Heston’s secret soup ingredient? A dash of gravel!
MOST cooks looking to add flavour to a dish opt for a pinch of salt and pepper, or perhaps some herbs and spices.
But Heston Blumenthal has a bizarre tip when it comes to perking up your soup – add a generous handful of gravel.
The celebrity chef, famous for weird culinary creations such as egg and bacon ice cream, snail porridge and lickable wallpaper, says he recently discovered that the silica in bauxite from his house in Provence, southern France, can transform dishes.
‘I cooked some soup made with green beans that came from the farm and I decided to put a lump of bauxite rock in the water,’ he explains on his new podcast, Heston’s Pod And Chips.
‘From this bauxite rock, comes silica. Water, with silica in it, kind of thickens it.
‘There’s bauxite all round here. I got gravel and pebbles and rock and I stuck it in a pan. I washed them first and I put them in a pan with green beans, no salt, and they came out really green.
‘It was rather a successful experiment. So the next time I made the soup I just chucked loads of pebbles in it.’
Blumenthal bills Heston’s Pod And Chips, which is free to download from iTunes, as ‘ the world’s first multisensory podcast’ and a ‘ journey into the magical mind’ of the 52-year-old, whose restaurants include the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire.
The chef also revealed that on a trip to the Natural History Museum in London he had discovered another gastronomic ‘treat’ that might not appeal to the average diner.
‘ It was 10,000- year- old sloth poo,’ Blumenthal said. ‘I licked it. I smelt it first and it had no smell. It tasted of nothing.’