Pumpkin is a personal favourite of mine, so I happily welcome the beginning of Autumn, which is when this king of the squashes comes on the scene. Once pumpkin is on the cards, we keep it on our menu till the season’s out.

The Carousel pumpkin dish began as a combination of 4 ingredients:

1) Pumpkin, simply roasted in butter and salt

2) Sea buckthorn – according to Greek legend, war horses injured in battle would be released to die a natural death, only to unexpectedly return from the sea buckthorn forests totally revitalised. The Greek name for the berry is ‘Hippophae’ which translates as “tree that makes horse shine’.

3) Butter, whisked into the warm sea buckthorn juice so that it thickens into a luxurious velvety butter sauce with the added sharpness of the berry, which works so well with the pumpkin.

4) Cobnuts, carefully cracked open and shaved wafer thin with a sharp knife, bringing a nutty earthiness and much needed crunch to the dish.

For the second version of the dish we continued to play with texture, pureeing the pumpkin with the sea buckthorn, and added a fifth ingredient: trout roe, whose pop of flavour complimented the crunch of the cobnuts perfectly.

The final version of the dish again uses 4 ingredients, and is adapted to be extra-comforting in the colder weather:

1) Pumpkin, roasted

• Sugar kelp, braised in chicken stock and butter until it takes on a lovely soft yet chewy texture, to then be shredded into noodles.
• Chicken, in the form of a reduced stock mixed with a few other ingredients and dispensed through a siphon gun, creating a creamy sauce that gives body to the dish
• Cobnuts, made into a nut butter and added to the chicken glaze to make the sauce