-baked, under-baked, made with too much raising agent, over-whipped eggs, or under-melted fat.
"You can actually see exactly what went wrong and what it would look like, and I think that's sort of what sets our show apart: explaining the whys."
This season will deliver a new collection of recipes (you'll find them on RTE.ie/Food after the show) that focus on key cooking techniques and skills using easy-to-get ingredients to make the most out of your weekly food shop.
"Prices have gone up so we don't want to be wasting anything," he explains. "In a professional kitchen, anything that goes in the bin is money in the bin, and it's the same at home. The amount of times I look at my fridge and there's half packets of green herbs and half a cabbage, so a lot of my recipes would show you how to blend that all up and create something different with it."
"I think a lot of the recipes are based off great staff meals throughout the year where any leftover bits - you'd have to throw something together that was quick, delicious, and could feed 20 people but only taking up half an hour of your time. And they're all chefs so they'll tell you if it's s**t."
This image of a group of chefs eating perfectly prepared leftovers reminded me of the 'family meal' scenes portrayed in The Bear - a fictional TV series following an award-winning chef who is called home to run his family's sandwich shop in Chicago.
According to Mark, the fast-paced, anxiety-filled show is an eerily accurate portrayal of many professional kitchens.
"I was watching it and just thinking, 'this is just a day in work'," he laughs. "It's very real and that actually gives people a great insight into how hard it is in the restaurant industry at the moment with the price of everything.
"What you see on that show is just the relentless issues. If only being a chef was just about cooking food; it's dealing with people, dealing with suppliers, dealing with customers - every facet of life coming at you every day.
"The Menu was hilarious," he adds, referencing the 2022 horror comedy that sees a select group of (largely pretentious) people invited to an immersive tasting menu hosted by a celebrity chef and his trainees.
"It was so apt. It wasn't the kitchen side of it, it was the customers that jumped out to me because I have seen all those types of people."
Ultimately, Moriarty believes that there will always be a fascination with food and what goes on behind the scenes in kitchens because food "never goes out of fashion".
"I have yet to meet someone who doesn't get some sort of emotion from having a nice plate of food in the evening."
Off Duty Chef, sponsored by M&S, will air Wednesdays at 8pm on RTÉ One.
