How To Cook An Artichoke

Hi there. I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today, I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Today, I'm going to show you a fantastic recipe.

It's how to roast artichoke hearts but at the very end, we're going to stuff them with onion, a bit of melted cheddar, some pine nuts, and top it with some rocket. It's going to be delicious, trust me. So, the first thing we need to do is take these out, the leaves off.

Now, this will take quite a long time. It's about 3 minutes and there's no way you're going to watch that, so you're going to see me do 1 or 2, and then come back when the whole thing is done. I like to use gloves because it's really messy and your fingers and nails get filthy.

So, I'll see you in about 2 or 3 minutes. Right, so I've now taken all of the chokes out, so now, we're just left with this beautiful heart and what you want to do is just make a nice clean base on the bottom so that it stands up because we're going to stuff it later on. But before we do that, we're going to do two things.

The first is I'm just going to rub a little bit of olive oil all over it, like that. Get some kitchen paper, and then just lightly season. Now, that can go in the oven.

Now, before we put it in the oven, I'm just going to add some onion to that. So, I'm just going to slice that in half, peel – actually, this is quite a good lesson on how to slice properly. Beautiful banana shallots I've got here, take the ends off, I'm just going to move on with that out of the way.

Slice along like that, and then what we'll do is that we're going to add the sliced onion. Right. All of that in there, a little bit of olive oil on those, and now, we're actually going to add our secret ingredient to make this a bit more interesting.

I've got some, just some regular balsamic vinegar. Now, that's going to stay in the oven for about 35 to 40 minutes, so when you come back, we'll stuff the rest of this and plate up. Right, now the artichokes have been in the oven or the onion and the artichoke have been in the oven for about 35 minutes.

I'm going to grab a knife and you can see it's pretty much cooked all the way through, just from the texture. So, what we're going to do is now – look, we've got those onions so I'm just going to add those on top like that and then you can use any cheese you like. I normally use goat's cheese but I didn't actually have any today, but I did find some cheddar so the cheddar goes on there like that and some pine nuts on top.

Just a little bit of olive oil, a little touch of black pepper, and that will go in for maybe just another 5 or 6 minutes so the cheese melts and the pine nuts toast. So, in, that goes and when you come back in about 5 or 6 minutes, we'll finish that dish off. Right, well, that's about 3 or 4 minutes.

Isn't that lovely? Right, we're going to take that off, put that on the plate, a little bit of olive oil on some rocket. Always try and give the dish height and a bit of salad is always a good way of doing that. We need to place rocket, a few more leaves on top, makes a bit more passionate, looks like it.

I'm going to just garnish the dish with a couple of things. You can get this balsamic glaze in the local supermarket and even markets these days, so a little bit of add-on there. If you can't find it anywhere, then just get some regular balsamic vinegar and boil it down till you get a nice syrupy consistency, a little bit of olive oil right there, and a pinch of black pepper, here you go.

And there you have a roasted artichoke heart with melted cheese, toasted pine nuts and rocket. .