Heston Blumenthal continues to inspire with his revolutionary cooking creations
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Serving wasabi with scallops and venison with chocolate may sound strange, but chefs exploring the scientific processes behind today’s food are producing some surprisingly mouthwatering dishes
Eating food concocted in a science lab may not turn your taste buds on, but wait until you see the latest inventions. Snail porridge, oyster in passion fruit jelly with lavender, and tomato cookies are now replacing regular restaurant dishes. Last year “Tea on Toast” won Britain’s Top Dessert; simply freeze a cup of Earl Grey with liquid nitrogen, drop it on crispy toast and plate it up with jelly purée, raspberry preserve, shortcake and voilà! Sean Wilkinson, known locally as “PsychaDelia Smith” and head chef of Gourmet Spot in Durham, is the proud creator. ‘At home I’m always jotting down ideas,’ he tells us. ‘A lot of my food is based around art and childhood memories. With “Tea and Toast” I wanted to take something incredibly normal and reinvent it.’
Inspiration
This scientific way of cooking – twisting an old favourite into a the-crazier-the-better new dish – is gathering an army of advocates. The most well known, Heston Blumenthal, owns award winning restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Bray. ‘Looking back, my initial foray into the research and development path I have now taken was really spurned on by the limitations of the kitchen,’ he says. ‘Fundamental issues like domestic gas supply – I had to find a way around the problem.’ For his TV programme In Search of Perfection he scours the world to revolutionise some of the nation’s favourite dishes. By analysing every component and ingredient Blumenthal, and all scientific chefs, gain a deeper understanding of the food they’re cooking, putting them in a better position for development. Ferran Adrià, who has held the World’s Best Restaurant crown for the past three years for El Bulli in Spain and has 400 requests for every table, changes his three-Michelin-star tasting menu every day. Popular favourites include mint and Parmesan marshmallow and peach soup.
Moving forward
Blumenthal’s journey of cookery discovery began with Harold McGee’s revolutionary book On Food and Cooking in 1984. With the book as his inspiration, he eventually met McGee along with Adrià and Thomas Keller of Per Se and The French Laundry in the US, at a ‘Molecular Gastronomy’ workshop in Erice, Sicily in 1992. Keller is also renowned for his experimental style and has many discerning palettes as fans, including Angela Hartnett who says, ‘The food he produces is just phenomenal. Really beautiful and really lovely. While James Martin from Saturday Kitchen attributes him as his biggest inspiration and declares him ‘The greatest chef in the world.’ No one could have known how important this meeting of the four outré chefs would be for the future, and the history, of cooking.
Labelling the movement
Although labelled as “molecular gastronomy” – a phrase invented by Nicholas Kurti to get a research institute to sit up and take notice – the biggest names in the business, including Blumenthal, openly believe this pompous term creates an elitist barrier. Adrià says, ‘Cooking is much more than that, or rather, it is something different; at any event, out of respect for the scientific world, a respect that should begin by not having its work trivialised, I shall never mix the two.’ But there is no united answer as to what it should be called and so the term remains. Wilkinson says, ‘It’s a random one, I think I’m the same as most chefs, I think it’s too scientific and pretentious. We don’t set ourselves in any category and it’s a bit of a mouthful’.
Trial and Error
These kitchen chemists question the traditional rules of cuisine, usually taking them at least 10 steps further; nothing is off limits. The chefs have real chemistry labs where recipes are assessed culturally and scientifically. In Wilkinson’s lab at Durham University he and his assistant are working on an edible balloon and a dish inspired by the food chain, while he’s already created an “essence of grass” to be married with beef. New dishes are a case of trial and error, often using some shocking experiments. Blumenthal intravenously fed one of his staff twice the recommended dose of chilli oil before giving him a brain scan to see the effects. Each dish takes a lot of research and an army of scientists; it took four years for Blumenthal and his team to create hot-cold ice cream, they eventually succeeded with the help of the Bernard Matthews turkey dinosaur machine.
