Recipes

James Devonshire, our Head Tutor in the Daylesford Cookery School explains how to cook the perfect steak using a 35 day dry aged T-Bone from our new range of organic steaks. You can watch a video of him in action here.

Read more about what dry ageing is, how and how and why we dry age our meat and the benefits of dry aged steak in our blog, All You Need To Know About Dry Aged Steaks.

This iced tea recipe from Kirthanaa Naidu is so good we recommend having a jugful at hand to enjoy throughout the day. Kirthanaa has added our Daylesford Oxfordshire honey to make this iced tea not only delicious but free from refined sugars. It's simple to make, perfect for a hot day and easy to make in advance when hosting friends or family.

Ideal as a side or main dish, this versatile gratin is packed with flavour and can be prepared in advance. Simply omit the pancetta to make a vegetarian version.

We like to serve these baked plums with organic yoghurt and local honey for breakfast or a light dessert. They also make a delicious accompaniment to lean venison or seasonal game – spoon the juices through rich gravy for a little sweetness and colour.

Try alongside our recipe for Loin of Venison with Celeriac Purée.

Thoroughly warming and made with nature’s true superfoods, this is a dish packed with the benefits of lean venison and seasonal ingredients.

A juicy steak is the ultimate carnivorous treat when you are craving something meaty.

We have paired the perfectly cooked steak with a piquant, herb-rich sauce that combines elements of salsa verde and chimichurri. When wild garlic is in season, this is a beautiful addition.

The abundance of the festive period can lead to unnecessary waste, so mastering the art of making leftovers sing is a worthwhile skill.

With braised red onions, pickled chillies, rocket & yoghurt dressing.

This vibrant seasonal dish packs enough flavour to be served as a standalone dish, or would make a great accompaniment to roast chicken or lamb. The pickled chillies give a peppery heat to the dish, balanced by the yogurt dressing.

This recipe is inspired by a dish served in our cafés. Discover more seasonal recipes and cooking skills at our Cookery School.

This slaw is a wonderful way to make use of seasonal winter vegetables, turning them into a colourful raw salad that is packed with nutritional value. We love to serve this as an accompaniment to festive platters of cold meat and baked potatoes. It is also a fantastic recipe to have up your sleeve when entertaining guests over Christmas as you can prepare it completely in advance.

If you can’t find candy or golden beetroot, traditional ruby red will work beautifully and do add your own favourite raw vegetables such as carrots or cabbage to make the recipe your own.

A recipe from our tutors at the Cookery School to celebrate the seasons throughout the year.

The scone-like topping works just as well with stewed cinnamon pears in winter or ripe stone fruit in summer. In the autumn months, chopped apples and blackberries are lovely and you could even swap the almonds for seasonal cobnuts.

Discover Tait's top tips for wild cooking in our journal here.

Every Shrove Tuesday we think, why don’t we make pancakes more often? Loved by children and adults, this delicious recipe proves why.

The combination of fennel seeds, fresh rosemary and thyme in this recipe is the perfect complement to our pasture fed organic lamb.

The contrasting colours of the punchy green tapenade and the rich reds, oranges and yellows of our heritage tomatoes are stunning. 

World renowned makeup artist, Wendy Rowe believes that the key to good skin is to feed it with the right nutrients.

An extract from Donna Hay’s book Basics to Brilliance using the basic Asian-style poached chicken recipe here.

Recipe from Basics to Brilliance by Donna Hay.

Once you have made this recipe, try it in Donna’s Feel-Good Chicken Soup.

Perfect for hosting a deliciously warming seasonal supper or to bring a new twist to Sunday lunch - Chef Thomas Straker shares his roast chicken recipe using our truly free-range, organic whole chicken and fresh produce from our Market Garden. 

This side dish makes the most of fresh, seasonal flavours. It is particularly good with lamb and makes a good addition to summer barbecues

Recipe from Simply Good For You by Amelia Freer.

"This is an ‘instant’ soup. Simply blend the raw ingredients together in a decent blender, and it’s ready. No cooking required."

This true favourite in The Legbar at our Cotswolds farm. We love ice cold and served with salted MARCONA ALMONDS and NOCELLARA OLIVES. 

"There is little more refreshing in the summer months than the cool clinking of ice cubes in a jugful of homemade elderflower cordial."

Steaming broth brings instant comfort to the airways, while quality chicken broth is revered as an antiviral remedy to support the immune system around the world.

This simple nourishing broth is full of minerals. The natural sweetness of leek and carrot balances and rounds out the flavours.

