Fly #3: Heston Blumenthal, don’t sell yourself to the fodder of the plebeian

Heston Blumenthal is my newest crack addiction. Procrastination, once stale Facebooking and the odd exotic afternoon snack (savoys with cheese and tomato sauce, anyone?) is now a hedonist YouTube binge of How to Cook like Heston shows. I will flip from a shirtless picture of Jake Gyllenhaal to a clip on how to perfect Heston’s black forest cake, and there would be no change in my desire to lick the screen. So you can imagine that I was close to devastated when, after a fevered two-hour read, I concluded that cookbook Heston Blumenthal at home was an anti-climax to his on-screen extravagance. 

In its hefty 400-page glory, there are few gems accessible to commoners.  Many of the recipes are far above anything classified as “home cooking”. My mother, an accredited chef, and myself, proud amateur, attempted the most pedestrian recipe - the slow-cooked lamb shank and giant couscous salad. What was assumed to be a breezy hour of cooking was actually a rambling cacophony of North African spice mix on the floor, and squished couscous between the stoves. After many floor mops and emergency trips to the IGA, the meal actually turned out to be a raging success. But this was at the cost of a whole afternoon and a kitchen which resembled a crime scene. The book is advertised as “classic home cooking, by Britain’s most creative chef”, which is a testament to the artistic grandeur of Heston, not his family-friendly dishes. Since when was the use of dry ice, or 15-ingredient, two-kilogram crab stock ever classic home cooking? Come now Heston, we don’t all have a laboratory, or the Atlantic Ocean for a kitchen.

For this reason, the lusty final masterpiece photos and attractive recipe layout make a flip through torture. How could you dedicate a whole-page photo of the perfect cheese toastie, and tell me I can only re-enact the fantasy with a fondue set, two types of rare cheese and seven assorted spices and flavourings? That is not home cooking, and the vision of sinking my teeth into this crisp cheese dripping toasted sandwich will only ever be unrequited love. It is page after page of frothing-at-the-mouth, jump-out-of-the-page decadence, and a teasing recipe that masquerades user-friendly ingredients and methods. But I can’t make any of them, and I finish my fruitless recipe hunt cursing the maestro.

Despite struggling to capture the lay-man imagination, the book is worth it, if only, for a read of its background information on how the meals “work”. Heston explains the science behind leaving the chicken out for 45 minutes before roasting it at 180C, and how slow cooking a stock allows soluble proteins to rise to the surface, making them easy to remove. He also uses the science of all the senses to uncover the mechanics behind a sweet tooth, and how playing music can enhance a meal’s flavour. While it would be far-fetched to serve a shell with a soundtrack of waves and seagulls whilst dining on edible sand and pickled seaweed, as Heston does in his restaurant, the first chapter offers an eccentric insight into food and the brain, something often skimmed over in the conventional cookbook. But the inclusion of food chemistry does not take away from the depressing reality that these dishes are just too hard and too obscure for the wannabe chef.

I could set aside a few days, and sacrifice some kitchen utensils to recreate a garden salad with edible soil, or, as it is named in the recipe, “gribiche”. But in the spirit of home cooking, why would I put myself through so much food preparation labour when I could heat up spaghetti from last night? Heston Blumenthal at Home would do the three-Michelin star chef justice if it were named along the lines of his other book, In Search of Perfection.

Heston battles to find a medium between his capricious gastronomy and the square meal of Joe Blogs. If you are one of his tragic disciples, or if you really have a thing for crab lasagne, Heston Blumenthal at Home is worth the sweat. Otherwise, it’s a jumbo book of did-you-know facts and a gallery of food pornography.

Black Forest Gateau http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZQ7nwCJBlg
Cheese Fondue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxcIQOAaB24