INTERVIEW:Heston Blumenthal's restaurants serve food that confounds diners with its level of intricacy and technical wizardry, but now he wants to demystify his cooking and make it accessible to the rest of us, he tells MARK HENNESSY– although he's not giving up the liquid nitrogen just yet
HESTON BLUMENTHAL is late. As we await his arrival, his publicist is concerned that the interview will focus on his split from his wife, Zanna, and subsequent divorce, a story beloved of the tabloids. “I couldn’t care less,” I tell her, leaving a frosty silence to linger.
“Apologies, apologies. I’m really sorry, you wouldn’t believe the reason for being late,” Blumenthal says as he rushes in, wearing his trademark glasses and black pea-coat. Quickly, a cup of tea is produced from the bowels of the building. He begins.
He says in the introduction to his new book, which has been 18 months in the making, that it is an attempt “to make people feel really at home in the kitchen”, by offering recipes and “all the background information that explains how they actually work”.
Blumenthal, who runs the Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Bray in Berkshire and the very upscale Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental near Hyde Park in London, wouldn’t be the first chef you’d turn to in search of a quick supper dish. His book of recipes from the Fat Duck took four years to write. Some of the dishes take literally days to prepare.
“Basically, it was the recipes of the Duck, exactly how we do the dishes, down to the size of the pans because sometimes if you change a pan’s size, with more surface area it cooks in a different way. Some of the recipes were seven pages long. So I wanted to do something which still encapsulated some of the techniques that I had developed over the years [with] some of the elements of magic but [with recipes that] were also doable.”
Using star anise with onions in a beef dish, for example, is but one of countless pieces of magic: “If you are doing any meat dish and you want to make a sauce, if you use onions, put some star anise with the onions, lightly caramelise them with the onions. You have sulphur compounds in the onions and the star anise that react, and when you put meat with it, you boost the meaty flavours.
“If you put too much in it will give a slightly Chinesy star-anise flavour to it. But if you get the balance right, you end up with a meaty flavour. So even using that technique in a spaghetti Bolognese, for example – bit of star anise, lightly colour the onions, then add the mince – makes a real difference. Or into some gravy for your leg of lamb.”
He defends detail, arguing that simplicity can be the enemy of confidence: “As chefs, we are asked to give recipes to magazines. Quite often, as a remit, we are told to keep them simple. What they mean is, keep them short. I think making a recipe short and apparently more simple does the opposite. It makes you more of a slave to a recipe because it doesn’t give you the confidence, because you feel, I have to do it in a certain way, because it doesn’t tell you why. This is also about the why of doing things.”
Blumenthal is passionate about food quality, believing that while the public has become more informed about what it eats in recent decades, it is still suffering from a dearth of information, leaving them open to exploitation by food companies.
“The labelling laws are fairly clear in terms of what is written on the packet, but what is printed on the packet, however, is a different kettle of fish. You could have a packet of sliced meat, ham, chicken, or whatever and there is a beautiful water-colour painting of a field, or trees or maybe a manor-house, or something.
“Most of the general public haven’t been to some of these farms and don’t know what happens to the animals when they go through that process. Just by having a nice painting on a packet is enough to send a signal, or send the wrong signal, as to the conditions these animals live.
“In some of these packets, the slices of chicken are this big,” Blumenthal says, and here his hands spread wide across the table to indicate the gargantuan size of the offender. “Chickens don’t have breasts that big, so the meat has been taken off, processed, cooked, reformed and sliced.”
Food companies know how to exploit the public’s ignorance, he believes, offering the following example to prove his point. “What some of the ice-cream companies do is get a vanilla pod and scrape the seeds. That is the most expensive . You then use the pod to flavour some sugar, or whatever; you then heat it and get some essential oil out of it.
“You eventually end up with a vanilla pod that has got nothing left in it, bar some colour. Then they dry it and grind it into a powder, and it looks like vanilla seeds, but it is exhausted vanilla. Then you make some ice cream, a cheap one with a cheap vanilla flavour, but put in that exhausted vanilla and you will think it is vanilla because the brain will see the seeds. But there is nothing coming from the vanilla: neither sweetness nor flavour,” he goes on, at a rush.
Blumenthal believes in buying the very best ingredients, but economic hard times are having an effect: “You can’t blame people for being more careful about what they spend. It is very easy to tell people that they should spend more money on food but if people haven’t got the money and need to eat . . . . It’s bread and water.”
“Let’s take the case of chicken. I would always recommend buying the most expensive chicken that you can buy. But that depends on what budget you have got. You don’t just get completely beautiful free-range chickens and at the other end of the scale chickens that have literally been chained-up. There are various stages in the middle.”
In the past, Blumenthal has wowed TV audiences with the fruits of the Tudor kitchen, when food was often entertainment for the rich, though the British became more monochrome in their food tastes, particularly in the years after the second World War.
“If you go back to certain times in history, we were, if not the envy of Europe, then we were as gastronomic as any country in Europe. Then I found out that the French called us ‘les rosbif’, which I always thought was a mickey-take of our love for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but in the 1800s we were leading experts at roasting meat over a fire. It was originally a compliment. The French sent their chefs over to learn about how to cook meat.”
