Joe Swash and Suzanne Mulholland on Channel 4’s Batch From Scratch and the benefits of batch cooking

For the 43-year-old, best known for his role as Mickey Miller in the BBC One soap opera EastEnders and winning the eighth series of I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! in 2008, it’s the best way for families to tackle difficult meal times.

“The key word is consistency. I think you’ve got to continue with something because, like anything, you will go through the stage where it doesn’t make sense. It’s not getting easier, but you’ve got to fight through that, in the long term, it’s the way forward, especially with a big family,” says Swash.

It’s something the actor is familiar with himself. Married to TV personality Stacey Solomon, 35, who rose to fame on ITV’s The X Factor in 2009, the couple share three children – Rex, 5, Rose, 3, and Belle, 2. Completing the brood are Solomon’s sons Zachary, 16, and Leighton, 12, and Swash’s son Harry, 16, from previous relationships.

“It can be really overwhelming, dinner times, all the kids running around. So, consistency with with batch cooking is the key to this because long-term, this is definitely the future. I’m the perfect example of why batch cooking works. I’ve got kids of all different ages. They’ve got all different timetables at school. Both parents work full-time.

“Batch cooking has almost brought the love back to dinner times. I don’t dread it as much as I used to, because I know I’ve got a fridge full of stuff that the kids have cooked, the kids have picked. I am a good example of why you should all be batch cooking.”

It’s why Swash and family cooking expert Suzanne Mulholland – also known as The Batch Lady, and author of the book series with the same name – have come together for Batch From Scratch: Cooking For Less, coming to Channel 4 in partnership with Lidl.

In the new six-part series, the pair will meet a broad range of families who need advice on how to make their food budgets go further, their menus more organised and meals more nutritional. The plan is simple: to cut their meal prep time down to as little as just one hour a week by concurrently batch cooking, freezing, and storing multiple meals.

Mulholland and Swash will also create a customised menu to reflect each family’s favourite foods and match their time-saving goals.

“It was so lovely. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I was quite nervous about going into people’s houses. And Joe and I both had the same ethos; we were not there to be judgmental at all. It didn’t matter the reasonings of how you’d got to the stage that you were at. We were just there to help them detangle and fix it. I loved being a part of their lives. I felt like we jumped in and sort of lived with them for a few days and then jumped back out again,” says Mulholland.

“The show is transforming people, in terms of seeing them change their [eating habits] and try and keep things. But in reality, we also talk about the fact that viewers out there can just change a little bit. So maybe choose two nights a week that they want to get organised, maybe their busiest nights that they know that they’re coming in from work and they’re taking the kids out to whatever activities.

“Just start small. Once they’ve done one or two nights, then it’s easier to add a third night or a fourth night, and I think we talk about that in the show as well. When we look at the 28-day plans, they don’t have to change at all instantly, they can just choose bits from it until it’s working for them.”

After Mulholland showed a few of her friends how she stayed organised and made all my meals in advance, they loved it and suggested that she put it on the internet – and that’s how The Batch Lady was born.

But when looking at the specific pros and cons of batch cooking, Swash says he hasn’t come across any difficulties.

“I haven’t seen any cons in batch cooking. I’ve only seen positive things. The amount of money the families are saving, the amount of time people are saving, the amount of nutrition people are eating, especially now that more people are thinking about what they’re putting in their bodies. I’ve not seen any negatives but positives with batch cooking,” says Swash.

“The positives completely outweigh any sort of negatives. A lot of people would say, I don’t have the time to batch cook. But I think we’ve shown in the programme, when we put the cameras in, how much time people spend going to the shops. I mean, in one of the episodes, they went to the shops 50 times a month,” says Mulholland.

“Think about how the time driving to the shop, being in the shop, driving back home, and unpacking groceries adds up. You could have sat down, stayed at home, and worked out a meal plan for the next two weeks.

"So it’s just changing that perspective of ‘I don’t have time to batch cook’. Actually, you do, if we just change a few habits first.”

And there are also so many meals someone who wants to get involved and start batch cooking could try, due to most people eating “the same sort of meals on a rotation”, according to Mulholland.

“I mean, everybody does in the UK, around the world, most people do so for me and my family, it’s things like spaghetti bolognese, fajitas, like things that are just family favourites that are going to get used every single week. So we’re not trying to get people to make weird and wonderful recipes. It’s basic meals that we all eat on a weekly basis,” says Mulholland.

Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less comes to Channel 4 on Monday, February 17 at 8pm