Interview to Heston Blumenthal – When i discovered my passion

0
19

This week The Metropolitan interviewed Top Chef Heston Blumenthal.

Heston Blumenthal is self-taught chef, he is the founder and owner of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, awarded three Michelin stars since 2004. Considered an exponent of molecular gastronomy, he has received numerous international awards, conducted several television programs and written several cookbooks.

INT: Good afternoon Heston, can you tell us how you discovered your passion about food?

HB: Well, good evening!..I was eighteen and I decided to. I took the Good Food guide and I wrote to the top thirty restaurants of the Good Food Guide any chance of coming and doing for a job. And I got like three letters back. It was in those days there wasn’t any staff shortages. One of them was some guy called Raymond Blanc had a recipe with a memoir that says almost two Michelin stars. It was the best restaurant in the country at the time. So he asked me to come and do it like a week, ten days there. And I turned up and it was a mountain of beans, boxes and boxes and boxes of green beans. And that sort of did this top ten to the top and told them, funny enough, I don’t know if that was a subliminal kind of message, but it did open the dark. Several years later, ten years or so later, the green beans is one of the big things that it became almost like a leitmotif for what I was doing because we had domestic gas pressure. So the ovens were, it’s an old pub really weak. The gas power was really weak. So I had a box of green beans to do. And when you throw the beans and you want the water to stay boiling or what happened is that through any more than sort of a bunch like that thick into the water, the water would come off the board. It would just sit there, just sitting, almost sweating as water. So I was doing about four to eight beans at a time. So one box of green beans took all day. But what it did do again, question everything.

Maybe the whole thing about why this green veg salt in the water is green veg. And I got quite obsessed about that and realised that there’s an awful lot of nonsense about this stuff. Sometimes it’s better to put salt in and sometimes not. So you’re safer to just put it in, but lid on the pan. It’s another classic thing in the kitchen. Never put the lid on the pan when you’re cooking green vegetables because of this colour. That’s the biggest load of rubbish. What I reckon what probably happened is somewhere in the past, some young chef kept on forgetting that there were beans in the pan because the liberals on. So you’ve got to never put the lid on the pan. But it’s really saying it that way. You won’t forget them. But in fact the lid on the pan is better. You want the water. Cellulose doesn’t break down until eighty two to eighty five degrees centigrade and you need to break the cellulose down in green veg in order to release some of the sweetness and remove some of the bitter compounds. So you need to get it up to that temperature, cook it quickly enough to keep the colour, but enough to soften the beans, drive the sweetness. So big heart of mine is you wouldn’t eat overall, you wouldn’t just go and just I mean, you could do, but they’re not particularly enjoyable. So why haven’t more and more people just don’t cook them enough? Anyway, I went off to ramble and green beans in between those two boxes of green beans was about ten years, and I decided after the memoir he offered me a job.

For some reason I just I’d started this self kind of self educational process for cooking and loved it and was just immersed in it. I thought at the time I saw some people that have been there, been doing what they’ve been doing for five years, six years, seven years. And I thought, I don’t know if I’ve got that patience. So I decided I thought I’ll go and do some other jobs and I earned myself a fortune and then opened a restaurant but realised one I wasn’t really good at much else. And secondly, I wasn’t driven by money and the jobs that I could get certainly weren’t going to net me enough money to even get little restaurant. So I did debt collecting, sold off as equipment, no glamorous stuff. And then eventually I worked for I went to work for my dad. He had a leasing company and I basic accounting. So I was bookkeeper every day, half past three hours, every day, eight hours, nine hours a day, half every single day. I was exhausted. I was exercising a lot. But I think some of that was just out of the release of energy that I hadn’t expended during the day. And then funnily enough, I started working at the dock and I was working twenty hours a day, sometimes twenty one, twenty two hours. Never, never knew those levels of exhaustion could exist. However, the days went quicker. There was never enough time. I was never bored. And so that office, that kind of office job for me wasn’t it wasn’t like I had a small cottage, flooded cottage, borrowed some money from my old man, and that was it. So had bought the flat. Often. The fact was that it was and still is, a small, very small cottage.

But I did what I am. Not many I’ve seen on the chefs, the careers, they’ve moved up quicker, but I sacrificed everything. So that was it. No house. In fact, that was was my house, which actually turned out to be that way for the first few years because I was sleeping on the laundry upstairs. It’s open. The fact that in 95, 1997 was looking back at a fairly defining moment in terms of cooking in particular one dish. I’ve been working on ice cream was the first area that I kind of looked into the science of it because I just found it. If you took 1015 chefs cookbooks for Vanilla Ice Cream, they’d all have given sort of whole eggs on the egg yolks of the sugar, some honey, some of these mascarpone cream, double cream, whipping cream, milk, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I was kind of thinking, why on earth are these recipes? Do they differ in the way they do? Is it because that’s just the way that they’ve been taught? Or do these ingredients play a role that extends further than the taste? So I started looking into into the science of ice cream, making you realize it really comes down to things like if you you put a you put a glass of water in the freezer, it freezes into solid block. When you start putting things in the water, you change the freezing point and then it becomes softer. So alcohol and sugar and stuff like that, total solids make a difference. And with ice cream, you churn. So the churning spreads, the ice crystals around quicker as it churns.

This morning, the ice crystals, the smoother the ice cream. So those rocks, if you don’t put sugar in ice cream, you don’t end up with you don’t get the smooth texture. But if you put too much, it becomes chewy. I found a recipe for a Sicilian recipe 1850 1870 for Parmesan ice cream. And I thought, Oh, this is a bit weird. And then I started thinking, Why should it be weird? It’s just because we’re used to ice cream being sweet. So I started playing around with savory ices, and I made a crab risotto with I had a sheet of passionfruit jelly, a reduction of red pepper carcinoid, a red pepper, bunch of other stuff, and then a crab between potato ice cream and sorbet. It’s crab stock, a bit of milk powder, a little bit of cream, and churned it. And the idea was that these different characteristics of crab as a crab oil on there as well, but this hot and cold thing and some people loved it and some of them couldn’t get their head around it. And I found that if I if I gave them a spoonful of it and said, taste this, it’s it’s crab ice cream, you get one reaction. If you say, taste this, it’s a frozen crab bisque.

I can tell you that everything that has a value, requires sacrifice, but i think wjat matters is to understand where is what has value for you and work for it, because you will never regret to do it, if you choose wisely.

INT: Thank you so much Heston, that was very kind of you to release this interview!

HB: Thanks to you, William, that was my pleasure.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here