As chefs of two of the world’s most influential, risk-taking restaurants, Grant Achatz and Heston Blumenthal are often compared to one another. Now, it turns out, Achatz’s Alinea Book and Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck Cookbook are scheduled for release within a week of each other this fall—and they have taken very similar approaches to translating their cuisines into print. Gourmet’s Christy Harrison spoke with the chefs about the writing process, the audiences they hope to reach with their books, and their feelings about the term “molecular gastronomy.”
Heston Blumenthal: How are you doing, Grant? How’s your health—I’ve heard you are doing much better?
Grant Achatz: Oh yeah. Cancer, that’s nothing, man.
HB: So fully on the mend?
GA: Yeah, it’s completely gone. Now I just need to try to gain some weight back, which isn’t too difficult, to be completely honest with you. I just eat a lot of ice cream.
HB: Wow, that’s incredible. I wonder how much of [your recovery] is kind of mind over matter.
GA: Well, obviously I credit the doctors, and they’re phenomenal. But everyone was kind of surprised that it happened so quickly and that I responded to the treatment so well.
HB: That’s fantastic news. I’m really glad to hear it.
Christy Harrison: Me too. And now you’re hard at work on your cookbook, I understand. It’s interesting that you both have books coming out at the same time. Grant, you’re going a nontraditional route with yours—you’re self-publishing, and you’re also publishing the exact recipes used in the Alinea kitchen instead of tweaking them for the home cook. What were the reasons for that choice?
GA: For us, we felt the most important thing was to express the restaurant in its most accurate fashion, and try to convey to the reader what Alinea and the food are all about. We felt that if we eliminated some of the techniques because they were too difficult, or some of the ingredients because they were too hard to find, then you would be left with something that’s not representative of the restaurant or of the cuisine itself. So our effort was to convey the emotion, the expression, the essence of the restaurant, and also hopefully—if the recipes are written well enough—to dispel the myth that cooking in this style is impossible for somebody who isn’t a professional cook. I think that people will be surprised when they see the recipes written step by step—it’s really not that hard to do. Of course we’re going to have the typical source guide telling you where to find some of the ingredients; and obviously most folks aren’t going to have a Pacojet or a rotary meat slicer at home, and so we’ll offer ways to get around that. And in some cases we’ll have to say that if you don’t have, say, a Pacojet or liquid nitrogen, you’re not going to be able to do this. We felt that was okay in these cases, because there are so many recipes in the book that it really boils down to how ambitious people want to get in their own kitchens.
CH: Heston, are you planning something similar in your cookbook?
HB: Yeah, I’m completely with Grant on this one—we’re making absolutely no concessions whatsoever. We’re printing exactly the recipes [we use in the restaurant]. We went through a whole process—as you know, Grant, when you’re working in the kitchen you don’t make things for four people, you don’t start the whole thing from scratch. We started looking at reducing some of the quantities down to a more manageable size, but we found that if you started to divide the various ingredients and scale a recipe down for four or six people, if you had [an ingredient] like gelling gum, which you use in small quantities [anyway], you might end up with something like 0.021 grams. So we actually decided to make a caveat at the beginning of the recipe section that these are literally Fat Duck recipes stuck in the book. And Grant, I agree about the book needing to be an expression of the restaurant, and of you as the brains behind it. If you look at your food, you see that actually you don’t wake up in the morning and say “I’m going to have a go at this today.” It’s not a random process; often it’s something that’s been kind of bubbling away in the back of your mind for months. And I think those thought processes can be fascinating for the reader. To see the journey the dish goes through, to see how we take an idea or a concept or a technique and farm it out to different dishes, where it gets tweaked and honed. I just think that having that knowledge, putting that across, gets under the skin of the chef. We have a lot of that in the book.
GA: For us, we even went as far as breaking a pretty major rule here in the States: We’re doing all the recipes in Metric.
HB: Is it common to find recipes in grams and cups?
GA: That’s kind of what they wanted us to do at the beginning. Ten Speed Press is distributing the book—we’re self-publishing, we have 100 percent control, but Ten Speed was like, if you want to sell cookbooks, there’s no way people in the U.S. are going to buy it if you make them go out and buy a digital scale. And we said, well, then tough! Because like Heston just said, you can’t accurately weigh some of these things in 1/2 teaspoons and 1/8 teaspoons. You have to have an accurate gram scale; that’s just the way it is. So it’s going to be really interesting how people will respond to that.
