The Farm Table: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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Julius Roberts is a first-generation farmer and restaurant-trained chef on a mission to live a self-sufficient life on a tiny farm in Dorset. Put the tray back in the oven at 160C Fan for 2 1/2 hours, by which time the pork should be supremely tender, the skin crisp and the apple and onion molten and tender. The Farm Table is delightfully dynamic; you can feel the seasons changing as you’re flipping through the pages! If his star continues on its current trajectory, no doubt he’ll be listed by many future talents as a dream guest at their own farm tables in the years to come. He wrote Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game, and Narcissus and Goldmund, which is my favourite book ever.

This week, Gilly is on Hove seafront with an old friend of the podcast, Joe Woodhouse to talk about More Daily Veg. And if you want more plants in your life, do listen in next week to Nik Sharma on his latest book Veg Table. There began a wonderful journey of learning, animal husbandry, and foraging and growing his own food on a small farm in Dorset.The recipes that garner the most attention online are also the simplest, he says, such as courgette fritters and broccoli pasta.

You can often catch him cooking in his greenhouse among the beehives sharing honest tales of farming life and his gentle, thoughtful dishes. Think stewed plums with whipped yoghurt in autumn, poached quince with ginger cake in winter, asparagus and ricotta tart in spring and courgette frittata in the summertime. For main, there’s a great dish in there of pork belly, where it’s chucked in the oven and it goes lovely and crispy. Pat dry with a tea towel, then with a craft knife, or a similarly sharp paring knife or razor, score the pork skin from edge to edge in line 1cm apart. His mission is to become self-sufficient, whilst cultivating the finest, freshest ingredients and use them within his cooking to make the very best foods.

Julius is a firm believer in the importance of seasonality and he showcases how to make the most of each season’s produce with simple, unfussy recipes that allow these hero ingredients to take centre stage.

A fierce guardian of nature, she planted over 2,000 trees and listed the farm under a stewardship scheme with the local wildlife trust. Would you say your past skills and experience as a restaurant trained chef has helped you in becoming a first-generation farmer?

Before the mud-splattered early morning feeds and overflowing greenhouses, Julius was living life rather out of sync. It has transformed his relationship with eating meat and Roberts says he now eats ‘significantly less. As things start to get warmer, Summer brings a colourful plate of courgette pasta and a deliciously sweet apricot sponge. Soaking up all the knowledge and skills, Julius left the chef industry to begin a adventure into self-sufficiency, where he started a smallholding in Dorset and is now fully fledged along with the many animals he keeps. His mind wandered to those formative experiences, “hands in the mud, hiding in the woods, foraging with Granny,” and, after a gruelling period, “all of that instinctual stuff just kicked in quite hard.

I met someone recently who told me that they say to their daughter every morning, ‘It’s my favourite time of year. In this month’s cookbook club series with Penguin Books, we grab wellington boots and head over to the farm as we get to know more about Julius Roberts and the release of his debut cookbook, The Farm Table. Here to show you that you can still indulge in bakes, puddings and sweet treats, this collection of lighter recipes is perfect for anyone with a sweet tooth.

I’ve got that in the book on a bed of whipped ricotta, which is where you whip ricotta until it goes super soft and velvety with lemon and then you have some bruschetta-like, little crisp toasts to dip and dunk in this lovely mixture. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.