With a focus on no fuss yet big flavour, Fiona Smith has winning ideas for winter one-pot dinners and tray bakes.
There are a good few reasons that we all love a warming winter meal cooked using one pot or tray: fewer dishes to wash is probably the obvious one! I really like the way flavours meld in this style of cooking too; the meat and, where appropriate, the bones are a huge contributor to this. Meat has a lot of umami flavour – being naturally high in glutamates – so cooking it together with other ingredients will really boost a meal, in the same way that a gravy made using meat juices from a roast is bursting with umami flavours. I do think it’s important to brown meat to caramelise the proteins and render any fat, so I encourage you not to skip this step. If you do this in a separate frying pan, you can deglaze the pan with a little wine, stock or other liquid, scraping up all the sticky, delicious bits and adding this to the dish.
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