HB: Grant, that’s a very wise move, self-publishing. I was lucky—and it’s only now that I realize that there was a big chunk of luck involved in it. We interviewed eight publishers, and we chose Bloomsbury because they seemed to really get what I wanted. From the beginning I said that I really don’t care about the money (probably not the best thing to say!), that I don’t care if I get no advance, if I get nothing at all—what I care about is having the book done the way that I want. There are always going to be some financial and practical constraints, but to a certain extent I just want the book that I want.
So I made all the right noises; and now we’ve gotten to this stage where it’s been delayed because I keep wanting more stuff in there. The book’s been getting bigger and bigger.
GA: How big is it?
HB: There are about 120,000 to 140,000 words of text right now. Loads of text. We’ve got 700-something pages, but with the weight of paper we want, we can only have about 450 to 500. And the book is in three sections: The first section is sort of biographical; the second will be 50-odd recipes and sub-recipes; then there’s the section on science. We’ll have info on ice cream science, meat science, etc., and a bit on equipment and ingredients; then there are 18 pieces by different academics (including a hydrocolloid specialist, the head of the UK Synaesthesia Association, somebody who works on pain and pleasure mechanisms, a perfumier, a flavorist, etc.). I’m sort of writing through those sections about how I translate the science into my work. I don’t want to leave anything out, but I might have to reduce the text in that third section and have it be like a reference book. But in those first two sections I wanted to try and have a lot of white page space, and we’ve got two photographers and an illustrator too.
What about yours, Grant? Yours must be—
GA: It’s big. I mean, it’s not 700 pages, but it’s big.
HB: I don’t think ours can be either. [The publishers] are being very polite—actually very clever: They’re saying, we’re not going to ask you to leave anything out, so if you want this type of book you’ll have to reduce the thickness of your paper by half—knowing that I’m not going to want to do that.
GA: I think right now we’re at about 425 pages. We just received what they call the dummy or the test-bind; we went with 10 inches by 13 inches, and it’s laid out horizontally as opposed to vertically. It’s a heavy book.
HB: I think ours is probably about 10 by 13 too, but vertical and not horizontal. Actually we’re probably about neck in neck, because I got my [dummy] about 10 days ago. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been living with this on the flipping computer screen for so long that to actually see something that looks like a book is pretty exciting.
GA: Yes, very exciting.
HB: When’s yours due out?
GA: October 15.
HB: Wow, I think that’s within a week [of mine]!
GA: Yeah? Ours is really photography-heavy, too. We’ve been fortunate enough to have a photographer in the restaurant every day. She just sets up her lights in the dining room and we do the deal. I remember when I was helping Thomas [Keller] do his book, he set up to photograph in his house, which is right on the property at the French Laundry—and it was kind of a pain in the butt running back and forth to the kitchen. But this is basically like serving dinner: You plate one or two dishes and you take them out there.
CH: It sounds like your books both really take a lot of risks. What audience are you hoping to attract?
HB: I don’t know about the States, but in the UK £40 is a really serious cost barrier for publishers. No chef has ever done a book more than 40 quid. I wanted mine to be more expensive than 40 quid, and eventually they accepted it. Then 40 became 50, became 60, and now I think it’s at 100. So it’s an interesting question because I don’t know—I’m hoping it’s got an international market. And like Achie [Achatz]—there are so many interesting parallels here—if you look at the reputation and stature that Grant’s got now with Alinea, I think there are going to be chefs all over the world wanting to buy the book, and I’m hoping that’ll be the case with the Fat Duck book as well. Whereas if you take chefs like Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and Gordon [Ramsay], because of the main audience of their publications, those are going to sell really heavily in the big bookstores. But because of the size [of the Fat Duck book], it’s literally not going to sit on a conventional bookshelf. At one point I made the mistake of saying to a publisher “I don’t care how many copies it sells,” and I could see their jaw dropping, see them going “nooooo!”
GA: It’s really an interesting game when you start thinking about the marketability and the audience, and who you’re writing the book for. Ultimately we ended up writing the book for ourselves. But we also want to sell some books; and we ended up pricing it at $50—which, for a 425-page book of that size, is going to be a relative bargain.
HB: Is that also because you’re self-publishing, and presumably you’ve got fewer middlemen to get involved? I don’t actually quite know how that works.
