This is the perfect summer starter. Mackerel is a delicate fish and it needs to be cooked with a lot of love. Here, the sourness of the buttermilk sauce really cuts through the fish and balances beautifully with the brightness of the cucumber relish. In the restaurant, we use a clever technique to create neat rolls of fish, but to simplify things here we’ve left the fish fillets flat and intact. We also finish the dish by pipetting on a little parsley oil, which you can make easily enough by blitzing the herbs with extra virgin olive oil.

You should be able to find ponzu – a Japanese citrus and soy sauce – in a large supermarket or specialist grocers, but if not you can approximate its flavour by adding lemon juice and rice wine vinegar (or even white wine vinegar) to some soy sauce.


As part of Big Green Egg’s 50th birthday celebrations, we’re sharing 50 brand-new recipes from an amazing cast of cooks. Next up is the man responsible for the fantastic food at one of London’s most famous hotels, The Dorchester.

Tom is the executive chef of The Grill, the hotel’s 93-year-old restaurant. While embracing this historic institution’s rich heritage, Tom has added a more modern, dynamic edge to its classical European menu – and this includes the regular use of two MiniMax Big Green Eggs in the kitchen. He loves them for the smell of the smoke, the crackle of the charcoal, and their impact on what he calls “honest cookery”: simple and unpretentious but packed with flavour.