Back to the future
From snail porridge to chocolate wine, Heston Blumenthal’s cuisine never ceases to surprise. The Willy Wonka of the kitchen chews the fat with Feargus O’Sullivan I CAN’T THINK of a good reason why we don’t eat mice,” says Heston Blumenthal with genuine perplexity. The wildly inventive chef is famous for the unorthodox dishes served up at his [...]
From snail porridge to chocolate wine, Heston Blumenthal’s cuisine never ceases to surprise. The Willy Wonka of the kitchen chews the fat with Feargus O’Sullivan
I CAN’T THINK of a good reason why we don’t eat mice,” says Heston Blumenthal with genuine perplexity. The wildly inventive chef is famous
for the unorthodox dishes served up at his triple Michelin-starred restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and has introduced such delights as snail porridge and salmon with liquorice to an intrigued public. But with his new series, Feast, to be broadcast on Channel Four this March, he has pushed the envelope still further by cooking the sort of critters others might see as vermin and climb a chair to avoid. The series follows Blumenthal as he recreates banquets from both the Middle Ages and the Roman period, when stuffed dormice were considered a toothsome delicacy. While the dish sounds daunting, Blumenthal is so charmingly excitable when I discuss it with him that it’s hard not to be won over by his enthusiasm.
“Mice are actually really tender and taste just like quail when you fry them. Unfortunately people seemed to have a block about eating them in their natural state, so we made the meat into a paté and covered them with white chocolate to make little chocolate mice, actually made from – well – mouse. It was the only dish in the series that really polarised people.”
As well it might. The experimentation with foods from the past is something of a theme for Blumenthal this year – a year when he seems set to go back to the future.
As well as Feast, he’s also developing historical tasting menus at The Fat Duck and his pub, The Hinds Head, not to mention his revamp of that quaint 1950s roadside restaurant chain, Little Chef. This backward-looking approach might seem odd for a chef well known for using modern gadgetry such as centrifuges and freeze-driers in his kitchen, but Blumenthal, 42, has recognised some adventurous kindred spirits from our culinary past. “Researching our historical tasting menus, I came up with some amazing stuff, like a recipe for stuffing duck with mercury and sulphur in a way that actually makes it quack at the table. We have an amazing gastro heritage in this country, but it’s somehow got lost and buried. I just want to bring it back.”
But while he’s been mining historical cookbooks for the likes of a chocolate wine dating back to 1710, Blumenthal has also been modernising dishes in a typically bold and playful way. Among the most striking has to be his version of mock turtle soup, a Victorian favourite that used calf’s head to mimic the texture and flavour of more expensive turtle. Instead of recreating it directly, Blumenthal has remodelled the dish somehow into an egg-shaped form and matched it with “Mad Hatter tea”, inspired by the moment in Alice in Wonderland where the Hatter dips his fob watch in his tea cup. “We’ve made a langoustine and calf’s head broth with Madeira and freeze-dried it in a fob watch-shaped mould – the process concentrates the flavours without altering them the way heat does. We then cover it in gold leaf, put a teabag tag and string on it and put it in a teacup. At the table, hot water is poured over the watch, which transforms back into a delicious gold-flecked tea, and which is then in turn poured over the mock turtle ‘egg’ to make the soup.”
Of course, he’s not the only one to have built up a reputation based on hightech molecular gastronomy. The father of that movement is Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, whose El Bulli restaurant has been Restaurant magazine’s Restaurant of the Year since 2006 – a title The Fat Duck took in 2005. The two chefs have been very close, but where Adrià is the high priest of avant-garde gastronomy, Blumenthal is more of a Willy Wonka figure, creating flights of fancy such as edible rose bushes and seafood served with an iPod loaded with sea noises.
Understandably, Blumenthal’s efforts at the Little Chef chain have been rather less lavish. Indeed, as the recent TV special on him shaking the place up showed (a follow-up is due in a few months), keeping his quality standards up at the roadside cafés proved more daunting. “It was like having sunburn and everyone prodding it all the time – the challenge was humungous but worth it.”
