Interview with Heston Blumenthal
Heston Blumenthal is a British chef.
Gut-Brain Axis
Contents
Max Raskin: I want to start with your morning routine — when your eyes open in the morning, what happens next?
Heston Blumenthal: I lay in bed a little bit. I do a bit of a meditation lying in bed…we’re lucky we have a comfortable bed. Just being in the moment. I get up, I brush my teeth.
MR: Do you floss?
HB: No, I've got something called a Waterpik, which is a jet of water. I do it thinking about how my gut feels because there's microbiome connected to your teeth. Then I hang from a door for a minute.
MR: What do you mean you hang from a door?
HB: I just hang from a door which stretches my spine.
MR: Wow.
HB: And I've got this little Japanese monk who is a gardener. He's done a little Zen book — every day a little page. It could be making a cup of coffee mindfully. Taking you through the mindful process. One day, one page. Then I fill in a gratitude book.
I do some exercise because since my diagnosis — I'm bipolar — I've been on medication and the medication has helped give me quite a big tummy. So I'm in the process of trying to remove that. I take the mountain bike out and go for a run and then start.
MR: Do you listen to music when you run?
HB: Yes, I listen to music, and I also sometimes listen to podcasts.
MR: What kind of podcasts do you listen to and what music do you like listening to?
HB: There’s a great book by an American woman with a double-barreled name who wrote a book called How Emotions Are Made.
I have the widest variety of likes of music. I can say what I don't like: I don't like gothic rock, I don't like industrial house. I do like house music, but industrial house, no. In general, pop, I'm not such a big fan of, otherwise, it just depends on what mood.
Never Drink the Same Wine Twice
MR: Don’t you have people listen to music when they eat your food?
HB: I did it with wine. I had three glasses of red wine for a room of about 600 people and I played the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite, then I played “Carmina Burana,” and then I played the “The Girl from Ipanema” and asked them to rate the wines. Soft or sharp and likability out of 10. There was a massive difference in results between the three wines. And when I told the audience they were the same wines, I'd just changed the tune, they didn't believe me. So I had them try it without the music.
MR: Do you consider yourself a trickster?
HB: No, I wouldn't call it trickster. I'm discovering things with myself and my relationship to eating and drinking and it helps me discover more things about the subject.
[Grabs a pen.]
So if I write the word “wine” in a certain sharp, jagged way, and you have a sip of wine, then if I write the word “wine” in this softer more bubble-letter way — I think it works with coffee as well — you have a sip looking at the words and the soft letters make the wine taste softer. But you have to keep the same hand because sometimes it tastes different from the left and the right hand.
MR: Really?
HB: I did it the other day with a friend of mine. I have a sip of wine and stroke my hair this way and then have another sip and stroke it the other way, and the taste was more rough when you stroke my head backwards.
MR: Does that make you skeptical? There are all these experiments where sommeliers are not able to tell the difference between good wine and bad wine — or even red and white wine when they’re dyed. Since so much of a meal is the emotional content of it, does that make you skeptical or make you think that the food itself or the wine itself is just an empty canvas, and it doesn't particularly matter what you cook?
HB: No. There was a Greek guy some couple of thousand plus years ago called Heraclitus and he said, "No man puts his leg in the same river twice. The man is never the same and the river's never the same." You can eat exactly the same food every day for two months, it won't be the same and without getting too deep into it, your caca won't be the same.
MR: Your caca?
HB: Poo.
MR: Oh, your poo!
HB: The poo won't be the same.
We go throughout the day, and we operate in different emotional states — we might be stressed, angry, happy, sad, excited — and the connection between the brain and the gut plays a major part in generating these moods. If you are angry, then you'll have some inflammation in your body and that will affect the activity of your gut bacteria. A friend of mine, an amazing professor who is one of the world's leading experts on touch, has done an amazing experiment.
He took he took rats and fed them the same food every day. He measured their microbiome before the experiment and over a couple months. Half of the rats were left alone, the other half were petted. After one week the microbiome of the stroked mice changed quite dramatically, the diversity of it. Even the sense of touch can have an effect.