GA: Yeah, basically—you are the one controlling costs, and you have the power to hire the photographers you want and the writers you want. But ultimately we wanted it to be approachable on the price scale. If we make less money we make less money, but I wanted people to be able to pick it up. I think it would be great if we could get aggressive amateur cooks, and even people in the industry—it’s priced at that point where it might infiltrate the market a bit more. It might educate people on what this cuisine is and why we do what we do. We focus in the book on dispelling some of the myths and some of the negativity that swirl around this type of cuisine. The critics are saying this is emotionless cuisine, it has no soul; so we’re trying to combat those kinds of critiques, and when people get their hands on the book and read what we have to say, they might actually understand our cuisine a little better. It’s worth the effort.
HB: I actually have agreed with the publishers that after a year, we’re going to do a £30 one. So the book will get scaled down; it’ll still have all the information in there, but it will just be a smaller book, so the accessibility comes in at that point. But to hear those comments that [our style of cuisine] is dehumanizing cooking and reducing it to a test-tube, people are completely misunderstanding it. If you really wanted to be a purist about it, man should only ever cook over fire, not use anything electrical.
CH: That’s interesting, because it seems like your cuisines are actually so much about emotion and imparting some sort of feeling to the eater.
HB: I’m not saying that Grant or I are any more emotional than a classically minded cook. Chefs take ingredients, do things with them, and serve them to people; but we have more ingredients, more equipment, and more knowledge than we’ve ever had—so it’s even more exciting. And excitement is an emotion. And do you think that we get any less excited than somebody who serves a nice roasted leg of lamb with some rosemary and onion compote or something? That could form part of any of our dishes anyway, but it’s just that we interpret them in our own style. And that actually becomes—I don’t dare to say more emotional, but it’s certainly a way to give excitement and pleasure to the people eating your food.
CH: So do you guys foresee that these books will make the scientific approach to cooking more common in everyday households? Or will it still remain a specialized niche for people who really want to challenge themselves?
GA: Well, I don’t think it’s going to become mainstream for people to cook like this every night, and that’s certainly not my intention. But, for instance, I know a lot of people who aren’t cooks but who enjoy throwing dinner parties and entertaining at home—and they’re cooking out of the French Laundry cookbook, or they’re cooking out of Charlie Trotter’s cookbook. When those books came out 8 or 10 years ago, people were like “oh, we can never do this at home”—and now people are cooking out of them regularly when they entertain. So now there are books coming out that show updated versions of what the greatest restaurants in the world are doing, and I think it’s just going to keep filtering down. I don’t think people are going to be running out and buying a lot of expensive equipment for their home; but a lot of the ingredients [we use] are things you can go to the store and buy, which is another misconception. And I think people will buy [our] books and pick the recipes they want to try based on their skill level.
HB: One of the ways these books could have real influence is when people thumb through the index and say “I wonder what he’s doing with potatoes,” and they pull out one of the techniques used in the process of making a dish. I don’t think people will pick up the Fat Duck cookbook or Grant’s cookbook and fall over in shock because they’ll never be able to do any of it. We’ll still have lots of little bits and techniques that people can pull out and use at home—or even better, that might spark off an idea for somebody to go and give something else a try.
GA: Yeah, in fact, we’re going to have a paragraph in there about how it would carry on the spirit of the restaurant if people didn’t carry out the recipe verbatim, but if they read the recipe, looked at the photo, and were inspired to do a dish of their own. That sense of creativity is what we’re trying to convey. It would be really cool if people did that.
CH: And Grant, people who buy your book will also get access to the “Alinea Mosaic,” the companion website where readers can give feedback and ask questions.
GA: Yeah, we felt it was really important to do an online component. We’re all kind of web geeks.
HB: We’re getting there, but I don’t want to talk about my website, thank you very much! We’re planning on having it launched sometime near the time of the book coming out, but at the moment...oof.
GA: We’re actually going to reference the Mosaic when there are particularly difficult techniques in the book; we’ll tell people go to the Mosaic and watch a movie of it, because one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s pretty difficult at times to convey the simplest things through words. We take it for granted—like when we’re in the kitchen, we might say “Spread a purée on a piece of acetate, roll it into a cylinder, and tape it, with the purée on the inside.” It sounds really simple, and as a cook you know it’s really simple because you do it every day. But then you have to write it down, and you have somebody who’s not a cook read it—and you ask if it makes sense and they say no. So then it’s back to the drawing board to make it understandable. It’s really very educational writing a cookbook, I have to say—it’s a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. We’re cooks, we’re not writers.
CH: Switching gears here from the cookbooks, people tend to lump your two cuisines into the same category—“molecular gastronomy”—and I know that Heston, you don’t use that term.
