Gourmet Magazine

[lizziee]

Heston,

You were featured in an article "100 Great Things About Restaurants" in the Oct. issue of Gourmet Magazine. They mentioned your newest, revolutionary creations: caviar with white chocolate and sardines on toast ice cream. What led you to these flavor combinations? How was it conceived? Would you give a more detailed description of each dish?

[Heston Blumenthal]

Hello Lizziee

The caviar and white chocolate combination is now a couple of years old but still a very strong dish and one the one that opened up the whole world of possibilites of flavour combining.

There is an obvious reason why you could argue that white chocolate and caviar go together and that is because of the fact that you are pairing fat and salt

The combination however runs a lot deeper than that. The amine levels in caviar and white chocolate are such that the two ingredients almost "melt" together.

This lead me to start experimenting with other amine rich foods. Cheese being one of them. Sure enough, in certain forms this combination worked very well indeed.

I then decided to test this theory of combining foods with similar flavour profiles by looking at two flavours that, to me definately did not go together; coffee and basil. We looked at the flavour profiles of these two ingredients that, when tasted together really were quite unpleasant

and do you know what? They had nothing in common!

The sardines on toast ice cream came about while talking to someone about the bacon and egg ice cream that we were allready serving. I think that I suggested, initially as a joke, that we could make bacon and egg on toast ice cream.

I then started thinking-why not try buttered toast in an ice cream mix?

We tried all sorts of things from chip butties to sausage rolls, burgers to marmelade on toast.

The sardines on toast idea was fuelled by the fact that it was a real childhood taste for me.

It wasnt as straight forward as that, as we had to do quite a bit of work on the ice cream mix itself-getting the flavour and texture right.

In the restaurant, we serve it with a wafer thin (sliced on a meat slicer) piece of sour dough walnut bread with a few grains of gruyere on it, half dried and cubes of tomato ketchup jelly with some parsley oil.