So in terms of food, the food you eat is never exactly the same either. The person's never the same and the food's never the same. I mean if you buy a mass-produced Kit Kat or something, the companies do so much work to try and get them to be the same every single time. So it gets close to the same, but you don't enjoy it the same way each time you eat it.
Heston’s Habits
MR: Would you describe yourself as a creature of habit or not?
HB: I don't know, actually.
MR: Do you eat the same thing every morning for breakfast?
HB: No. Sometimes I don't eat breakfast.
MR: Do you snack during the day?
HB: Not every day. Sometimes I do. I put that down to my chef-iness because chefs are big snackers.
MR: What's your favorite thing to snack on?
HB: If there's a piece of bread, I'll take half a slice, put a bit of butter on it and put some ham in it. Or it could be the crispy Japanese seaweed flakes.
MR: What do you drink during the day?
HB: I drink a lot of water. I have tea in the morning.
MR: What kind of tea?
HB: Generally, rooibos. Sometimes I like Assam, sometimes Oolong, sometimes Earl Gray, occasionally lapsang.
MR: How do you take your tea?
HB: Black — apart from if I'm drinking some English breakfast teas, I might put a drop of milk. But there’s this milk I discovered in France, which isn't milk. Tastes like breakfast milk, but I don't know what it is yet.
MR: What is it?
HB: No, I don't know what it is.
I'll also have one or two cups of coffee. I've got a coffee machine I helped design, which is really cool, but I won't drink coffee after two o'clock.
MR: My dad loves your grill.
HB: Brilliant.
MR: Where do you get your eyeglasses?
HB: I designed them with a guy called Tom Davies in London.
MR: A lot of chefs like wearing the same thing every day. They have a uniform. Do you?
HB: I wear the same thing. I don't know if I put it down to my ADHD, but all my socks are black. This might change, but at the moment I wear the same black trousers and the same tops. I've got multiples of them.
MR: Where are they from?
MR: Is there a store you like shopping at?
HB: No, not really. Just things I'm comfortable in. I've got trousers that are Boss. My T-shirt is something like Zara, but not Zara. They're not expensive clothes. I do have quite a few expensive clothes, but I just don't tend to wear them. I haven’t got it on now but I've got a crest, a coat of arms.
MR: Is there any pen you are particular about using?
HB: There’re pens that I write better with. I like writing with fountain pens, but funny enough, plastic see-through classic BIC pens. I'm happy writing with those. I like writing with pencil. My writing's quite fluid. I’m left-handed but I don’t write like most left-handed people. I’ll hold the pen up more.
MR: My dad's left-handed. I think you'd get along with my dad.
HB: I can write with both.
MR: We’re in New York now — when you come to New York, is there a place that you love to eat?
HB: I realized I haven't been here for 10 years, so I’m completely out of touch with New York restaurants.
MR: Do you pick up a hot dog or anything like that?
HB: Yeah, because my wife has never been. The first morning we went to Katz's Deli.
Bipolar
MR: Do people ask you a lot about being bipolar?
HB: What started to happen is people come up to me to say they've got it or a friend or relative has it or had it. They started opening up, which is really good.
MR: Do you ever feel the questions get too invasive?
HB: No, not really.
MR: Do you go to therapy?
HB: I used to, but not at the moment. I should do it. I believe in it. I believe in it big time. I've had a lot of therapy.
MR: For someone who knows nothing about bipolar, how would you describe it?
HB: You get big mood swings. If mine was a graph it would go up and down. When it goes down, I have the chance of being the Incredible Hulk and biting the corner off my telephone. It was always my objects, no one else's. I've done three telephones before and I've done a TV as well…just the corner. That's anger, but that only lasts a few seconds. Then when it goes up to the highs, I could do all sorts of things. We went to honeymoon to the Taj Mahal and I licked the wall to see what it tasted like. I had to look around to make sure no one was watching. It was very neutral.
MR: So it didn’t taste like Indian food?
HB: No, no. It didn't taste like Indian food. There was no taste.
MR: How do you feel right now?
