Food for Thought – Thomasina Miers

In 2005, she was crowned champion of MasterChef after making a lip-smacking ravioli. In 2007, she brought Mexican street food to the masses with her restaurant chain Wahaca. Since then, she has been the author of six cookbooks and is an ambassador for everything from Chefs in Schools and Centrepoint to the Soil Association. In 2019, her tireless campaigning and services to the food industry meant she received yet another trophy for her mantlepiece – an OBE. Meeting the cook, writer and restaurateur Thomasina Miers was never going to be a dull affair. 

“I always hated playing with dolls in the playroom. I far preferred to nose around the kitchen and watch my mother cook,” Miers recalls. Her childhood was spent observing her mother making béchamel sauces and sweating onions: “It wasn’t long before I started making pocket-money cooking for my parent’s friends. I remember learning to make profiteroles for a glamorous Venezuelan friend of my parents. Every time he came, my kitchen skills became more and more elaborate.”

Miers attended St Paul’s Girls School – notoriously famous for producing a pipeline of doctors, bankers and lawyers – where she learnt a career in sweating onions and making chocolate profiteroles was not taken seriously. As a result, her career path was full of diversions. After studying Modern Languages at Edinburgh University, she did a stint in journalism, advertising, VAT consultancy and digital consultancy. “I spent a long time in London trying to find a career and failing. I was even a digital strategist at the height of the dot-com boom, and I found it all so boring. I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘what was wrong with me?’,” she confesses. 

Fortuitously, Miers met the celebrity cook Clarissa Dickson Wright in 2002, who told her to quit stalling and follow her passion. “I remember asking her how she ended up working in food,” she says,  “she told me to go to Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland. Luckily, someone dropped out, and I took their place.” Miers packed her bags and headed for County Cork. She loved the whole experience so much that she stayed on to work on a cheese farm in West Cork, making sourdough in her free time to sell at farmers’ markets. 

While she was honing her craft at Ballymaloe, Miers often reminisced on her gap year spent eating her way through Mexico. Back in the UK, she realised, there seemed to be a limited understanding of the sheer diversity and flavour of Mexican cuisine. “My first idea of Mexican food was that it was all Tex-Mex, but when I went out there, I couldn’t believe how amazing and fresh the food was,” she says.

Armed with this knowledge, Miers returned to Mexico to work and run a cocktail bar, making caipirinhas on weekdays and exploring the country’s cuisine on the weekend. “I went back to do a lot of travelling and discovered the vast regionality of Mexican food,” she says. “There are so many different regions and micro-climates, the biodiversity is amazing. In the UK, we have around 1500 flowering plant species, and Mexico has 3000. So, as you can imagine, the markets are totally intoxicating with a huge range of herbs, a wide variety of chillies and corn in all colours.”

After her travels, Miers was left empty-pocketed and had to take a slight detour on her path to fame.  “I had just co-released a cookbook Soup Kitchen, and after all that travelling, I was broke,” she explains. “I needed to pay my rent, and so I decided to do the 2005 MasterChef reboot out of a slight sense of desperation.” 

So, with a ladle in one hand and a whisk in the other, Miers took to the television studios. After initially feeling like a “rabbit in headlights”, she soon won appraisal from judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace for her “bold, and, at times, eccentric cooking style”. Miers tells me how her MasterChef experience revolved around lots of late nights and early starts, trialling and testing recipes. But, after making her crowd-pleasing dish of chicken and liver ravioli on the final episode, she was crowned MasterChef champion. “Winning MasterChef was the first time in a long time, I felt like I had done something right,” she says. “Beforehand, I had always been trying-and-failing at various careers but winning it was hugely gratifying. It felt like a sign of someone saying ‘kid, you’re on your way’.” 

Miers then worked briefly at Petersham Nurseries under the watchful eye of Skye Gyngell, and a year later, she met her business partner, Mark Selby. After lengthy research and a taste tour back in Mexico, the idea for Wahaca finally came to fruition and the flagship was opened in Covent Garden in 2007. At last, Miers had a platform for real Mexican cuisine, far from the cheap tequila, greasy nachos and supermarket salsa stereotype.

Miers explains how from day one, sustainability has been core to Wahaca’s ethos. They were the first UK restaurant to be certified as Carbon Neutral, they only use British free-range chicken and pork, grass-fed beef and sustainable fish, recycle everything from their food waste to their bottles and have a heavy emphasis on their vegetarian menu (to this day, 50 per cent of their street food and sales are vegetarian). Miers describes herself as a bit of an “eco-warrior”; her passion for food and its origins comes from care for soil, biodiversity and the planet. 

“As a campaigner, chef, food writer and restaurateur, it is endlessly optimistic to see how much power the consumer has in improving the environment with their wallets,” Miers says. “We should always be asking: where is this food coming from? Everything is linked to the earth and back to our health (as we have seen with Covid-19), and when you come into Wahaca, you not only eat delicious food, but can make a positive impact on the planet.”

