Heston Blumenthal
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2006
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the chef Heston Blumenthal. He is one of only three chefs working in Britain today to be awarded three Michelin stars and last year his restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named the best in the world by a panel of 5,000 food experts.
His speedy rise to the top of his profession is little short of extraordinary. He has only ever spent a week in a professional kitchen and taught himself classical French cookery. He became fascinated by the science of cooking and has become the Willy Wonka of modern cuisine - dishes he's created include mango and douglas fir puree, salmon poached with liquorice and, most famously, snail porridge. But he acknowledges his success has been largely due too to his wife's support and now wants to change the balance of his life towards spending more time with his young family.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Love has Finally Come at Last by Bobby Womack Book: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee Luxury: Japanese knives
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006. My castaway this week is the three Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal. He's one of only three chefs in Britain to hold that ultimate culinary accolade. |
| 0:37.0 | An achievement made all the more astonishing given that he taught himself to cook at home, |
| 0:41.0 | and had only ever spent one week working in a professional kitchen |
| 0:44.6 | before opening his own restaurant. Last year that restaurant, the Fat Duck, was named |
| 0:49.1 | the best in the world by an international panel of 500 experts. |
| 0:54.0 | His approach to food is, to say the least, unconventional, a sort of Willie Wonka of contemporary |
| 0:58.9 | cuisine. |
| 0:59.8 | He astonishes his diners with fanciful menus of sardines on toast sorbet and the now |
| 1:05.0 | legendary snail porridge. |
| 1:07.4 | It's the science of food that really gets him going, and his particular approach, dubbed molecular gastronomy, |
| 1:13.4 | means he spends almost as much time with test tubes and pipettes |
| 1:17.0 | as he does slaving over a hot stove. |
| 1:19.4 | So, Heston Blumenthal, are those three Michelin stars the highest conventional |
| 1:24.4 | recognition for a very unconventional chef? What do they mean to you? |
| 1:28.0 | I think it's only now just sunk in, to be honest, that was a couple of years ago and the six months |
| 1:34.7 | following actually being awarded the third star spent most of the time apologizing to people that in |
| 1:38.8 | literally I don't know why we've got it. Do you feel like you deserve it?? After a couple of years, now everything's settled down. |
| 1:45.0 | I love what I do. |
| 1:46.0 | And I'd never cooked to try and achieve accolades. |
| 1:49.0 | So to get it on that basis, for me, is even better. |
... |
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