"heston blumenthal" news and stories

Inspired by the bacon ice cream presented on last night's Top Chef, we're bumping this older post back to the top.

Deliciously demented maestro of molecular gastronomy Heston Blumenthal (chef & owner of the massively Michelin-starred UK restaurant The Fat Duck) shares his signature Bacon & Egg Ice Cream technique and recipe.

Nab our Pecan-Brown Sugar & Bacon Ice Cream recipe (from Joanna Pruess's Seduced By Bacon)

AOL Food's Top 11 Bacon Fantasies

Known for his cutting edge experiments, er, cooking at one of the world's top restaurants, The Fat Duck, chef Heston Blumenthal is not a man to shy away from a challenge. When he bought a pub, the Hinds Head, he thought he would have to leave his chemistry set in the car and cook more traditional pub fare. While some of the dishes are quite ordinary, what the diners didn't realize is that Blumenthal has a more unusual definition of "tradition" than most.

Instead of simply looking for classic favorites to serve at his pub, like fish and chips, he looked through medieval cookbooks as a jumping off place. Dishes like "quaking pudding" from the 15th century were cooked up, along with "chocolate wine" from the early 1700s. The most disturbing recipe, which seems to be what engouraged his curiosity for the old-fashioned cooking, is as follows, recounted by Blumenthal:

Source

But you won't be able to click over and surf through his archives just yet.

The chef of Fat Duck in Britain is putting his research, notes, recipes and photographs online, using a wiki-style system. He and his two sets of staff do "research" and "experiments" in their kitchen laboratory, which Blumenthal would like to keep for posterity. He agrees with Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Spain, who told him that "they were trying to log information, because you are involved in something that is changing the face of gastronomy."

Eventually, he says he would leave the archives to the country. Perhaps a library. For now, only Blumenthal and his staff will be able to access the online files with varying levels of security.