Wahaca’s menu is designed to be “fresh, vibrant and seasonal”. According to Miers, their most popular dish is their “sweet potato and feta taquitos.” Other dishes at Wahaca include: hibiscus-glazed aubergine tacos, grilled halloumi ‘al pastor’ tacos and buttermilk chicken tortilla. For dessert, try their banoffee empanada and churros with a rich chocolate sauce or dulce de leche caramel. 

On the question of her last supper, Miers turns to her window and takes inspiration from the mustard leaf tree in her garden; “For my starter, I’d have a salad with some mustard leaves with grilled courgette in a dressing of jalapeno, lime juice and toasted pumpkin seeds. Afterwards, I’d like to highlight the importance of cattle, so I would have a grass-fed T-bone steak cooked on the barbeque in a marinade of smoky chillies, garlic and oregano. Alongside that, I would have some crispy new potatoes with olive oil and thyme. For pudding, a strawberry and balsamic ice cream with some delicious biscuits on the side, some cheese with quince jam and some chocolate truffles. To drink – as much as I love a whisky and margarita – I would have a bottle of red to go with the beef.”

The spoon never stops stirring, nor does the pen stop writing when it comes to Thomasina Miers. Our interview is squeezed between her latest endeavour – a new book on Mexican-Vegetarian food – and the reopening of all 13 Wahaca restaurants. Her electrically-charged stamina clearly comes from a desire to prove the critics – who called her “foolish and misguided” for wanting to have a Mexican restaurant in the UK – wrong. So, to the non-believers, how about booking a seat at Wahaca and seeing first-hand what success looks and more importantly, tastes like. 

Grilled Ancho Chicken Tacos

“The grilled chicken tacos we serve at Wahaca are a huge favourite, and luckily they’re also perfect for cooking up at home, especially with BBQ season upon us. The combination of sweet ancho chilli, subtle Mexican spicing and crispy grilled chicken is a delight.  At home, you can segment a whole chicken to have bones leftover to make a stock, or you can use chicken thighs. If you can’t get hold of whole ancho chillies, we’ve included a simpler dry rub using pimento, a wonderful Spanish smoked paprika.” – Thomasina Miers

Ingredients

1 chicken, segmented, or 8 chicken thighs

Ancho marinade (see below)

Corn or flour tortillas (2-4 per person, depending on size)

1 bunch spring onions

A small bunch coriander

2-3 limes, cut into wedges

Guacamole or a roast salsa, or ideally both

For the marinade

2 ancho chillies

1 tbsp black peppercorns

1 small cinnamon stick

1 tbsp cumin seeds

10-12 cloves

2 tsp sweet smoked paprika

2 large tbsp soft brown sugar

2 tsp salt

1 tsp dried oregano

2 large cloves garlic, or 3-4 smaller ones, crushed

4-5 tbsp vegetable or olive oil

Method

First, make the marinade: Open up the ancho chillies like a book and discard the stem and seeds. 

Toast for 30-40 seconds a side in a hot dry frying pan until smelling fragrant, then cover with boiling water and leave to rehydrate for 10-15 minutes. 

Meanwhile, get out all the spices.

Briefly toast the spices in the same dry frying-pan and then grind to a powder in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar. 

Work the salt, oregano and garlic into the spices to create a paste. 

Now, drain the ancho chillies and pound them in too (in the mortar, or a small food processor). 

Finally add the oil.

Rub over the chicken pieces and marinate for a few hours, or overnight. 

Heat the coals in the BBQ (or heat a char-grill). 

Grill the chicken pieces for 20-25 minutes, turning to grill all over.  

At the same time peel away the outer leaves from the spring onions and rub in oil, salt and pepper.  

Grill over the coals for 5-8 minutes until beautifully blackened.  

Arrange on a plate and squeeze over the juice of half a lime.  

Heat up the tortillas on the BBQ, cut the chicken into slithers and put out on a table with the lime wedges, coriander, guacamole and salsas.

Tommi’s note: Do NOT worry if you are missing a few of the spice mix, just make the quantity up with what you have – i.e. fennel and coriander seeds are delicious; allspice if you are lacking clove or cinnamon – whatever mix you use will be delicious!

Not able to get your hands on Ancho chillies? Try this simple dry rub alternative

Ingredients

1 tbsp ancho powder (optional)

2 tbsp hot smoked paprika

1 tbsp sweet smoked paprika

2 tsp cumin powder

½ tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1.5 tbsp soft brown sugar

1 tsp dried oregano,

Lots of freshly ground black pepper

Method

Mix together and set aside. Combine with 3 tbsp vegetable or olive oil when you are ready to cook.

Find more delicious Mexican recipes to cook at home at wahaca.co.uk/wahacaathome