Gurdeep Loyal says we don’t need to be chefs to create “incredible, chef-y, flavourful food at home” – we just need a few pantry powerhouses.
The chef and food writer, and BBC Saturday Kitchen’s resident food trends expert, says the key is to keep your cupboard stocked with a few ingredients that act as a shortcut to big flavour – “for absolutely minimal effort”.
He wants to “demystify the whole idea that flavour is difficult to achieve” in a home kitchen.
Saying: “I think the pantry is the most incredible resource that we have as home cooks. For me, [it’s] a shortcut to full-flavour food.”
His new cookbook, Flavour Heroes, gives a “snapshot” of what the modern home pantry looks like in 2025. There are 15 in total, from tamarind and gochujang to Pecorino Romano – “a wonderful example of the global palates that we have and the amazing things we have access to”, he explains.
Born in Leicester to Punjabi parents, Loyal’s recipe influence also comes from extensive travel, and a belief that just because an ingredient has its origins in a specific cuisine or part of the world, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in another – like the North African harissa in a lasagne or mango chutney with chicken schnitzel.
Using more of these store cupboard ingredients could save money too, he reckons. “These flavour powerhouses can revive whatever you happen to have in the fridge. I wanted to show people that if you invest in a capsule of pantry superheroes, you can create incredibly flavourful, tasty food with the most basic ingredients” – like butter beans, chickpeas or any veg.
“When you have a capsule pantry, you can mix the ingredients. You can combine things like harissa and mango chutney, or tamarind and maple syrup – you kind of then create these wonderful flavour combinations really quickly.”
Here are five key ingredients to inject a bit of flavour into your food – no matter how basic a home cook you are.
1. Harissa
“I think it’s extraordinary,” says Loyal. “It’s just an incredibly punchy, aromatic chilli paste. It’s full of things like cumin and caraway and coriander seed. What I love about it is that it’s one of those chilli pastes that you can use in so many different cuisines. Although it’s sort of Tunisian in origin, it lends itself to things like pastas.
“It has this incredible ability to pair with so many different flavours. The pairing of harissa and butternut squash is really delicious, because you have that smokiness of the harissa with the sweetness of the butternut but actually adding in something like chard, which is really earthy, and Manchego cheese, which is a really lovely, fresh, vibrant cheese, the harissa amplifies all of those effects.”
2. Dark roasted peanut butter
“Dark roasted peanut butter – which is peanut butter where the nuts are roasted to a really dark level and then sort of blitzed up – has this lovely, very nutty, very toasty, almost sort of slightly charred flavour that I just think works really wonderfully in lots of different dishes, sweet and savoury,” he says.
Such as in a peanut romesco sauce or a Mexican salsa. “I make an incredible decadent peanut butter pie with a cinnamon cereal crust.”
3. Yuzu Kosho
Not many people are familiar with yuzu kosho, Loyal says, but it’s a Japanese citrus chilli paste which you can buy in Asian supermarkets, Japanese food markets or online.
“It has this really intense sort of yuzu lemony flavour and a lovely chilli heat to it and it’s quite salty. I think it’s one of the most incredible ingredients. I feel like it’s one of those ingredients that lots of chefs are starting to put on their menus, in the same way that a few years ago, miso suddenly kind of crossed the threshold and suddenly is now in everyone’s kitchen. I’m predicting that in a few years, yuzu kosho is also going to become a pantry staple.”
“I turn it into a bake with tomatoes, I turn it into delicious rice paper dumplings with prawns. Just mixed with soy as a kind of dipping sauce, it’s really wonderful.”
4. Nduja
“Nduja is just a flavour powerhouse. It’s meaty, it’s diced, it’s cured. And it’s just got incredibly vibrant, Calabrian red chillies through it. It really sort of lends itself to all sorts of things, not just Italian cuisine,” says Loyal, who also uses it in Gruyère and cornbread muffins (“just completely delicious – it adds this lovely, meaty, fiery punch in the middle”).
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Think, ’nduja and Roquefort mac and cheese, or ’nduja crab cakes with roasted pineapple salsa.
5. Toasted sesame oil
“I think it’s such an underrated ingredient,”says Loyal. “A lot of time people buy it just to kind of have one or two teaspoons that they might add to a stir fry or to a marinade.” But its intense sesame flavour lends itself to desserts too, he says. “I use it in a salted sesame basque cheesecake, I use it in a very decadent chocolate sundae called a Dame Blanche with a very intense sesame chocolatey fudge sauce. I also add sesame oil to a sesame and coffee brittle.
“Toasted sesame oil is not just for your stir fries. It’s this incredibly versatile ingredient; I have a very classic Italian recipe, chicken Parmigiana – I do a sesame chicken Parmigiana – and the combination of sesame and the breaded chicken with lots of parmesan is absolutely delicious.”
‘Flavour Heroes: 15 Modern Pantry Ingredients to Amplify Your Cooking’ by Gurdeep Loyal (Quadrille, £27).
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