Thank you, everyone, for your enthusiastic viewing, tweeting, chatting and sharing over the course of this series of Desert Island Dishes. We’ve covered Italian cutlery etiquette and the intricacies of an authentic tabouelleh, thrown in a whisper of vermouth and engaged in a bit of banter over chicken, enjoyed the perfect steak and been invited back to Pollyanna Woodward’s

Whilst part one has drawn to a close, to celebrate the release of our Desert Island Dishes cookbook, we’ll be letting you in on the dishes that some of the top chefs in the country couldn’t live without.

To mark Maldon Salt’s 130th birthday, this week sees the launch of our first cookery book, titled… Desert Island Dishes. You can find it here and at your local bookshop.

Desert Island Dishes is the result of a collaboration with the Academy of Culinary Arts, to whom part of the proceeds will be donated. Maldon Salt has always been the choice of the professionals in kitchens around the world and testament to this is the impressive array of top chefs that have contributed their favourite recipes using Maldon Salt. Part two of our series will see six of them preparing their choice of desert island dish.

With interviewees such as John Williams, Executive Chef at The Ritz and Head Chef at the Wolseley, Lawrence Keogh, we think that our second series can only serve to heighten your culinary curiosity and will hopefully make you think twice about your own choice of  Desert Island Dish.

Enough from us though, here’s our illustrious host Roy Ackerman, whom you can find more about here, with his introduction to Desert Island Dishes: The Chefs.

Desert Island Dishes is 192 pages of glossy hardback with 80 recipes, from simple suppers to dinner party crowd pleasers, contributed by 60 of the most inspiring chefs in the world. It is, of course, available from all good retailers.