"heston blumenthal" news and stories

We were pretty excited to hear the news that "The Big Fish Fight," a U.K.-based show featuring superstar chefs Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay was taking on the dark side of the fishing industry. But the news got even juicier yesterday when bad-boy Gordon Ramsay told The Daily Mail that while in Costa Rica filming his episode on the illegal shark-fin trade, things got downright harrowing for the chef when he got close to a Taiwanese crew with a full load of fins and a stash of cocaine. The story continued to be a nail biter when he crossed paths with a shady character named Enrique, who is thought to be the third largest supplier of shark fins in the world.

The experience includes cars with ominously darkened windows, pointed steely rifles and chilling threats of bodily harm. In the backdrop? The sheer gruesomeness of sharks being shocked with electric prods, their fins sliced from their bodies, and then being thrown back into the sea to die.

"At one [point], I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me," Ramsay told The Daily Mail.

A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:

Bravo announces that "Top Chef Masters'" will be renewed for a second season, this time with the addition of Food & Wine's Gail Simmons to the judges' table.

Chicago pizza lover Craig Scharoff takes a bet to eat only sausage pizza for one month and, with a little over a week left, Scharoff has actually lost a few pounds, owing to the fact that he no longer eats his kids' leftovers.

We know you'll be lining up for the Heston Blumenthal-endorsed SousVide Supreme, the first to market sous vide machine for the ambitious home cook who can't live without the tender texture and flavor the cooking method yields.

In surprising and annoying study news, researchers found that in addition to red wine, prolonged contact with white wine erodes tooth enamel -- making teeth more sensitive to cold, hot and sweet food, as well as staining. Even more surprising is that brushing teeth after drinking white wine worsens the damage.

The new edition of classic cooking tome "Larousse Gastronomique" arrives in stores with a thud, weighing in at eight pounds and 1,206 pages, with updates from avant-garde chefs such as Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller along with recipes for traditional French dishes like crepes suzettes.

Oyster, passion fruit jelly and lavender at the Fat Duck. Photo: smashz, Flickr

The Fat Duck restaurant is one of the world's finest eateries and has the statistics to prove it -- three Michelin stars, a number two rating by S. Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurants, among them -- but it's the number 529 that has stuck with the restaurant since February.

That's the number of customers who fell ill with vomiting and diarrhea at the Bray, England restaurant, and forced its two-week closure. Now, Britain's Health Protection Agency has published a 47-page report pinning the blame on norovirus caused by oysters contaminated with human sewage, the Daily Telegraph reports.

A little yogurt can elevate ho-hum marinated chicken to new levels of deliciousness.

There's quite a bit of buzz about Heston Blumenthal's new cookbook, at least on the other side of the pond. One of the masters of molecular gastronomy and the owner of three Micheline star The Fat Duck, Mr. Blumenthal is renowned for his amazing, and amazingly complex food.

Now he's brought his molecular know-how to the masses...sort of. His new cookbook, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, is a huge, 516 page, 12 pound, £100 ($200-though I found it for about $145) monster. I quite frankly have a hard time believing that many people are going to be rushing out to get it, especially at this economically uncertain time. It's pointed out in both of the articles in the Guardian this week, that not only is the book expensive, but it requires expensive and hard to find ingredients and equipment. Both of those aspects make it less likely that anyone would do anything more than drool over the reportedly exquisite photography.

Still, I'd love to be able to get a look at the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. I wonder if my local library will be getting this tome? If I could take pictures and see what recipes I could make, I'd definitely be one happy cook. Unfortunately, I think the library is the only way many people would be able to get a look at it.