Ordinary Gweilo

ATV World are showing Heston Blumenthal’s series In Search of Perfection on Tuesday nights.

I’ve only watched one so far, but it was a wonderfully bizarre program.

When Heston does sausage and mash, you won’t be surprised that he goes to great trouble to source the finest organic pork and even travels up to the farm to see the happy pigs.  You probably also won’t be surprised that he boils the sausages and then finishes them in a frying pan.

What might surprise you is that he doesn’t believe that sausages should be 99% meat, instead preferring to include more ‘filler’.  This is a traditional ingredient, and it gave rise to the joke about a German saying how much he likes English bread, but can’t understand why we call it "sausage".  Obviously Blumenthal is not including as much filler as those mass-produced sausages, but he does feel that some is required.  And he’s probably right.

Still on the bread theme, you might also be surprised that this recipe (which appears in modified form in The Times) calls for mass-produced sliced white bread:

Lay 6 slices of sliced white bread on baking sheets. Place them in the oven and leave for 30–40 minutes, until the bread is an even dark brown colour throughout. Break up the bread and put it into a large bowl. Fill the bowl with cold water and set aside for at least 1 hour.

Drain the soaked oven-baked bread pieces into a colander set over a bowl, then squeeze the bread to extract as much water as possible. Pour 400ml of the toast- flavoured water into the jug containing the spice mix, stir and place in the fridge to chill.

Yes, that’s right, the bread is used to make toast-flavoured water.  Not an ingredient that I’d ever have considered….   

You also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he went to great trouble to find the best treacle for Treacle Tart.  What you probably wouldn’t have expected was that after all of that he would decide that none of them was as good as Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup.

I guess he knows what he’s doing, but eccentric doesn’t even begin to describe his approach to food.