HB: In what way?
MR: However you want to answer it.
HB: I feel relaxed. I feel a bit tired because I'm still jet lagged.
MR: Do you enjoy traveling or do you not enjoy traveling?
HB: I used to do a lot of traveling, but I don't. We travel from England to France a lot. We do that almost weekly, but then it's a one-and-a-half-hour flight, 40 minute drive to the airport, 20 minute drive to the restaurant and there's no time difference. I had a restaurant in Australia for six months and I flew I don't know how many times…a lot. I found that I actually got used to the jet lag in the end.
Cooking with Rotten Tomatoes
MR: Do you like watching TV?
HB: Yeah, I like watching films and series or documentaries on Netflix, Prime, Disney Plus, on those channels.
MR: Do you binge-watch things?
HB: Yes, we binge-watched something a couple of weeks ago: Mr. Bates vs The Post Office. It's brilliant.
What I do is I look at Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. If IMDb is anywhere eight or over and Rotten Tomatoes anywhere in the 90s, that's a pretty good indicator that it's going to be good. We binge-watched a genre that I'm not interested in, which is zombies.
Cordyceps and The Last of Us
MR: I love zombies! Does your wife like zombies?
HB: We’ve never been into zombie movies, but there’s this one show called The Last of Us. It's brilliant. The fungi Cordyceps have taken over. I've eaten loads of those, so it’s quite funny. It's a really clever premise that the fungi have taken over human beings.
MR: Me and my wife just watched the second season finale.
HB: Don't say anything!
MR: I won't say anything. But the second episode of this season…was that not one of the best episodes of TV ever
HB: Oh, it is brilliant. They do a really good job of having a period of serenity and you just know something's going to kick off. I didn't expect the bit when [spoiler], but it's really good.
MR: You mentioned you did a meditation. Do you have any kind of religious practice?
HB: No.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
HB: Yes.
MR: What do you think it is?
HB: I think everything on this planet makes a sound. Either it's audible or inaudible. Sunlight makes a sound. We can't hear it. We've got a very narrow bandwidth of sound. While I’m talking to you now, I'm creating sound, reverberations, and those reverberations never disappear. They just keep on. It keeps on going and it disappears from its audible level, but it's going to be in your memory and it's going to be out there in the ether. So after I die, all the things that I've done and all the things that I said still exist. So that is in terms of afterlife that I believe in.
MR: Do you believe that you'll experience that in any way?
HB: I've thought of that before, but I don't have an answer to that. So after I'm dead, will I have any experience of it? And it's an interesting concept. I don't disagree with it, but I believe that we're in a very complex network of waves and vibrations and stuff that we can't see.
Meal Memories
MR: What's the first meal memory that comes to your mind right now?
HB: The first one, rather than just saying eating an apple or something like that?
MR: Yeah, an actual memory of a meal you’ve had that is coming to your mind now.
HB: I was on a blackboard in a flat in London. I don't know what age I was, I might have been five or four, and I was drawing on the blackboard with chalk and eating the apple. I had chalk and cheese, a piece of cheddar. So there's three things in two hands. I put one down and picked the other one up. I picked up the chalk, thinking it was cheese to go with the apple, and I bit the chalk.
MR: Really?
HB: I remember that one.
My biggest memory I suppose I would say I was seven, and my gran used to take my sister and I to this bric-a-brac market every Saturday, which is the last thing you wanted to do on a Saturday. However, the joy was on the way back, we passed an ice cream parlor, Sicilian-run, and had a big plastic cone above the door and we got a tub of ice cream and it was in a brown paper bag and we couldn't eat it until we got home. I remember looking at this ice cream and you just had to wait every footstep. That's where I think I got love for ice cream. When I started doing the science research stuff on foods, ice cream was my first and biggest subject.
MR: You made all kinds of ice creams, like bacon ice cream?
HB: I've done loads. Baked bean, I did a McDonald's one in private for somebody. I've done sardines on toast.
Cooking for the Queen
MR: You cooked for the Queen of England, correct?
HB: Yeah.
MR: What's that like?
