Drinking Now
Published: (04-11-2008)
Author: Nigel Huddleston
Heston Blumenthal
Fat Duck chef and sherry fan
Do you experiment on alcohol in your research kitchen at the Fat Duck?
I’ve wanted to do flavour pairing, looking at flavour compounds in the food to give you clues to possible new combinations with wine, but never really got round to doing it. Sherry’s the first time I’ve done it (for Vinos de Jerez with Reading University] and I’d like to follow it up. It’s something we really need to do.
Where did your passion for sherry come from?
It was from a wine merchant I was dealing with when I was in my early twenties. We had the first batch of aged sherries come in and I’d never tasted anything like it before. I just thought it was the great aunt’s favourite tipple. It was a revelation to me.
Do you think your work in matching sherry and food will get ordinary people drinking sherry?
It still might be an acquired taste for people, but the first step is to realise its versatility and how many foods it goes with, but also the combination of certain sherries with certain foods.
Some people call what you do molecular gastronomy. What do you think of so-called molecular mixology?
I don’t like the term molecular gastronomy. It gives the impression of walking round with test tubes and clipboards. We’re still cooking, but we’ve got more technology now. There’s no reason why you can’t do the same with cocktails.
The vertically split glass of hot and cold mulled wine on the Christmas special: tell us the secret.
We made it with a gelling agent and pureéd it, so it looks like a liquid but actually it’s a broken-up solid. When you heat one side it seems more viscous than the side that stays cold. But to make the cold side more viscous and seem more fluid in the mouth you can increase the acidity. It took about a year to get it to work.