HIX Townhouse and a Mark Hix Cookery Lesson

Chef Mark Hix at Lyme Regis

This week I was invited to spend a night at the HIX Townhouse in Lyme Regis so that we could have dinner at the well known chef’s HIX Oyster & Fish House.

And all very jolly it was too. The HIX Townhouse features eight luxury double rooms, personally designed by Mark alongside British artists and local producers, all individually themed around his passions.

Bathroom in the Temperley Suite, HIX Townhouse

The evening took me back to the day I spent with Mark Hix a couple of years ago, learning to prepare some of his favourite Dorset-based dishes…

Most of us cook at some time or another and quite a number of us really enjoy the challenges and achievements we can experience through cooking - but most amateur chefs tend to be left feeling as if they’ve been called up to play for Rustics United against Manchester City when and if they’ve ever had reason to rub shoulders with a pro…

Especially if the chef in question is a top player - famed for his restaurants, his cooking and his recipe books. 

Which is maybe part of the reason why so many professional chefs run cookery classes - perhaps it’s an attempt to humanise the whole mysterious process and restaurant style “chefery” a user-friendly experience that need not frighten the great unwashed. 

There’s nothing I love better than to go on such courses - I can honestly say that I have always, without fail, gone home having learned some very useful and inspiring tips. 

However, most are staged in professional kitchens, so there’s always a temptation to think: “Yea well, it’s all very well for Lord Apron to do culinary wonders with all that amazing equipment - but I’m going home to cook in an ordinary family kitchen where the most cheffy things to hand is a sharp knife.”

All of which is a perhaps overly lengthy introduction to Mark Hix. I imagine this particular Dorset chap is a foodie mentor to many thousands of folk given all the cookery books he’s penned, not to mention the recipe columns he has in a national newspaper or the many famous restaurants he either owns or has been involved with.

Lyme Regis Harbour in a storm

But I have been in his own domestic kitchen - a small but lovely, airy, room perched atop a chalet-style home high on a cliff above a Dorsetshire seaside town.

For this is where Mark holds court occasionally to cook lunch in front of a handful of paying guests who can chat, swig amazing Hix wine, ask lots of questions, gossip, swig, AND, most importantly of all, watch how five courses come together then taste, discuss, and taste again. 

The punters sit on bar stools on one said of the famous chef’s chopping and preparing surfaces - Mr Hix and assistant perform on the other. 

I say perform, but actually Mark Hix is probably the most laid-back chef ever to whisk an egg-white. He does an awful lot of shrugging, and chuckling and joke-telling - but he also gets very much down to the business in hand offering all manner of useful and indeed essential hints and advice when it comes to the various ingredients and dishes he’s preparing.

And all of this is done in a smallish kitchen just like the one you and I have at home. There were no special cheffy gadgets or vastly expensive devices - nor were there any  “here’s one I prepared earlier back at the restaurant kitchen” moments.

Every single thing we ate was prepped and cooked right in front of us, using equipment that you’d see in any self-respecting family kitchen.

“I’ve been doing this for five years now,” Mark told me. “I started doing it in the Fish House (his Lyme Regis restaurant a few miles from his Dorset home) but then I thought I rather do smaller more intimate ones here. There are lots of chefs and restaurateurs who do this sort of thing. 

“But I think restaurants can sometimes feel rather exclusive. If you turn at some well known places and it won’t be the actual chef cooking,” he said mentioning a few well known names. “I haven’t got anything against that - those people are my mates - but this is a way of me doing cooking for people in front of people. 

“You can pass over a lot of tricks of the trade - like the one you noticed today about being able to prep certain things before your dinner party. Stuff like that we do naturally in a restaurant - it’s just a matter of adapting it for use at home. After all, it’s the same ingredients we’re using - but it’s a matter of organisation really.”

So what was that little tip I’d picked up during  the thoroughly enjoyable morning I’d spent watching Mark at work? Well, it might be something many people do for all I know - certainly it’s something so blindingly obvious I cannot begin to imagine why I hadn’t thought of it before…

One of the courses we were to have was an absolutely stunning fillet of Lyme Bay pollack with Arne Bay (near Poole) cockles and sea beet. Now, I don’t know about you but I’m often a little daunted by serving fish if I’m having a dinner party. As Mark joked, there you are getting a bit sloshed pre-meal with your pals, then you have the first course while knocking back a bit more wine - and then it’s panic time…

Because the last thing you want to do is overcook your fish - but nor do you want to start preparing portions for eight or ten people while they are all through in the dining room while you are panicking alone in the kitchen. 

So what Mark did was to rapidly fry the fillets of pollack skin-side down for a minute or two, then turn them over for a quick flash fry on the flesh side - before sitting them all under a small knob of butter on an oven tray waiting for the final cook-through of three or four minutes. 

I’d never dreamed of attempting this stress-saving technique because I’d simply assumed the fish would either go all mushy and weary, or dry and weary - or both… It doesn’t. Whack it in the oven after your first course and while it’s cooking you can braise the sea-beet and other shoreline vegetables in the cockle-juice-and-wine-mix that you drained off when you cooked the shellfish for a couple of minutes earlier. 