Nothing is more satisfying than a warming, nourishing bowl of broth on a winter’s day and this one is a celebration of winter vegetables from our organic market garden.

Make a big batch and package into jars or paper bags tied up with string for a wonderfully simple homemade gift.

A recipe to celebrate the quintessential taste of spring: British asparagus. The perfect, fresh and seasonal supper from our Cookery School.

It’s the Valentine’s sugar-pink of the rhubarb, blushing under a blanket of melted Cheddar, that makes this feel like romantic food for me; though it’s the flavour – rhubarb’s intense earthy sourness counterbalanced by rich buttery pastry and melting cheese – that makes me long to eat it. As much as you might associate rhubarb with puddings and nursery fare, don’t be fooled: this is very much a savoury business and also very much a ‘grown-up’ dish. I’ll be honest: the portions here are more than generous for two, but to make half a tart seems mean, and this is one of those dishes that everyone always eats more of than seems sensible, so I prefer to err on the side of plenty. And while it really does taste its very best warm straight from the oven, the cheese melting in your mouth, I nonetheless always look forward to leftovers.

To go with it, you only need a salad: I can’t resist pairing this with a similarly pastel- hued salad of blush-pink radicchio rosa or dark red bitter chicory. Too much? Or just enough? One warning: this works best with long, thin, furiously pink rhubarb stems rather than the fatter ones, which take longer to cook and can taste a little too sharp.

A Table Full of Love by Skye McAlpine is published by Bloomsbury, £26.

Photography by Skye McAlpine

Skye is hosting a supper club upstairs at Daylesford in Pimlico on Thursday 29th June 2023. Spaces are limited and booking is essential; last few places remaining. Find out more.

This is a dish that can be enjoyed year-round. Quick to make, it creates minimal need for washing up and delivers on flavour.

There are recipes in this book that i love because they are interesting, there are those that I love for their simplicity, and there are those that I find myself making again and again. This is the latter, a great roast chicken, the heart of home cooking and one of life’s great pleasures. I relish the ritual, my family’s fight over the wings, the secret chef ’s treats of the oysters, the leftover sandwiches and bubbling stocks. There is no meal that makes me feel more at home. In my mind, there are three keys to a good roast chicken . . . juicy meat, brown salty skin and most importantly a ton of sauce. And it’s the sauce of this chicken that really sets it apart: handfuls of tarragon, lashings of cream and a proper dollop of mustard, which when combined with the cooking juices, garlic and wine creates a truly epic mouthful.

Extracted from The Farm Table by Julius Roberts (Ebury Press, £27). Photography by Elena Heatherwick.

This thick, moreish dressing is a staple with all manner of leafy salads throughout the year at Daylesford.

A quick, filling and thoroughly easy dish for a vegetarian summer supper or as part of a delicious lunch, celebrating our heritage tomatoes. We grow over 40 varieties of tomato in our organic Market Garden and every year we are in awe of their colours, texture and unrivalled sweetness. Most of the time we tend to enjoy them raw but every now and then a glut calls for a little variation and this quick cooking technique brings out their wonderful flavour.

This is an amalgamation of two classics: mayonnaise and salsa verde, the famous Italian green sauce, full of herbs with capers and anchovy.

This vibrant gazpacho showcases our favourite organic summer produce, straight from the Market Garden.

A real centrepiece, this barbecued fillet of beef recipe is perfect for entertaining and makes an elegant and light summery dish.

A light way to use up leftover turkey in the days after Christmas, a lovely combination of winter ingredients, it’s one of our favourites.

Perfect enjoyed after a dinner party or with a cup of afternoon tea or coffee. 

This recipe is one we have served at Daylesford for many years, full of flavour and a firm favourite on our winter menus.

With parmesan cheese & parsley oil.

Risotto is one of the most comforting foods, especially during colder months. It is worth sourcing the different mushrooms stipulated in this recipe so you get a variety of textures and flavours in every bite. The mushroom purée adds a velvety creaminess while the parsley oil lifts the dish and adds colour.

This recipe is inspired by a dish served in our cafés. Discover more seasonal recipes and cooking skills at our Cookery School.

This is a favourite of head chef Gaven Fuller: “A lovely, rustic, slow-cooked and warming stew that really showcases the lamb."

“Wild salmon comes into season at the start of the summer, so this dish is based around pairing it with other seasonal ingredients. The accompaniment is a twist on the classic French dish, ‘petit pois à la française’, something I’m quite partial to, in which peas and lettuce are braised in stock and butter. My husband likes the addition of the bacon, but you could happily leave it out to make it a meat-free dish.”

