why I hate Heston Blumenthal

First published NW Fine Food magazine, Autumn 2006

Why did I start working with the fine food industry a couple of months ago? It’s because I hate Heston Blumenthal, that’s why.

Actually, that’s not quite true. He’s so obviously a stupendous chef, but the star of a cookery programme – I’m not so sure. Take his current tv series. It’s the exact antithesis of what I passionately feel about buying food, cooking food and serving food. I think it may be destined to actually put people off cooking at home, eroding their confidence further so that they seek solace in the ready meal.

So why the worry about Blumenthal as a television chef? After all, The Fat Duck is pretty much the best restaurant on planet Earth. Three Michelin stars, with its sardine on toast sorbet, snail porridge and pairings of salmon and liquorice and cauliflower and chocolate. You really do have to know your stuff to make that work. Well, let’s take the example of making a good old fashioned Black Forest gateau. It died a death after the 1970s but it’s making a comeback because the combination of chocolate, cream, cherries and kirsch are sublime if you use the best ingredients in the right combination.

The new series and accompanying book explain how to make it:

“To assemble a whole cake in one day would, undeniably be an unfair amount of work. Prepare the chocolate sponge up to a month in advance and keep them in a freezer. Make the biscuit base up to a week in advance. The aerated chocolate can be prepared anytime. That leaves two layers to prepare on the day.”

In the recipe there are 37 ingredients, and for the equipment you need a whipping cream canister and charges, vacuum seal storage bag with one way valve, vacuum cleaner, digital probe, melon baller and paint gun. Later there is a bit about making ice cream, where you need to make some custardly-like stuff which you keep at exactly 72ºC for 15 minutes using a digital probe to ensure the temperature doesn’t drop, you are also supposed to use liquid nitrogen to freeze the mixture at -197ºC. He doesn’t say where you can buy liquid nitrogen from. Tesco? But apparently you can use dry ice instead. Waitrose?

This is what makes The Fat Duck stunning. But on television? I think it could put off thousands of people, yet again, trying to cook at home using great ingredients or products from North West producers, because the act of preparing food is seen as too complicated or difficult. Another television chef, making us feel totally inadequate, alienated and inferior. Meanwhile the health, wealth and education of the public regarding good ingredients, simply cooked, takes another battering. Don’t the programme makers know that whilst the public may view this as great entertainment, it ironically drives them to the nearest tasteless, soulless boil-in-the-bag?

This is not food, it’s a chemistry lesson. Some PR luvvie has also told Heston (who by all accounts is a great guy), that he should wear glasses that resemble some form of medical protection, and a jacket that looks like a white lab coat. They’re trying to exaggerate the Frankenstein of the Kitchen feel. We know Heston’s into culinary alchemy and molecular gastronomy, which is hugely impressive in the restaurant, but what about my kitchen, in my house?

It’s promoted as science and not art. So it’s set up to look like cooking is a set of rules and chemical reactions, which means perfection is a solution already defined somewhere out there by your particular brand of god, or if you’re an atheist, by the rules of the universe. Your job therefore is to find the ultimate chemical reaction, write it down and follow it. That means there is a definitive, unassailable answer out there, like a mathematical equation, and that is how you devise recipes.

But for me, this is not how families have arrived at the abundance of superb locally produced food and the provision of lovingly cooked meals generation after generation. Fine foods are the result of art and history. They have a magical quality about them. Every company that makes small batches of fine food has a great story to tell, without exception. History. Accident. Ancestry. Skill. Developing recipes by a mysterious drawn out journey that could never be planned. The skill of a family member who just happened to be talented and passionate - desperate to pass it on. They didn’t know why x went with y, it just tasted brilliant and they wanted to share it.

The people who make these pastries, pies, soups, sausages, puddings and pates are descended from true artists, who (I would bet) didn’t own a paint gun, vacuum seal storage bag with one way valve, digital probe or liquid nitrogen. Domestic science in the home is dry, boring, humourless, sterile, predictable and consistent - the equivalent of pharmaceutical production. Domestic art is passionate, personal, witty and unique, it has character and style.

I’d love to eat at The Fat Duck, but I don’t want to know the painstaking complex journey they take to consistently produce great food, as I don’t think it translates into the home. If it did, they wouldn’t have any customers.

So, why did I count my blessings that I currently work in the fine food industry? Because I am an artist at heart, and I love everything that locally produced food represents. That means promoting talented human beings who use instinct and passion, they’re individuals not numbers or chemical formulae and you pretty much can’t replicate that somewhere else in the universe, well at least not in the North West of England.

Thank heavens for that!