In other words, you can start plating yup the ingredients just five minutes after you’ve gone back into the kitchen and left your guests - and not a single fillet of fish will be ruined by the tyranny of overcooking. 

I learned a lot, lot more from the affable Mr Hix during the three hours I was in his home kitchen - and these are the amazing things he cooked for us to eat…

Buttermilk-fried Lyme Bay cuttlefish with ramson mayonnaise

Serves 4 

400g cleaned cuttlefish 

100g buttermilk 

100g gluten free self-raising flour 

1 tsp ground paprika 

1 tsp of ground cumin

A pinch of onion salt 

Preheat about 8cm of oil to 180C in a large thick- bottomed saucepan or electric deep-fat fryer. Cut the cuttlefish into 3-4 cm pieces, including the tenticles. Place the buttermilk in a bowl, add a third of the paprika and cumin and mix together. Place the flour in a bowl, add the remaining cumin, paprika and onion salt and mix.

One by one, put the cuttlefish pieces in the flour, then into the buttermilk and finally into the flour again. Do not knock off excess flour or buttermilk as you need a slightly rough, bubbled almost popcorn-like finish when deep-fried. Place the pieces of cuttlefish a couple at a time in the fryer and cook for 2-3 minutes. Remove from the fryer with a slotted spoon and place on kitchen paper to drain. Serve with good quality or homemade mayonnaise.

For the mayonnaise

2 egg yolks (at room temperature) 2tsp white wine vinegar
1tsp English mustard
2tsp Dijon mustard

1 tsp salt
Pinch of freshly ground white pepper
100ml olive oil mixed with 200ml vegetable oil Juice of half a lemon (optional)
A handful of ramson leaves

Put the egg yolks, white wine vinegar, mustards and salt and pepper into a stainless steel or glass bowl and beat together with a whisk. Do not use an aluminium bowl, as it will make the mayonnaise go grey. Very slowly pour the oils into the bowl, whisking continuously. If the mayonnaise is starting to become too thick, add a few drops of water and continue whisking in the oil. When the oil is mixed thoroughly with the egg mixture, taste, re-season if necessary and add a little lemon juice. Blend the ramson leaves and fold in to the mayonnaise.

Lamb’s sweetbreads with Sillfield Farm bacon and scarlet elf cups

Tender and delicious, delicately flavoured sweetbreads are a perfect spring treat, and although they are not so easy to get your hands on, a good butcher should have them. If imagining which part of the animal they come from puts you off, think again. They're actually thyroid glands and not from somewhere lower down. They aren't difficult to cook, either. As wild garlic is growing everywhere at this time of year and can be picked for free, it makes a great springtime match for sweetbreads. You can use this dish as a starter or a main course; just double the quantity for a main course.

650g plump lambs' sweetbreads
Vegetable oil for frying
A good knob of butter
5 medium shallots, peeled and finely chopped

50ml white wine

350ml chicken stock (or a good stock cube dissolved in that amount of water)

60ml double cream
A handful of scarlet elf cups – or another seasonal woodland mushroom
Salt and pepper

Wash the sweetbreads under cold running water for 30 minutes, then put them into a pan and cover with cold water and a teaspoonful of salt. Bring to the boil and simmer for 2 minutes then drain in a colander and run under the cold tap for a minute to cool them down. Remove the outer skin and any fat and put them to one side. Heat a little vegetable oil in a frying pan, season the sweetbreads and cook on a medium heat for 2-3 minutes until they begin to colour then remove and transfer on to kitchen paper.

Add the butter to the pan and gently cook the shallots on a low heat for a couple of minutes without colouring. Add the white wine and chicken stock and boil until it has reduced by half. Add the double cream and simmer until it has reduced by half. Add the sweetbreads and scarlet elf cups, season and simmer for 2-3 minutes.

If you are serving this as a main course, mashed potato or Jersey Royals and a green vegetable like spinach would go well.

Fillet of Lyme Bay Pollack with Arne Bay cockles and sea beet

4 x 200g pollack portions from a large fish, boned and skinned 200-250g cockles, mussels or clams, washed
100g sea beet, prepared and washed
50ml white wine175g unsalted butter, diced Vegetable oil for cooking

Lightly season the pollack with salt and pepper. Heat a little oil in a large non-stick pan and fry the pollack fillets for about 3 minutes on each side, until they are nicely coloured (if the fillets are very thick you will need to finish them in a hot oven for another 5 to 10 minutes). Meanwhile, give the cockles a final rinse and put them into a large pan with the white wine. Cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook over a high heat until they begin to open, shaking the pan and giving them an occasional stir. Drain the cockles in a colander, reserving the liquid and pouring it back into the pan.

Add the sea beet and butter to the pan and keep stirring until the butter has melted. Return the cockles to the pan, season and stir well.

To serve, carefully remove the pollack from the pan with a fish slice and spoon the cockles, sea beets and butter over the top.

To find out more about the HIX Townhouse in Lyme Regis check out https://www.hixrestaurants.co.uk/restaurant/hix-townhouse/