Carole Bamford

This bright smoothie with blackberry, mint and honey is full of flavour and equipped with soothing and nourishing benefits.

With a thick, lightly salted date caramel and a textured nutty base of almonds and ginger biscuits, this is the perfect festive treat.

There is no better way to celebrate the mushroom flavour than with generous doses of organic butter, garlic, salt, pepper and fresh herbs.

The classic Bakewell Tart filling is almond frangipane with raspberry jam, but we’ve used our new gooseberry & elderflower jam here for a seasonal variation. Feel free to play with this base recipe - hazelnuts with plum jam would be delicious in the autumn, for example. 

Discover more recipes like this and pick up essential skills in the kitchen at our Cookery School's Cakes & Bakes course.

Vibrant, bright and full of the flavours of spring, this quick risotto is made with nourishing ancient grains and plenty of greens.

We serve a version of this dish in the restaurants and on the food to go menus at Daylesford year-round. 

We’ve used our new peanut butter in this dressing but cashew butter is also excellent. Make extra and use the dressing to add punchy flavour to other dishes such as salads, grain bowls, noodles, fish and chicken.  

For the slaw, feel free to vary the ingredients depending on what’s in season, or what you have handy.  

Chorizo, fresh organic eggs and new season asparagus – a trio made even better when served with crispy chunks of sourdough too. 

Simple to make and delicious to eat, our Garlic & Thyme Mushrooms on Toast recipe is the perfect warming, speedy supper for autumn evenings.

Try baking a variety for added colours and textures and serve as we have done here on a big platter, drizzled with the flavourful butter.

Slow roasted pumpkin, smoky pancetta and pappardelle with pickled walnut and crispy sage.

Inspired by places and people they love, Jemima Jones and Lucy Carr-Ellison, founders of Tart London and Wild by Tart, cook food with big flavours and seasonal ingredients, sustainably sourced where possible.

“We absolutely love pasta – our Achilles’ heel! Pumpkin is so delicious at the moment, and Delica is our favourite – we wanted to make something vibrant, comforting and luxurious and came up with this recipe – we loved it so much we have put it on our restaurant menu!

This delicious recipe offers a lighter take on traditional lamb dishes and is full of the delicate flavours of summer.

This is a really indulgent recipe, perfect for Christmas Day and warming suppers on cold winter evenings. It’s also great for entertaining because you can prepare it in advance and simply popping in the oven to finish when your guests arrive.

Bold enough to be served as a standalone lunch or supper dish, this recipe is also a great accompaniment to roast chicken, pork or lamb.

A delicious, hydrating and nourishing non-alcoholic drink created by our resident nutritionist Rhaya Jordan. Originally a way to preserve ripe fruit, the traditional recipe simply muddles together equal parts of fruit, sugar and vinegar (choose a live vinegar for gut-friendly probiotics) to create a thick syrup that can be diluted with still or sparkling water. Shrubs are also a wonderful way of avoiding waste and using up scraps such as citrus peels and overripe fruit. 

An unleavened, gluten free loaf with aromatic toasty flavours, this bread is packed with energy and nutritional value.

You could say that this is as 'meaty' as it gets for your microbiome, due to the feast of fibre the cauliflower provides. The curd or cheese is a natural fermented source of bacteria that is beneficial for our gut health, and a punchy green dressing delights the eyes as well as the taste buds.

Taken from Happy Gut, Happy Mind by Eve Kalinik. Photo by Nassima Rothacker.

Read more about the gut-brain connection by Eve Kalinik here.

Discover Romy's top tips for making flatbreads at home in our journal here.

Photos by Matt Inwood. 

Discover Tait's top tips for wild cooking in our journal here.

Recipe from From the Veg Patch by Kathy Slack.

“When I worked at Daylesford Organic Farm, the bakery made chocolate brownies that were out of this world. They were dark, fudgy and flecked with nuggets of white chocolate. I would buy one at the end of my shift in the kitchen garden, unable to resist tucking in straight away despite my mud-engrained fingers. They have been my brownie benchmark ever since, and so when I came to this recipe (beetroot and chocolate, after all, being a classic combination I could not omit), I knew mine too must be broodingly dark and have those signature morsels of solid chocolate hidden within. The result is a grown-up brownie, almost savoury, thanks to the beetroot and tahini. Good for dessert with a dollop of sour crème fraîche as contrast.”

Recipe from Simply Good For You by Amelia Freer.