Denis Thompson

Denis Thompson started cooking as a teenager, standing at his mother's shoulder and being handed jobs he wasn't entirely qualified for. Forty years on, he still hasn't left the kitchen.

Based in Cheshire, he spent his adult life chasing flavour across three traditions: the slow, layered spicing of Indian food, the speed and precision of Chinese cooking, and the stubborn simplicity of the Mediterranean. What connects them, he'd argue, is the lesson his mother taught him first. Good food isn't about complicated technique. It's about knowing why an ingredient goes into the pan at the moment it does.

That obsession eventually found a target. Writing as The Chilli Den, Denis produces recipe guides that take apart British Indian Restaurant cooking and rebuild it for the home kitchen: the base gravy, the pre-cooked meat, the ferocious heat of a takeaway pan. The aim is simple. The curry you cook on a Friday night should taste like the one you would have ordered.

His current preoccupation is hot sauce, which has proved every bit as consuming as the curries. There is now a book about that too.