TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Heston Blumenthal: An ever adventurous chef
Heston Blumenthal - Courtesy of Discovery Networks Asia-PacificRenowned British chef Heston Blumenthal has earned a reputation as a genius whose dishes redefine âculinary adventureâ
Change Size
Heston Blumenthal - Courtesy of Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific
Renowned British chef Heston Blumenthal has earned a reputation as a genius whose dishes redefine 'culinary adventure'.
With a self-made dish recipe portfolio that includes floating desserts served on a hovering pillow, crab ice cream and snail porridge, British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is often described as part chef and part scientist by his peers.
At times, the Michelin-starred chef's creativity and his flamboyant cooking style also drive people to see him as a conceptual artist with a raging lunacy when it comes to the art of creating the perfect dish.
Blumenthal's dishes are not only outrageously unique but their tastes have also been acknowledged by culinary enthusiasts and experts, earning his restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Bray, United Kingdom, three Michelin stars.
It is therefore a big surprise that a highly reputable chef like Blumenthal has actually never had a formal education in gastronomy or cooking.
Apart from a stint at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons and Marco Piere White's establishments, he was pretty much self-taught in the art of cooking.
Blumenthal had also once worked as a corporate debt collector but his passion for cooking and working with various ingredients finally led him to a career path that gave him international fame and recognition.
'I just started cooking, cooking, cooking, researching, researching, researching and then saving up and every year blowing my annual savings on a two-week trip to France. I'd go to restaurants and winemakers. I'd go to vegetable groves and cheesemakers, etc.,' the 49-year-old says.
Blumenthal has a philosophy that cooking food is not only a way to create edible dishes.
For him, perfect cooking should be able to produce foods that can lead people who consume them to dive into their own personal contentment.
'I think it [cooking] is all about creating an emotion; generating emotions and those childlike emotions of adventure and discovery and playfulness and excitement. That kind of stuff, it ultimately leads to happiness or contentment because that's an internal emotion,' he said in a recent phone interview.
To achieve what he wanted in his dishes, he began to break cooking down to a scientific level when he opened The Fat Duck in 1995.
Blumenthal said the first dish that he broke down to a scientific level was the ice cream.
'You know: What role did the ingredients play? And I really got quite a deep understanding of all of that and then I came across a parmesan ice cream recipe in Sicily from the 1800s and thought, oh, this is a bit weird. And I've got this sort of slight Alice in Wonderland thing in my head where there were two voices,' he says.
'So I have a conversation with myself, which is: Why should a savory ice cream sound weird? Well, I guess it's because we grow up with sweet ice cream.'
Due to his knowledge of the role of the ingredients, he was able to reduce the sugar levels sufficiently to have crab ice cream served with a crab risotto.
'I found it amazing that when you called it crab ice cream some people loved it and some people couldn't get their head around it. However, if you said it's a frozen crab disc, then people went, 'Ah', and they got it.'
His scientific probing into ice cream made him realize that even the slightest adjustment of a name could change the perception of a dish.
'In fact, if we have the use of all of our senses, it does make sense that they're going to influence what we eat. What we see, what we hear, what we feel ' all of that stuff,' he said.
In one of his culinary adventures, Blumenthal decided to step out of his comfort zone both as a chef and a businessman.
Driven by his need to modernize the Fat Duck, he moved his entire restaurant, staff and facilities to Melbourne, Australia. There, he opened and successfully ran his whole food operation for six to seven months last year before returning to the United Kingdom for the opening of the new Fat Duck.
'For the last 10 years, maybe longer, I've wanted or needed to redo the kitchen at The Duck in Bray because it was just incredibly ' it was small, tiny,' he says.
'So, the problem with it was that the actual building work was going to take a good six to seven months and I couldn't just say to the 70-odd, 75 staff, 'All right guys, go find another job for eight months and then come back again.' So I had to find somewhere to move The Duck to.'
Blumenthal had considered cities like Las Vegas or St. Tropez, but he just did not feel right about moving the Fat Duck over there. Eventually, he chose Melbourne as the temporary location of the restaurant.
He described the first few weeks of the relocation to Melbourne as 'brutal'. There were many challenges that might have been able to discourage him from finishing his plan.
However, Blumenthal and his staff eventually persevered. Overall, he said the experience had benefited them greatly in both personal and professional terms.
'I knew it would be good for everybody just to change. Being pulled out of your comfort zone is ' we all need to sort of do that to ourselves,' he said.
_______________________________
Watch Inside Heston's World, a weekly series starting April 26 at 10 p.m. on TLC to explore behind the scenes of Heston's journey relocating the Fat Duck to Melbourne, Australia.