Using senses
Multi-award winning Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, worked on In Search for Perfection with Blumenthal. He’s interested in the perception of flavour and believes eating is “multi-sensory”, ‘Every sense is involved in contributing to the flavour we perceive in the mouth,’ he says. ‘Researchers have suggested that more than 80 per cent of our perception of flavour of food and drink comes from our nose.’ If you doubt this multi-sensory approach think about drinking Sangria on holiday. The memorable flavour is because of your surroundings, when you get back from holiday it’s never the same.
Armed with this physical and psychological knowledge, chefs are more equipped to improve flavours in a variety of ways. Their wholesome approach to food takes everything into account, from all the senses, to emotions and word associations. ‘The last decade has seen an explosive growth in our knowledge of how our brains integrate the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile experiences that surround us,’ says Spence. ‘Food manufacturers are now starting to use such insights to tailor their new products to match the actual taste experiences of those foods.’ Starting with the presentation, Wilkinson says, ‘I prefer colourful alternatives to the usual knives, forks, plates and spoons, it makes it more of an experience’. The Fat Duck’s signature dish, “Sounds of the Sea” is served with an iPod playing a soundtrack of seagulls squawking and waves crashing, scientific chefs believe that by evoking all of the senses and emotions eating can be much more pleasurable.
Challenging tradition
When trying to understand food we must look at prejudices and associations – why is it accepted to eat snails in France, dogs in China and guinea pigs in Peru? ‘Our prior experiences with food, from the womb onwards, play a huge role in determining what combinations of flavours we will like later in life,’ says Spence. Researching these associations has led scientists to understand why one thing can taste so great to someone in one country and be so detested in another. Chefs use these associations to heighten senses of enjoyment, like Wilkinson’s “Tea and Toast” dish, he has used something very familiar and English and updated it for the modern palate.
Blumenthal says his lack of formal training gave him an open mind. ‘It was a great advantage, I didn’t adhere to any specific rules that had been drummed into me. I could happily ask “Why?” without feeling self-conscious or guilty not knowing, and I did ask, often.’ Though he still believes traditional food is needed for evolution, ‘Tradition is the base which all cooks who aspire to excellence must know and master’,’ he says. ‘We [The Fat Duck] embrace this natural process of evolution and aspire to influence it’. His research is used to design more pleasing eating experiences from old favourites. ‘The important thing is that the food you serve is great both in quality and taste’, says Blumenthal. As consumers we are always looking for new flavours and food products, so to retain our interest and spending, food companies are constantly searching for more exotic flavours. The latest confectionary offerings include African Babao fruit in cereal bars, and goji and green tea flavoured sweets. Tesco have even developed a lemon-flavoured melon.
The widespread success of this style of cooking – The Fat Duck alone has received over 40 awards – has given the movement more confidence than ever before, so these scientific chefs remain one to watch, but Blumenthal remains characteristically modest, ‘I never opened the Fat Duck with the idea that I would ever have achieved the awards and accolades we have gathered,’ says Blumenthal, ‘let alone three Michelin stars’. Sign of a true genius?
Try it at home
Peter Barham, Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol and author of The Science of Cooking, collaborated with Blumenthal on In Search for Perfection. He uses a variety of experiments to explain his work; here he explains one of his favourites to illustrate the fact “flavour” is not just the signals from the mouth and nose, but is actually constructed in the mind.
• Take a white wine, colour it red with red and blue food dyes and ask a wine loving friend to describe the flavour. They will use terms such as “raspberry”, “blackcurrant”, “oakey” and “tannic”.
• Then give them a glass of the same, uncoloured, wine and ask them to describe it. You’ll probably hear the words “gooseberry”, “apple” and “fresh”.
The more they know about wine and the more wines they have tasted the harder it will be for them to recognise the two wines are the same. This is because we associate flavours with memories and use all the keys we have to hand to interpret flavour. In this case we tend to remember only the red wines we have previously tasted when tasting the “red” wine and so use “red” descriptors.’
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