HB: In Windsor Castle. It was amazing.
MR: You're a knight, right? I mean you’ve got crests and honours and stuff.
HB: I've gotten an OBE, which is the Order of the British Empire.
MR: When you cook for her does someone tell you she likes it salty, or she doesn’t like it salty.
HB: We had the people from the castle come to Bray. We had several meetings about what dishes we should do. We did two dishes, and the royal chefs did two dishes.
MR: And what were the two dishes you did?
HB: One was meat fruit and the other one was Black Forest gateau.
MR: What's meat fruit?
HB: It's a Tudor recipe from 1500 and it was called pomme dorée. It was minced beef and pork formed into a ball and rolled, turned over, spit-roasted over a fire, and then basted with a parsley custard. For the TV show, we changed that and we put chicken liver parfait and covered it. I think it became, it is here, the most photographed dish in the world on Instagram.
MR: Was that the most nervous before you cooked in your life? Or did you not really care?
HB: No, I cared a lot. I was really excited.
Last Meal
MR: When you were single and you wanted to impress a woman by cooking, what would be the dish that you would make them?
HB: I never did.
MR: Why not?
HB: Because I was only a single man. I’ve been a solitary man for about seven months in my life. I literally went from one 20-year marriage to a seven-year relationship to another seven-year relationship.
MR: Surely at the beginning, you must have cooked.
HB: I suppose for one of them I loved making roast chicken. But I don’t have a favorite dish. I know people always have answers to these questions.
MR: So we have something here in America called the death penalty.
HB: Yeah — the last supper…I don't have one. I've been asked that a lot, but I don't have a last supper.
The Incredible Edible Egg
MR: I'm particularly interested in eggs. I’ve just perfected poached eggs in the microwave. What's your favorite way to have eggs in the morning?
HB: I could switch. A Friday could be confit in olive oil with temperature really low. You could bubble it in a bit of butter so it gets slightly bubbled and crisp on the outside and do a poached egg and scrambled egg and an omelet. I could be in the mood for any one of those at one time.
MR: It's not the same thing every time?
HB: No.
MR: Do you go to bed late?
HB: No, I go to bed early, generally 11.
MR: And what do you do before bed?
HB: We tend to play backgammon quite regularly. From half six to half seven or eight o'clock, and then we'll watch something.
MR: Will you have a drink at the end of the night?
HB: A glass of red wine.
MR: Do you cook your own dinner?
HB: We generally do, yes.
MR: How often are you in the restaurant now?
HB: Generally, we go almost weekly and spend a couple of days in the restaurant. That’s more than I've done for years when I was a hamster on the wheel with all the TV and other stuff. When you see chefs on TV, they can't be in their restaurants. You can't be in two places at the same time. There's a very famous chef, Paul Bocuse and someone asked him, "Who cooks when you are not there?" He said, "The same people that cook when I'm there." There’s a brigade.
Business of Emotions
MR: What's your favorite book about cooking? Do you have a book that really influenced your cooking?
HB: Harold McGee's book called On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. It came out in 1984 and he took 10 years and he rewrote it. It's brilliant. It's the science of cooking. “Food science” is something you go to the university and get a degree in. This is different, this is the science of cooking. Why do eggs make the soufflés rise, and that kind of stuff.
MR: The Maillard reaction.
HB: It talks about the Maillard reaction, yeah.
MR: What recipe do you think is the most indicative of your style?
HB: I don’t have one. I've probably got 10 or 15 that would sum up that question, but I'll give you one. The “Sound of the Sea.” It’s a box with glass on the bottom, then sand, then a glass top so you can see the sand through the glass. Then there's edible sand, there's sea vegetables that have been foraged from the estuaries in southern England. Various cured fish in different ways, maybe an oyster, and then sea foam.
It looks like the waves are lapping up against the shore. Then we serve it with a seashell, and in the seashell is a tiny iPod. Put the headphones in and you listen to the waves lapping up against the shore while you eat the dish, and that can be really emotive.
I say I'm in the business of emotions. I just happen to use food and cooking to try and generate those emotions.