Heston Blumenthal:In Search of Perfection

ISBN 1-59691-250-2

Bought based on this entry at Ideas in Food.

Found little enough of lasting value that I eventually gave it away.

Sections

Chapter by Chapter

Introduction

Roast Chicken & Roast Potatoes

Pizza

Bangers & Mash

Steak

Spaghetti Bolognese

Fish & Chips

Black Forest Gateau

Treacle Tart & Ice Cream

End notes

Chapter by Chapter

Introduction

The note that:

... For many of us, the perfect meal won't be some fancy restaurant food. Stuck on a desert island, our dream dish is more likely to be something we grew up with and have taken to our hearts. An entry in ''Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany'' details last-meal requests of prisoners on death row in Texas and reveals fried eggs, fried bacon, ice cream, chocolate milk, burgers and French fries to be the front-runners. Before you ascribe this to penal-colony dmeographics, note that chefs exhibit similarly homespuin desires. ...

got me excited. One of the most memorable bits of food I've had is scrambled eggs (at Marvin's, in Novato), and a book dedicated to teasing the incredible out of the normal is my speed.

Unfortunately, despite Blumenthal's reputation as a man of science, as of the first two chapters the book (which was apparently derived from a TV series) is largely delving into the experience of food, the wandering through the French countryside or the Naples pizzerias, and not getting into the hardcore aspects of what variants in cooking does to food nearly as deeply as I'd like.

There have been a few interesting tips, but so far I'm hoping for deeper.

Roast Chicken & Roast Potatoes

A lot of the lore of what goes into a Bresse chicken, not as much as I'd like on quantifying why it's different or how one can find those qualities without shipping a $100 chicken from France.

The recipe for roasting the chicken says "4-6 hours" in an oven at temperature:=60 Celsius, which will allegedly bring the temperature of the chicken up to temperature:=60 Celsius. First off, that's medium rare, not a texture which I like in poultry, and quite a bit lower than the temperature recommended by the US FDA (temperature:=165 Fahrenheit). I'm willing to discount some of the recommendations of the latter, but undercooked chicken: yuck. And unless there's something dramatically different about British ovens, I'm pretty sure that it'll take longer than 6 hours for a chicken to completely stabilize at that air temperature.

I could chalk this up to a proofreading error, but it's repeated twice in different sections of the chapter.

Pizza

My take-away from this chapter is all about kneading technique. Yes, he comes up with some basic treatment of tomatoes that should improve a pizza.

Bangers & Mash

This chapter gets a little closer to what I was hoping for. But it feels unfinished. Specifically, the section titled "The Fickle Finger of Phosphate" talks about the chemistry behind phosphates in sausages, the challenges of acquiring them in Britain (and having them shipped over from the U.S.), and ends with the statement that:

...Each route we took seemed to lessen our chances of successfully binding our sausage.

The chapter then abandons sausage (until the summary recipe at the end) and goes on to making "mash". How about talking to all of the sausage makers you were interviewing previously and looking at their experience? How about telling us more of the processes and experiments you went through on the way? Why just leave us hanging.

Steak

Starts out at a steak house in NYC, talking about buying based on USDA beef grades and the importance of dry aging. Since the first chapter focused on finding the right chicken, it's kind of weird that we start out here with the assumption that beef is mostly a commodity.

Although American cattle are grain-fed, which leads to superb marbling and gives the meat a particular richness, I mainly opted for grass-fed animals because I was increasingly convinced that grain-fed meat would actually be too rich for British tastes.

ie: American consumers have been lead to believe that "fat" equals "tasty", British consumers haven't.

At the end of the chapter there's your basic "how to cook a steak", which looks like a tasty method, but once again there's a disconnect between the contents of the chapter and the recipe, and I wish that the chapter had more development on the things that the cook actually can change rather than a "oh look, I get to fly to New York City and hobnob with Ferr&aacute;n Adri&agrave;" travelogue. And why not do something more original, like go have a steak at the cafe in the Amarillo stockyards?

Spaghetti Bolognese

Now we're getting somewhere. Part of the problem here is that I love spaghetti with a good meat and tomato sauce, but I don't have a long tradition of it. So there's nothing in it that particularly takes me back to my childhood.

But he does begin to describe some of the things that make pasta different, and as someone who's made (by hand) a lot of pasta, I enjoyed the bits he got into, and wish he'd gone deeper.

For instance: What sort of textural differences occur between rolling pasta with a wooden rolling pin and through metal rollers (as you might do with a standard hand-cranked pasta machine)? He talks about rolling in air bubbles, if I was still doing pasta (Charlene's trying to stay low on carbs because of their caloric density and low on wheat because she doesn't digest glutens terribly well) I'd like to do two batches, one rolled in layers, one rolled flat, and see if I could detect the differences.

Fish & Chips

Some decent explorations into why he chose the fish he did, and an interesting technique using the soda siphon to create the batter texture. Not terribly information dense, but things are looking up.

Black Forest Gateau

After a night of rumination, what feels like a great bit on visiting a chocolate factory now feels like I've mostly read marketing materials. I'd love to have a bunch more on aspects of the process which got glossed over, for instance I think it was at a Ghirardelli shop that I saw a chocolate grinder that involved a large stone wheel rolling on a stone platen, more of those sorts of details would be really cool.

Treacle Tart & Ice Cream

It seems like this book started to pick up as it got into desserts which, alas, is the part I'm less interested in. Desserts are great, but I don't do much of 'em because most of the people I've cooked for over the past several years haven't been interested in that huge caloric load at the end of a meal.

At any rate, in what you'd think would be the simplest chapter, after all, how hard can treacle tart and ice cream be, he picks up steam.

Some interesting notes on treacle, a cane syrup (available in several different colors and darknesses) that I haven't run into in the U.S., including some ruminations on how sugar molecules form and break up and some notes on artificially aging syrups for flavor.

The recipe for ice cream uses dry ice, which is easier to get and handle than liquid nitrogen.

End notes

Still working on integrating my feelings about the book. I need to re-read the book to see what I pick up on the second pass through, and try to put some of the techniques and information into play a bit.

The book didn't live up to my expectations. I'd have rather donated a few more bucks to Aki & Alex at Ideas In Food than have purchased it, but having purchased it I enjoyed parts of it, learned a few things, and have had a couple of things re-affirmed.

The first is the large connection between nostalgia, theatre, ritual, and food. A lot of how we experience food is very much based on our expectations and our memories of it, and Blumenthal reaffirms this.

The second is a reminder that we should glory in our regionalisms in food. It's interesting to look at the things that I've never heard of here in the U.S. ("golden syrup" and treacle haven't been a part of my experience of food), how far afield he goes for some ingredients (across the channel for chickens, at the very least), and how many varieties of potatoes are apparently easily available to the British consumer compared to what we have here in the U.S.

I guess I'm also getting a general sense that while there's some magic in the preparation, a hell of a lot of food is in the things that are upstream of the usual chef experience. If I want to play more with the chemistry of food, going that direction, in the processing of food, is where I'm going to find the most interesting results. Of course that also takes the highest commitment.

Category:Books Category:Cookbooks Category:Food

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