Fat Duck magic...

Secrets revealed! I attended the Heston Blumenthal Experience dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong. Heston Blumenthal is famed for the Fat Duck, his 3-starred Michelin restaurant  near London, and his revolutionary cooking practices.

With Heston Blumenthal

 

Before dinner we had a 2 hour demonstration and lecture from Heston and his team. He turns the old rules of cooking upside down…reaching for the utmost in taste experience.

Does searing seal the flavour? That’s what all the old cookbooks say. In fact … no! One of Heston’s secrets is...

...to cook the food in a water bath, ensuring
the ultimate temperature to trap the flavour

He also uses Liquid Nitrogen to do
magic with food.

After the presentation we started the beautiful private  dinner at the Mandarin Grill.

Here Heston and his team are working hard to impress us

 

Heston Blumenthal started his famed Fat Duck in an old pub in Bray near London  in 1995.  The challenge of this impossibly cramped  locale lead him to seek scientific ways of achieving culinary perfection. Gradually he moved on from French bistro classics to evolutionary cooking that bent or ignored old clichéd  cooking rules, combining old and new. By the time he got his third Michelin star (2004), he was into the psychology of cooking too….

The idea is that taste is subjective and surrounding experiences and memories change your taste perceptions.  At the Mandarin Grill we experienced an example of sound-enhanced food…

Sound of the sea (from inside a shell): Here you
eat beautiful seafood listening to the waves...
Proved to give you a even better
taste experience

 

 More edible treasure from the realms of the Fat Duck:

The graceful Duck

 

Botrytis cinerea

Finishing :

Like a kid in a sweet shop