italian flavours

what's first Ben?

first up we're going to take our onion, cut it into rings and make a classic batter with flour, egg

and some milk

but then we're gonna mix it up we're going to do three different flavours to make them italian in flavour

we've got a sun-dried tomato paste, classic pesto basil

and then our own black olive tapenade lovely

ok so three different colours and flavours and they're all going to have onion in the middle, so if we can take

our onion and what we want to do is cut it that way, so parallel to the root, into big chunks

with the skin on how big? Thickness of a finger? Finger thickness

and then we can peel it off afterwards do we leave the skin on? Yup skin on because we will peel it off afterwards when we make them into rings

and what you'll find

is these will

pop out

into our onion rings

so that's what we're looking for ah nice

nice and simple

very simple

if we can get as many rings out of that as possible and meanwhile I'll make the

batter. Flour, two eggs

and milk

flavour it later on. Ben I wasn't really paying attention when you told me how to make the rings

just be gentle with them cos you don't want them to break

just push them out, like that cool

and peel them apart, it's important they stay whole

I wasn't listening and therefore i fell behind with the instructions. It's not a race

team effort

this is making me cry, every time.

there we go, classic batter done, plenty of seasoning, salt and pepper

we can come back to that later on

in the meantime we can make up our three flavours

you can of course buy black olive paste

but I think

the fact that we've already got pitted black olives in the fridge we might as well use these

so all it is

is these are going to go into a blender, with a splash of water to help bind it

and blend that up into a paste done

you can add so many more things to a black olive tapenade, an anchovy, maybe some garlic

but actually because we've got other flavours and other onion rings I'm going to keep this one as simple as

just pureed black olives and that is literally the process?

easy as that

three separate bowls, i'm going to put a tablespoon of our tapenade in there a tablespoon of our pesto in there

and the red sun-dried tomato paste in there so

we've bought these two and made that you can of course make them all

we give you so many options

stir those together so we've got one batter

keep them equally combined, not necessarily smooth cos obviously the paste had bits in it

do you have to have a deep fat fryer to be able to do these, could you do them in a pan?

you can do these in a pan just make sure if you are going to use a pan

only half fill the pan with oil

never leave it unattended and you want to get it to about 180 degrees, so keep testing it

do be careful. Take our onion rings which are perfectly cut

are you being ironic?

coat them in our batter, so they are fully coated

and lower them into our fryer now our fryer is at 180 degrees

celsius

nice and hot why?

so it crisps up really early on, you don't want the batter to run and separate

you want it to stick to the onion

so it goes soggy otherwise? Yeah, we'll do a couple each to show you and you're just putting them in the once?

sometimes you take them out and put them back in you can can do, sometimes you can put them in just flour

before the batter, so that it definitely sticks

and if they're thick enough and the batter is good they should be fine

different sized onion rings is always good i'm going to do some pesto now

we don't want to overfill the fryer so maybe one of those and that will be fine for now

plenty of batter and plenty of onion to come back to it these need about

two or three minutes in the fryer and then once they're out drain it in kitchen roll

put them in the oven at 80 to 100 degrees to keep warm while you fry off the rest so you can serve a whole bowl of them

for people to pick in to

there you go our final few

plenty to get stuck in to we've been busy while you've been away

let's pile them up on our plate and make them look good, there are our red pesto ones

oh you can smell those pesto ones, i'm obsessing about the pesto ones

there we go our pesto onion rings, three colours, three flavours... SORTED very good

pesto different colour

they've got a nice crispy crunch to them

that's good i'm going to try a

(inaudible noise)

this is also nice the olive had the best crunch

Barry have a pesto onion ring

what's that one? Pesto

that's amazing that is amazing isn't it? what's this one? Olive

that's amazing as well

ahh that went right down my arm...

now if you guys make different coloured onion rings, we want to see photos of them so upload

them to instagram

hashtag sortedfood