James Martin announces new tour dates as he talks about his new cookery book and plans to expand his restaurants

“I remember each season we used to ‘earth up’ or ‘hill up’, as he called it, and create 10–15-foot mounds of earth, which had to be perfectly drawn with a string line, and put in the potatoes every 40 inches using an old measuring stick cut to size. But it all paid dividends only a few months later when the crop decided to grow, as there is nothing that tastes as good as vegetables grown, dug and cooked the very same day.” Martin says he has inherited his love of gardening from his grandfather and grows vegetables at his home in Hampshire.

ITV’s Saturday Morning star, Martin shares his love of the humble spud in his latest cookery book simply entitled Potatoes.

It follows hot on the heels of his last book, Butter, which came out last year, and also focused on a single ingredient.

"I actually thought about doing potatoes before the butter one came out. It is such a versatile and simple vegetable and with what’s happening in the industry at the moment we need to use it more. I think what most people don’t know is that there are 5,000 varieties of potato and they all have their own qualities and uses.” To this end Martin has included a useful table giving top on what potato to use for what job as well as 100 recipes from around the world.

“Some varieties are so seasonal that they are available for just a few weeks of the year, like Jersey Royals, which can only be produced on a small island and are so special because of the combination of climate, soil and the type of potato. While others, such as the Marabel, which is one of my favourite baking potatoes, with a crispy skin on the outside and a creamy texture on the inside that almost tastes like butter, can be harvested and stored for up to a year.

"I also wanted to include recipes from around the world so as well as those from the UK there are some from India and Japan and other countries where potatoes are a staple ingredient. I’ve combined over 100 recipes and techniques. There’s everything from Tex-Mex BBQ filled potato skins to Japanese-inspired recipes where potatoes are baked in seaweed.”

He is also pretty obsessed with the making the perfect chip.

“You wouldn’t believe how technical the process can be to get the best fried chip, and I don’t mean all that triple-cooked palaver. I’m talking about the extent some of the best fish and chip shops go to, to produce the great

chip as we know it: it is a moving feast season by season, almost month by month, as they struggle to find the perfect potato with the right starch and sugar content to keep the standard the same. Everybody seems to think that they use the same potato all year round but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

"Potatoes have been a constant presence in my cooking life, from the first time I stepped foot in catering college (he attended Scarborough Technical College) making classic game chips – the accompaniment of choice for roast chicken and game birds – to working in three-star Michelin restaurants cooking Pommes Anna, used in every form of cookery and a staple in many a classic French cookbook from Larousse Gastronomique to Le Répertoire de La Cuisine."

More recently, he has been involved with something far less fine-dining but still with the potato as the star.

"I’ve teamed up with Albert Bartlett to run SpudULike, the famous brand from the 1970s and ‘80s, which used to have queues round the block for their simple, but tasty, baked and filled potatoes. It’s been great fun, not reinventing the brand but bringing it into the 21st century with a different twist, still keeping the classic taste at its core,” says Martin. “As a result I have leant more about potatoes in the last two years than in my entire career.”

Martin, who currently has restaurants in Manchester and runs courses at Chewton Glen cookery school, says he is looking to expand from two restaurants to ‘quite a lot.’

"I’m a great believer in pushing forward even when times are hard – I have always looked forward.” he wouldn’t be drawn on where the new restaurant might be although he didn’t rule out returning to Yorkshire. He ran the restaurant at the Talbot Hotel in his home town of Malton until 2015 and before that ran "The Leeds Kitchen", inside the Alea Casino in Leeds. Both closed in 2013.

So does he have plans to do any more single ingredient cookery books?

"I’d quite like to do an onion book,” he says.

Martin has never been one to sit still for long. Born in Malton, his passion for food began when his father took the role of catering manager at the Castle Howard estate.

When he was 16 he attended Scarborough Technical College and was named Student of the Year for three years running. “I pretty much owe my whole career to head lecturer Ken Allanson. He managed to keep me humble and hungry enough to learn while building my confidence and self-belief,” says Martin. “I went from bottom of the class to number one; from the one who’d never get anywhere to the one to watch.”

From there he moved to London and worked in a number of top end restaurants, including Marco Pierre White’s Harveys. He achieved his ambition to become a head chef eight years early when he joined Hotel Du Vin as head chef in Winchester just a few weeks short of his 22nd birthday.

His TV career began on Sky One in 1996 before he moved on to Ready Steady Cook and The Big Breakfast. Since then he has had a number of his own series promoting food and drink producers and first hosted Saturday Kitchen for the BBC before moving to ITV with his Saturday Morning show.

He has talked openly about his recent weight loss which he says isn’t down to any changes in his diet other than cutting out fizzy drinks “I tried drinking water instead of fizzy drinks and I lost two stones in four months.” He did scare fans recently when he posted on Instagram that he was having an MRI scan and needed an operation.

Despite this he plans to hit the road again with a brand-new tour for 2023. Following a sell-out 2022 tour James Martin Live will visit 20 towns and cities entertaining audiences with live demonstrations and cooking tasks, and the exciting and fast-moving shows will include two dates in his home county of Yorkshire at York Barbican on Tuesday October 31 and Sheffield City Hall on Saturday November 04. FOr tickets go to www.ticketmaster.co.uk

Potato by James Martin is published by Quadrille, £23. Photography by John Carey