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Are You Ready for High Cuisine in a Box?

  • Spence Cooper
  • July 15, 2010

Renown chef Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck is one of only three restaurants in the United Kingdom with three Michelin stars. Blumenthal is famous for creating strange and exotic dishes like Smoked Bacon-and-egg Ice Cream, Mousse Poached in Liquid Nitrogen, White Chocolate with Caviar, and Edible Sand.

If you haven’t had the chance or money to visit The Fat Duck to sample Blumenthal’s magic, worry not. Blumenthal has created 20 different products which are slated to go on sale later this year at Waitrose, the 6th largest grocery retailer in the UK. Waitrose is a high-end food retailer with 228 branches across the United Kingdom.

Blumenthal’s Waitrose offerings will include chilled ready meals, store-cupboard ingredients, bakery goods and puddings, Scottish salmon smoked with Lapsong Souchong tea; Ponzu dressing, a citrus-based Japanese dressing made with rice vinegar,maybe some coupons, mirin and konbu, a type of seaweed.

“I have been working on the creation of these dishes with Waitrose for some time,” said Blumenthal. “Just to confirm these are not packets of food I am putting my name to, these are my recipes with Waitrose, recipes I created.

“We have been working together in the Hinds Head kitchens and also in our development kitchen in Bray, coming up with new ideas and new directions. It has been an easy association, Waitrose have done a great job in sourcing from various different producers and they have been exhaustive in their search.”

It’s one thing for movie stars like Paul Newman (rest in peace) to pimp designer salad dressing and spaghetti sauce in supermarkets across the country — after all, Newman was a confessed foodie and all the proceeds from his sales went to charity — but molecular cooking in a store bought box?

Blumenthal inspired retail marketed food smacks of cheap brand name commercialism. What’s next, Fat Duck franchises serving haute cuisine in thirty seconds for people on the go?

And then there’s Gordon Ramsay’s ready meals churned out by his mass production backstreet kitchen in a run-down part of South London.

Apparently dishes such as pork belly, coq au vin, braised pig cheeks, salmon roulade and orange and bitter chocolate tart are prepared in bulk, frozen and then transported in discrete plastic bags by unmarked vans to several of his London locations.

This despite Ramsay’s so-called disdain for packaged food. “My food hell is any ready meal,” Ramsay told Olive Magazine. “It’s so easy to prepare a quick meal using fresh produce .. but people still resort to ready meals that all taste exactly the same”

Israel Pons, a restaurant owner who was excoriated by Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares points out, “We were criticized for making up orders the day before instead of fresh on the day. Restaurants he puts his name to should follow the ethos he stands for”

Later Pons was forced to close his restaurant.

In Ramsay’s defense, a spokesperson for Ramsay said the method of reheating the food — sous-vide -” is used by the world’s best chefs.

In fact, sous-vide cooking method IS used in several gourmet restaurants under Joël Robuchon, Alessandro Stratta, Paul Bocuse, Jesse Mallgren, and may others. According to Blumenthal, “sous-vide cooking is the single greatest advancement in cooking technology in decades”

Sous-vide cooking employs the use of vacuum sealed plastic pouches to slow-cook raw food for extended periods of time at low temperatures. But unlike using a slow cooker, food is cooked at temperatures below the boiling point, between 104°F to 190°F.

To learn more about sous-vide cooking, please read Antonio’s article “Sous-Vide The Complete Guide.”

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