Future gazing
Heston Blumenthal has always been an innovator in the kitchen, famous for recipes such as snail porridge. Now he is cooking with insects and urging us to take a more mindful approach to eating
‘A Greek philosopher called Heraclitus once wrote: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not t he same river and he’s not the same man.” It’s the same with food: nothing ever stays the same.
When I was 16, I went on holiday with my parents to the South of France and we visited a restaurant in Provence called L’Oustau de Baumanière. Back then, in the 1980s, it had a long history of having three Michelin stars and it was the first restaurant like that I had ever been to. I remember it vividly still. The waiters had these huge moustaches and were carving legs of lamb at the table side. It was incredible and just blew me away. So many sights, smells and sounds, I thought it was wonderful, and I knew immediately that’s what I wanted to do. Thirteen years later, I opened my own restaurant, The Fat Duck.
My inspiration for recipes comes from anywhere. For example, snail porridge was about the absurdity of the name. My head chef at the time had recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong and told me about a dish he’d eaten called congee, which he described as being like a fish porridge. It just sparked off an idea in me. Snails were traditionally purged on oats and I’d always served them at The Fat Duck, but now saw a way I could do something very different that also played around with people’s expectations of a dish. It was something similar with bacon and egg ice cream – I realised that the ingredients for a traditional English breakfast would work just as well as a dessert, and I loved the idea of starting and finishing your meal with the same thing but in a different way.
I was one of the first chefs to really use all the senses in the dining room, which grew out of an understanding and curiosity on my part to see the effect you could have on diners when you brought food all the senses into play.
I am still a work in progress. After 25 years of cooking and bedding in recipes in the linear way – weighing ingredients, timing cooking, setting temperatures – I realised that I’d been fighting against myself. I’d created the most consistent precision-driven system, with a big group of chefs, where everything had to be done down to a T, but inside I was screaming. My methods were suppressing imagination. In the past year or so, I’ve come to realise that accuracy and creativity are equally as important when you’re cooking.
SAVOUR EVERY MOUTHFUL
I don’t like talking about trends, or predicting trends. So much about food and cooking is trial and error or just person
