Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
‘I feel like the past twenty years of my life has been an apprenticeship. Now is when it all begins.’ This is quite a statement from someone who, for at least the past ten years, has been single-handedly responsible for changing the British dining landscape. He might be known for his eccentric TV escapades – creating giant boiled eggs or historically-inspired psychedelic banquets to celebrities – but it’s easy to forget just how much of an effect Heston Blumenthal has had on how we all eat.
He is, after all, the inventor of the triple-cooked chip, now a staple of gastropubs across the UK. He made cooking something everyone could enjoy, encouraging people to start scrutinising why certain things tasted nice instead of taking them at face value. And he’s captured the imagination of diners and chefs everywhere with his unique, outside-the-box approach to cooking. It’s fair to say that he’s a pretty big player in the world of food and science.
Interviewing Heston was the last step in my task of uncovering all the work, wacky ideas and incredible talent that goes into The Fat Duck Group – the umbrella company that brings together all five of his restaurants. I’d already talked to Jonny Lake, The Fat Duck’s head chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts, who handles the operations at Dinner, and the people behind The Hinds Head, The Crown at Bray and The Perfectionists’ Café at Heathrow T2.
They all talked about a sense of community and collaboration and how having access to the mythical Fat Duck database – a sort of Wikipedia of Heston’s recipes that’s talked about in hushed tones amongst the chef community – meant they had enviable access to some seriously cutting-edge culinary research. But I wanted to meet the man who started it all to find out what his next steps were.
Heston has been tinkering with the idea of multi-sensory dining since the 1990s, but he says it's not until very recently that he's started to achieve the results he's been looking for
The Fat Duck moved to Melbourne for six months in 2015 before reopening in Bray with an entirely new menuThe amount of thoughts that can go through my mind in five seconds can join the dots between thirty, forty or fifty things, which is brilliant, but when it doesn’t work it’s like a big bang without anything being formed together again.
Heston Blumenthal
We covered a lot of topics over the course of the interview, ranging from the early days of civilisation (‘the Bible is effectively a book about the domestication of animals’) to the future (‘more and more we’re living our lives like a computer algorithm’). He jumps from subject to subject at such a rapid rate, perhaps powered by his ADHD, which he was only diagnosed with last year.
‘When I found out I thought, ‘great’!’ he tells me. ‘I have so many ideas whizzing around my head, which is so busy all the time. The amount of thoughts that can go through my mind in five seconds can join the dots between thirty, forty or fifty things, which is brilliant, but when it doesn’t work it’s like a big bang without anything being formed together again. The general public tends to misinterpret it against this system of perfection, but I think it’s the kids with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism that make humans human. They have so many incredible abilities that others don’t.’
As I looked at my notes, wondering how to make sense of it all, it became clear that everything we talked about, no matter how disjointed it seemed at first, all boiled down to one thing: how food is one of the few experiences where all five of our senses are hard at work, and how we can, and perhaps need to, make the most of this when it comes to enjoying food.
This is why Heston is now putting all his attention into ‘multi-sensory’ dining. This isn’t anything new in the world of The Fat Duck; his most famous dish Sounds of the Sea comes accompanied with headphones, so diners can listen to crashing waves (sound) as they tuck into a dish of seafood, seaweed and edible sand (taste and smell), served on a glass plate with real sand and shells below (sight). But what’s really exciting is how he is trying to move beyond this, taking into account how subjective food can be. Personalising menus – something which goes dead against the rigid consistency usually strived for in professional kitchens – is a revolutionary idea that’s taken years of research for Heston and his team to understand. Finally, it’s beginning to see the light of day on The Fat Duck’s new menu, marking a new chapter in the restaurant’s profound history.
To truly understand this idea of multi-sensory dining, however, we need to go back to when Heston first started to realise all sorts of things could affect how food tasted. At sixteen years old he was obsessed with the great French chefs, translating them word by word with nothing more than a pen, some paper and a French to English dictionary. ‘I saw that each of these cookbooks had a recipe for vanilla ice cream, but they all varied – some would use whole eggs, some just the yolk; some used cream, others used milk, a few mascarpone; then there was glucose or sugar – the list went on,’ he explains.
‘Were these just the recipes the chefs had learnt during their studies, or was there a reason for the different ingredients and ratios? I started trying to develop my own recipe for the perfect vanilla ice cream and came across a Victorian recipe for asparagus ice cream, and then later a Sicilian one for Parmesan ice cream. Why did these sound weird? I thought it must be because we think of ice cream as something sweet.’
Heston didn’t realise how important this little detail was until 1997, a few years after he opened The Fat Duck. ‘I made a crab ice cream to go with a crab risotto,’ he says. ‘Some people absolutely loved it and others thought I was the devil. But I discovered if I called it a frozen crab bisque, people were much more likely to enjoy it.’ This eventually led Heston to write his first research paper with Martin Yeomans at the University of Sussex, where they discovered that people found a frozen smoked salmon mousse tasted up to twenty percent saltier if it was called smoked salmon ice cream. ‘I thought, hang on a second, you can change how a dish tastes just by calling it something different? And that’s when my mind started to properly think about multi-sensory dining.’
This realisation, combined with what Heston read in Harold McGee’s seminal book On Food and Cooking, led to the simple motto he now uses to describe his approach to food – question everything. ‘I needed to look at everything differently,’ he says. ‘I started investigating how the senses can influence one another and realised that eating is a complete multi-sensory experience that’s all about awareness of what’s going on around you. Just the font used on a wine label can change the taste of what’s inside. It wasn’t until around two years ago that scientists really started to look at food and eating as a multi-sensory thing, and it’s had a huge impact on that world already.’
I hope you liked this post and as always have a chilled day from the Viking.
