1Start with a humble celeriac, which is quite an underused ingredient.
2Start by prepping it with a knife.
3Go around as if you were going to segment an orange or grapefruit.
4This puree was very similar to what we did at dinner by Heston, a slightly simplified version down but again the technique is very similar.
5Essence of this puree is about intensifying the flavor of the celeriac.
6Get a pan on sort of medium low heat.
7Go in with a good amount of butter and to make sure we can cook out as much water as possible, we are going to cut it really really small.
8Get celeriac into our pan and then turn up the heat a little bit, but we don't really want to add color at this stage. We're just looking to soften it down completely.
9Give it a really good mix, make sure all the butter is covered in the celeriac.
10Important that you add seasoning throughout the cooking process. If you add it just at the end, you get a basically salty flavor.
11Turn it down to pretty much my lowest setting.
12Gonna stir it every five minutes or so.
13Enhance the flavor by adding a spiced milk.
14Add to the pan some black peppercorn then going to go in with some coriander seeds. it's just going to be mostly for the flavor.
15You can always tell when your spices are roasted, you should be able to smell them first.
16In with my milk, going for about 20% cream to milk ratio.
17You can use 100% milk, you can use 100% cream, is all about depending on what sort of puree you want.
18Gonna warm it through, and that when when we add the thyme and the spices back in, it's going to infuse into the milk.
19Milk is now warming through is gonna add my spices in and then we'll set this milk aside now.
20That will infuse for about 45 minutes to an hour basically the time it takes for my puree to cook.
21Celeriac is breaking down nicely now.
22Cook celeriac further and further and further, it only gets better.
23That's been infusing for the same amount of time that celeriac has been cooking, I'm just going to pass it through a strainer.
24A little bit of our milk to our celeriac, not never add all of your liquid, even if a recipe states it. Always save back at least 50% I would say.
25Continue to cook it for about another 5 to 10 minutes.
26Our puree is now ready to blend.
27Give or take altogether, you're looking at about an hour for this celeriac puree.
28Always recommend splitting your blending into two parts, so always blend it.
29Once you blend it halfway through, you then want to just adjust your seasoning.
30Serving our puree with some beautiful scallops.
31Add a little bit of bacon to go with our scallops.
32This stage isn't essential to be honest, if I was at home I probably wouldn't bother either.
33Gonna choose a drag, because it's quite nice to hold a little bit of that beautiful cooking juice.
34Not reinventing the wheel here, just doing scallops with a little bit of bacon.