His beef is supplied by Templemore-born butcher Jack O’Shea, who built up a successful operation in Brussels before taking over the meat stand at Selfridges on Oxford Street. The relationship between the two took years to grow, as Blumenthal inched his way to trusting the Irishman as the source of one of his main ingredients, but he is now clearly a fan: “All the beef comes from Jack. All the meat comes from Ireland.”
The fact that the Irish beef is grass-fed makes the difference, even if it makes it more complicated: “I think the best grass-fed beef is better than the best grain-fed beef. If you don’t eat beef very often and you go to the States and you get a big hunk of grain-fed cattle, it can knock your socks off. But it is big and rich.
“Grass-fed is more complex, it is more delicate. If you buy fillet steak, you know it might have a bit less flavour but it is going to be really tender. If you buy rib-eye, it will be a bit tougher but it will have a bit more fat to it.”
“So I was trying to find a butcher who had . . .” he stops, searching for the words. “The real two talents of the butcher are, one, their skills to seam bone, but there is also carcass selection; and, two, to be able to walk into a room and pick the right one. That is something the chef couldn’t do. Well, we can on a clumsy level, but to know what to look for in a carcass is the real art. I think that makes a really big difference.”
Blumenthal forensically investigated US and Australian beef in his hunt for perfection. The Australians have done the impressive testing, offering half-a-million pieces of meat to a survey team who were asked to grade each on juiciness, tenderness and flavour: “Then, they worked back to find out what was influencing those three factors.
“Fat made a contribution, but not massive; but genetics was the biggest thing of all, and then, obviously, husbandry. So something happens. It could be the particular breed or something that happened through slaughter and then a little bit on the ageing process, post-slaughter.”
Here, Blumenthal goes into lecture-mode, offering an explanation for the toughness of some cuts. Even Irish beef, which is well regarded today, still falls on this hurdle. “That comes from the connective tissue. Basically, it is collagen. The bits of the animal that have done work. Think, if you go to the gym, your tougher bits are your shoulder, calves, shin.
“It is trickier, more complex with grass-fed cattle than grain-fed. But grain-fed is worse for your health and certainly worse for the animal’s, but there is so much fat in there and the type of fat in there does deliver a juicier, richer result.”
Grass-fed, he accepts, will always have more collagen – because such cattle are field-reared, rather than being cooped in barns by the thousand as happens in the US – and this will always need to be broken down in the cooking.
“It is really noticeable with the white grisly bits. You will also have collagen running through the lean pieces of meat as well, but there are fewer connections there, so [it is] less tough,” he says, just as I spill coffee over his book. “Don’t worry about it; it was made for the kitchen,” he says.
Next he wants to talk about the slaughtering of animals. “If you wash an animal with a cold-hose before slaughter, even if the slaughtering process is relatively humane, that is enough to toughen the meat up. If meat gets toughened up, the lactic acid comes washing out in the blood, and you want to have the lactic acid stored in the blood because it changes the pH of the meat, so that when you age the meat that lactic acid will help to break down the meat and tenderise it.
“When it is stressed like this, it comes out in the blood; lactic acid stays in relaxed muscle.” The Australians, he said, found that stress in slaughter made a “really quite noticeable difference”.
By now, Blumenthal has moved on to a neighbour near his Berkshire restaurant, who has an abattoir designed by the American academic, Temple Grandin. The neighbour is Jody Scheckter, a former Formula one driver. “She did his abattoir. When you go in there, there are no sharp corners; there is a pen and hay, where the pigs are left to rest before slaughter.”
The venison used at the Fat Duck comes from Denis O’Leary in Downpatrick, Co Down. “He said to me – it was really a great way to put it – he said he considered becoming a vegetarian. If he couldn’t, in principle, kill humanely, then he didn’t deserve to be in meat and should become a vegetarian.
“I went [to O’Leary’s farm] with Ashley, head-chef at Dinner. The abattoirs are on the estate, so the deer don’t get stuck in a lorry. They come into [the slaughter-house] in pairs because they are herders, if you take one away from the other, they get scared.
“We stood there, they’ll trot up to you, they’ll walk by you looking at you like that,” he says, craning his head to the left, “and then they’ll trot down this little tunnel and there will be a bloke above with a bolt-gun. Bang, bang.
“The first one knows nothing about it, the second one has, maybe five seconds, maximum, to think, what is going on here.”
The drive for safety after the mad-cow disease crisis has had unintended consequences, he believes, since the forced mass-closure of abattoirs in the years afterwards has contributed to the industrialisation of food. “For me, this is what happened with foot-and-mouth. Mad-cow disease comes along so they get rid of the abattoirs, so that the animals have to be cooped up into lorries, driven further around the country, so then any disease gets spread as well. What happens then?
“The animals are more stressed when they get there. There is a lot to be said for the old-fashioned way of taking a gun around the back of the barn and just going bang,” he says, though he does not claim much experience. “Once, I shot a deer and skinned it.”
Heston Blumenthal at Homeis published by Bloomsbury (£30)
