Poke your head around the kitchen door at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s award-winning restaurant, and you’re probably in for a surprise. This hybrid kitchen-laboratory plays home not only to ovens and stoves, but to centrifuges, Petri dishes and vats of liquid nitrogen.
While many folk like to boast of their experimentation in the kitchen, few have gone so far as to put a chicken breast in an MRI scanner to examine the effects of a marinade. But self-taught Blumenthal has thrown away the rulebook of traditional cookery and based his recipes on painstaking experiment.
The resulting dishes (such as snail porridge and bacon and egg ice-cream) blow away our preconceptions of how foods should be prepared and combined. This is where science and fine dining meet.
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