How To Make Lemon Couscous

Hi there. I'm Matt Kemp from the Underground Cookery School. We do cooperate team building and I'm going to show you a number of couscous recipes today.

Hi. Today, I'm going to show how to make a lemon couscous. Now what I've done in advance is I've made a sweet stock.

Really all I've done is I've taken 400 millilitres of water and 5 tablespoons of caster sugar, and I've just combined them, mixed them and I've brought them out to the boil. You can see the heat come up and that's effectively a stock and whenever you make couscous, you need a hot liquid to add to it and whatever flavour is in that liquid is obviously going to enhance the dish. So if you're doing a savoury couscous, you could do it with either chicken, beef, lamb stock or you could use stock cubes.

I've done a previous broadcast, where we've done an orange juice but here it's just a sweet one, we're going to do a sweet dessert and this is just the water and the sugar combined. You could maybe put some vanilla pods in there to make it really exciting. But all I'm going to do now is to cover all those ingredients, which is the couscous, which you can get from any supermarket and just leave it there for 10 minutes and within that time, these will cook perfectly.

Now what you can also do, just to help it along, just add a pinch of salt, little bit olive oil and maybe just a little bit of butter, not too much, just the odd dice here and there and that's going to enhance the flavours and once I've put those in, normally what I would have done is actually put straight into the stock but I forgot. Well, if you could give it a good old mix, it's going to have the same effect that preferably. So come back in 10 minutes and we'll finish this dish off.

So now, the couscous has cooked off. It's amazing just the stock or water or whatever you want can cook if off, brings it back to that. I'm just going to add, I'm not using a mixing bowl because I've only got stainless steel ones and the couscous will inherit flavour in stainless steel which I don't want it to happen.

Anyway, I've just added some lemon, obviously it'll give it the lemon flavour and all I'm going to do now, lay this out over here. That's my base just going to make it a bit taller. Whenever you cook or plate up, just try to give the dish as much height as you possibly can, just makes it look a little bit more interesting.

And as finally thing, I'm just going to add a little lemon zest to finish the job off so you've got the perfect lemon zest. Perfect lemon couscous. Here we go, tidy the place up a bit.

A little bit of olive oil to make it look more pretty and there you have the perfect lemon couscous. .