Food from the Fat Duck - Is it possible to make?

Looking back on previous posts I find that I have been going on and on about two topics: The Modernist Cuisine book (or books, rather) and the chef Heston Blumenthal. And to all of you who just read that sentence thinking "At last there is something else", I have to say I am sorry, but no. Today I will be taking a closer look at the first modernist cookbook I got hold of, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook containing recipes from Heston's famous restaurant The Fat Duck.

This is a great book in more than one way. First of all it is big and heavy and well made with four sateen bookmarks. The first part of the book describes why and how Heston became a chef

and what lead him on to the path that eventually made him start experimenting with new ideas in food. In the second part are the recipes, and the third part describes some of the science involved. And all over are gorgeous pictures and great art. 

This was, as I said, the first cookbook I got that had this new, fancy food in it. When I first started reading it, I enjoyed it enormously, but I did not think I would ever be able to make any of the food. These dishes often use lots of ingredients a normal amateur has not heard of. They also often require equipment that is normally not found in an ordinary kitchen. They are very long and very elaborate, one dish can contain ten different elements or more and may take days to prepare. A dish often spans 4-6 pages in the book. Ok, the first part of each recipe is the story behind the dish, but you still have a lot of pages full of unknown ingredients and tools. So I definitely thought they were out of reach.

But that was before I started reading Modernist Cuisine, before I got a sous vide set-up and other stuff at home and before these strange ingredients actually started to appear in internet stores and even in stores here in Oslo. And on the web, more and more sites written by ordinary blokes report successful projects. So now the task does not seem impossible any more. I have decided to try to make food from the Fat Duck.

I actually thought I would be very brave and start a project to cook all the recipes and document it on the blog. That would be a great, new thing. But, then I stumbled over another blog called The Big Fat Undertaking, where a Dutch student had done just that and succeeded. You can find the blog here:

http://thebigfatundertaking.wordpress.com/

So that project sort of imploded. But, starting tomorrow, I will be trying out Fat Duck recipes on my blog. I may not do them all, but I will try to go through a good number of them. First out will be the Red Cabbage Gazpacho with mustard ice cream.

Stay Tuned.