HB: Well, I don’t have a problem with the term; it’s actually the way the term has been interpreted. Grant and I might have very similar ethos and beliefs and principles, but obviously we have our own styles of cooking. And the trouble is, I just feel that if you say to somebody, there’s a restaurant making a tarte tatin and another one making a tarte tatin, then okay, they could be put into the classical French food category. But if you’ve got one restaurant doing unusual, creative food and another one doing unusual, creative food, they just get lumped into the same category, and that category—especially if it involves doing anything remotely unconventional and nontraditional—is molecular gastronomy. And then people assume somehow that there are chefs walking around with clipboards and test tubes and little lights strapped around their heads.
If you say to people, what if I were to juice this lemon on a glass juicer? Okay, fine. What about juicing raspberries in a liquidizer? No problem. Okay, what about juicing carrots in this veg juicer I’ve got? No problem. And then you say, well, what about this lab-grade centrifuge? Whoa, hang on a sec, now you’re talking funny stuff. And this comes back to the idea of only cooking on fire—where do you draw the line? A motorcar in the 1920s and a motorcar today: still a motorcar. It might have electric windows and stability control and all this stuff, but it’s still a car. You know, we like to embrace modern technology in all other walks of life: It doesn’t dehumanize filmmaking; in theatre you’ve got modern lighting and sound systems, and it doesn’t turn it into something that’s no longer pure and human. With cooking it’s the same thing; we’ve just got more tools in the kit [today]. As long as the tools don’t overtake what we’re cooking, you can look at them as tools. You’ve got tools, ingredients, and technology, and it’s still just cooking.
GA: If you look at gastronomy in the historical sense, you see these patterns, these waves. And it just so happens—fortunately for all of us, I think—that in our time there’s been an explosion in new technique for the first time in years and years. We’re going back to Escoffier or something before there was a time in gastronomic history when chefs had this kind of renaissance of new techniques being developed, and it’s an exciting time in cooking. But what’s going to happen is over time it’s going to become more mainstream, and you already see that happening where a lot of the techniques that have just been developed in the last 5-10 years are filtering down, and then we’ll probably go through a period of, I don’t know what you call it, dormancy or something like that, and then it’s going to explode in another 50 years. I can’t wait to go out to eat when I’m 80 years old!
HB: That’s going to be exciting. I was involved in a discussion panel last year, and Michel Gerard was there; I didn’t know this, but I found it absolutely astonishing: He said that he got a phone call in the early 1970s from his mate, either Pierre or Jean Troisgros, saying he’d just put food on a plate. And [Gerard] said that’s the first known instance of the chef in the restaurant plating food himself. Before that it was always done in the front of the house, from the platter to the plate at the table. So it completely transferred the control of the food to the chef. And you think, I can’t believe that it was only 40 years ago that chefs didn’t plate food.
GA: So can we classify [molecular gastronomy] as a style of cooking? Probably. Like Heston says, there are certain philosophies that are involved and certain techniques that we share, but ultimately I think it’s just an evolution of a certain segment of dining. And I think it will continue to evolve. It’s like anything else—art, technology. And for some reason people didn’t complain when we went from 8-track to cassette to CD to iPod, but they get all freaked out when food starts to modernize.
HB: I know! I suppose anything that can elicit excitement and plaudits in some form will, by nature, have the opposite effect on other people. I suppose that’s just the way the world works.
CH: I’ve always been curious, are there particular ingredients that you guys find work well with some of the new technologies or applications (like, say, anti-griddling, or mixing with hydrocolloids), and are there others that you’d never alter with chemicals or that you view as off-limits?
HB: There are some products, like gelling gums and some pectins, that are sensitive to salt and that behave differently when you’ve got a slightly acidic environment. You have to be careful when you add the salt because you might make it gel earlier than it needs to. So you’ve got to be careful of that sort of thing. Beyond that, you approach these technologies much in the same way as you’d approach, say, truffles—a white truffle is best raw and a black truffle can be cooked.
These technologies are a little bit daunting to people, and the multi-syllable words for things don’t help. But everything is full of chemicals—water is a chemical, salt is a chemical, sugar is a chemical. It’s just that we’re used to those names; we’re not used to phenolic compounds and disulfides of whatever. But for me it’s exactly the same approach.
GA: As far as ingredients go, from a chef’s perspective, you literally have to take any ingredient on a case-by-case basis, and when you’re conceptualizing a dish you have to decide what your objective is with the particular ingredient—whether it be a textural change or altering the flavor in some way. There are certain things that we simply, for whatever reason, don’t want to mess with, but I think pretty much everything is fair game.