Little Chef may not have been ready for innovations like serving fish and chips with an atomiser spray full of pickled onion juice to recreate the smell of a chippie. But most of the chef’s reforms are simple good sense, such as using dry-cured outdoor-reared bacon in their butties, de-starching their cherry compote for pancakes and, er, installing a Mr Whippy machine.
Despite his creativity and high profile, even Blumenthal can’t deny that times aren’t exactly rosy for restaurateurs at the moment. With people across the country tightening their belts, isn’t he worried that the current economic slump might land his business in hot water? After all, his intricate, experimental food doesn’t come cheap. “I can’t say what’ll happen in six months, but we’re heavily booked up,” is his response. “In some ways I think we may still do pretty well. In time of credit crunch, people want escapism, and there’s definitely escapism and fantasy in what we do at The Fat Duck.”
But won’t people find it too pricey? A three-course meal, without service or wine, costs £93, but that also includes amuse-bouches and little treats between courses; a tasting menu is £212. “The general public aren’t stupid. They don’t necessarily gauge value by the how much food is piled on the plate – and no one’s ever said The Fat
Duck’s not good value for money. Anyway, it isn’t the sort of place most people visit monthly, it’s for special occasions.”
That argument is hard to fault – as is Blumenthal’s keenness. Despite being pressed for time, our interview spills over the allotted limit as he enthuses about everything from cooking a vacuum-packed pig in a Jacuzzi, to experimenting with ultrasound in his kitchens. Given his two restaurants, his TV work, and his writing, such as the recently published The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, he clearly has stamina, I tell him. He laughs: “Well, I usually get five hours sleep a night. My body has more
or less adapted to it, but my eyesight’s gone, my short-term memory is shredded and I’m pretty much held together with masking tape and string.”
The Fat Duck, +44 (0)1628 580333, www.fatduck.co.uk The Hinds Head, +44 (0)1628 626151, www.thehindsheadhotel.com. Both are located on the High Street, Bray, Berkshire.
A Heston Blumenthal recipe from The Hinds Head
Lancashire Hot Pot
INGREDIENTS
2 lamb neck fillets, cut in half
5g fresh rosmary, chopped
5g fresh thyme leaves
4 cloves garlic, chopped
325ml lamb stock
8-10 Maris Piper potatoes, peeled
200g button mushrooms, sliced
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced
4 oysters (optional)
Instructions: Bring the water and salt to the boil in a saucepan, remove from heat and add herbs and garlic. Allow the
water to cool, then add the lamb pieces and refrigerate for 24 hours.
After 24 hours, soak the lamb in clean cold water for 2 hours, changing the water every 15 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 60ºC. Place the lamb in a covered casserole dish with 25ml of the lamb stock and place in the oven for 12 hours. When cooked, allow to cool down in the liquid and keep in fridge until you are ready to serve.
Top, tail and cut the potatoes into thin slices, 1-2mm thick. Place in a colander, sprinkle with salt and leave for 20 minutes. Fry the mushrooms in a little butter until coloured; then set aside. Add butter and fry the carrots for 4 minutes. Set aside. In a casserole dish, layer the potato slices a third up the side, add carrots and mushrooms and most of the remaining lamb stock (just under 300ml), then layer the rest of the potatoes on top. Brush the final layer with the remaining lamb stock, cover with a lid and cook in the oven, preheated to 145ºC, for 1 hour or until the potatoes are fully cooked. Remove from the oven and cool.
Remove the lamb pieces from the liquid and dice into 1cm cubes. Carefully remove the top layer of potato, keeping it in one piece. Lay the meat on top of the carrots and mushrooms then put the potato layer back on top. Reheat and finish the hot pot or return to the fridge.
To finish, reheat the casserole dish under the grill, on a low shelf, brushing occasionally with melted butter to protect the top layer of potatoes; so they become crisp while the bottom layers warm slowly, keeping them moist. If the top gets dark too quickly, put the dish on the hob for a short time to warm the sauce and lower layers, but very gently or the bottom layer will burn.
One option is to add fresh oysters from their shells and tuck in next to the meat under the potato at the last minute. Serve with pickled red cabbage.