THE FAT DUCK
‘I feel like the past twenty years of my life has been an apprenticeship. Now is when it all begins.’ This is quite a statement from someone who, for at least the past ten years, has been single-handedly responsible for changing the British dining landscape. He might be known for his eccentric TV escapades – creating giant boiled eggs or historically-inspired psychedelic banquets to celebrities – but it’s easy to forget just how much of an effect Heston Blumenthal has had on how we all eat.
He is, after all, the inventor of the triple-cooked chip, now a staple of gastropubs across the UK. He made cooking something everyone could enjoy, encouraging people to start scrutinising why certain things tasted nice instead of taking them at face value. And he’s captured the imagination of diners and chefs everywhere with his unique, outside-the-box approach to cooking. It’s fair to say that he’s a pretty big player in the world of food and science.
Interviewing Heston was the last step in my task of uncovering all the work, wacky ideas and incredible talent that goes into The Fat Duck Group – the umbrella company that brings together all five of his restaurants. I’d already talked to Jonny Lake, The Fat Duck’s head chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts, who handles the operations at Dinner, and the people behind The Hinds Head, The Crown at Bray and The Perfectionists’ Café at Heathrow T2.
They all talked about a sense of community and collaboration and how having access to the mythical Fat Duck database – a sort of Wikipedia of Heston’s recipes that’s talked about in hushed tones amongst the chef community – meant they had enviable access to some seriously cutting-edge culinary research. But I wanted to meet the man who started it all to find out what his next steps were.
Heston has been tinkering with the idea of multi-sensory dining since the 1990s, but he says it's not until very recently that he's started to achieve the results he's been looking for
The Fat Duck moved to Melbourne for six months in 2015 before reopening in Bray with an entirely new menuThe amount of thoughts that can go through my mind in five seconds can join the dots between thirty, forty or fifty things, which is brilliant, but when it doesn’t work it’s like a big bang without anything being formed together again.
Heston Blumenthal
We covered a lot of topics over the course of the interview, ranging from the early days of civilisation (‘the Bible is effectively a book about the domestication of animals’) to the future (‘more and more we’re living our lives like a computer algorithm’). He jumps from subject to subject at such a rapid rate, perhaps powered by his ADHD, which he was only diagnosed with last year.
‘When I found out I thought, ‘great’!’ he tells me. ‘I have so many ideas whizzing around my head, which is so busy all the time. The amount of thoughts that can go through my mind in five seconds can join the dots between thirty, forty or fifty things, which is brilliant, but when it doesn’t work it’s like a big bang without anything being formed together again. The general public tends to misinterpret it against this system of perfection, but I think it’s the kids with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism that make humans human. They have so many incredible abilities that others don’t.’
As I looked at my notes, wondering how to make sense of it all, it became clear that everything we talked about, no matter how disjointed it seemed at first, all boiled down to one thing: how food is one of the few experiences where all five of our senses are hard at work, and how we can, and perhaps need to, make the most of this when it comes to enjoying food.
This is why Heston is now putting all his attention into ‘multi-sensory’ dining. This isn’t anything new in the world of The Fat Duck; his most famous dish Sounds of the Sea comes accompanied with headphones, so diners can listen to crashing waves (sound) as they tuck into a dish of seafood, seaweed and edible sand (taste and smell), served on a glass plate with real sand and shells below (sight). But what’s really exciting is how he is trying to move beyond this, taking into account how subjective food can be. Personalising menus – something which goes dead against the rigid consistency usually strived for in professional kitchens – is a revolutionary idea that’s taken years of research for Heston and his team to understand. Finally, it’s beginning to see the light of day on The Fat Duck’s new menu, marking a new chapter in the restaurant’s profound history.
To truly understand this idea of multi-sensory dining, however, we need to go back to when Heston first started to realise all sorts of things could affect how food tasted. At sixteen years old he was obsessed with the great French chefs, translating them word by word with nothing more than a pen, some paper and a French to English dictionary. ‘I saw that each of these cookbooks had a recipe for vanilla ice cream, but they all varied – some would use whole eggs, some just the yolk; some used cream, others used milk, a few mascarpone; then there was glucose or sugar – the list went on,’ he explains.
‘Were these just the recipes the chefs had learnt during their studies, or was there a reason for the different ingredients and ratios? I started trying to develop my own recipe for the perfect vanilla ice cream and came across a Victorian recipe for asparagus ice cream, and then later a Sicilian one for Parmesan ice cream. Why did these sound weird? I thought it must be because we think of ice cream as something sweet.’
Heston didn’t realise how important this little detail was until 1997, a few years after he opened The Fat Duck. ‘I made a crab ice cream to go with a crab risotto,’ he says. ‘Some people absolutely loved it and others thought I was the devil. But I discovered if I called it a frozen crab bisque, people were much more likely to enjoy it.’ This eventually led Heston to write his first research paper with Martin Yeomans at the University of Sussex, where they discovered that people found a frozen smoked salmon mousse tasted up to twenty percent saltier if it was called smoked salmon ice cream. ‘I thought, hang on a second, you can change how a dish tastes just by calling it something different? And that’s when my mind started to properly think about multi-sensory dining.’
This realisation, combined with what Heston read in Harold McGee’s seminal book On Food and Cooking, led to the simple motto he now uses to describe his approach to food – question everything. ‘I needed to look at everything differently,’ he says. ‘I started investigating how the senses can influence one another and realised that eating is a complete multi-sensory experience that’s all about awareness of what’s going on around you. Just the font used on a wine label can change the taste of what’s inside. It wasn’t until around two years ago that scientists really started to look at food and eating as a multi-sensory thing, and it’s had a huge impact on that world already.’
I hope you liked this post and as always have a chilled day from the Viking.
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