Sardinian-inspired cooking - Telegraph This winter, I didn't manage to take a holiday with my family. Work has been too hectic and perhaps the winter wasn't, with the exception of an extreme week, "wintry" enough to send me shivering to warmer climes. But one of the joys of being a chef is the ability to conjure up a virtual holiday by cooking with the specific tastes of a foreign location. Here, I've opted for Sardinia, Italy's second biggest island: a land of mountains and beaches and wonderful food, home to shepherds and fishermen. Their pecorino cheese is one of the best; but for me, and for most food enthusiasts, the thing to get excited about is the bottarga. Bottarga is air-dried roe, generally from mullet, sometimes from tuna. But "air-dried roe" sounds too prosaic. Bottarga is wonderful stuff, with an almost endless range of uses; salty, slightly bitter, rich with the savoury "fifth taste" or "umami": the taste of olive oil, of caviar, of salted anchovies and sunny days. You don't have to restrict your dried-roe "holiday" to Sardinia: bottarga is found in other places, too. As well as in different regions of Italy, you'll find it in France, where it is called bouttargu e. In Lebanon they like to slice batrakh and serve it with thinly sliced raw garlic and olive oil. In Japan it's known as karasumi, served sliced and warmed gently over a charcoal grill with a glass of good warm sake. It's really a testament to its deliciousness that all these different cultures hold it in such high esteem. Historically, it seems likely that the Arabs brought it first to the south of Italy. Karasumi seems so different that perhaps the Japanese just worked it out independently, as they did so much else. Sardinians have a pasta all of their own for use in soup. It is called fregula, and in appearance it is like a large-grained couscous. Made from semolina like normal pasta, then toasted, it has a great flavour and a wonderful texture, and in this soup with clams it works particularly well. For my meat course I might cook a simple roast pork with myrtle, a classic Sardinian ingredient but one that can be hard to find if you don't grow it yourself. Rosemary works well as a substitute: just pound it with garlic and fennel seeds, and pack it on the inside of a loin of pork, then roast quite fiercely. I finish my Sardinian menu with fried pasta, which is not as weird as it might sound: you get sweet fried pasta all over Italy. It is often made as a celebration treat for carnival and every region has a different name for it, from cenci (rags) to my favourite, chiacchier e (gossips). These dishes are usually served unadorned, or with a glass of sweet wine, but I lay mine over blood oranges and ricotta, both quintessential Sardinian ingredients - though you would be unlikely to find them paired, as they are here with fried sweet pasta and bitter honey. Sardinia is a land of many fabulous honeys, the best of all being made from the flowers of the arbutus tree: this has a fantastic floral taste, with a smell of the woods and a slight bitterness of artichokes. It's hard to find, though, and incredibly expensive when you do. For practical purposes I use chestnut honey, which has something of the same taste.