What space menu has Heston created for Tim Peake?
The chef is used to creating other-worldly menus – but can he deliver the perfect take-away to Tim Peake? Joe Shute reports
On March 23, 1965, a few hours into the Gemini III mission – Nasa’s first crewed attempt to orbit the Earth – John Young reached into the pocket of his spacesuit and produced some contraband.
It was a corned beef sandwich, purchased from Wolfie’s Restaurant at the Ramada Inn in Cocoa Beach shortly before take-off. Normally space food came in cubes or coated in gelatine to hold its form in zero gravity; after one bite of the sandwich it became clear why.
Pieces of meat and rye bread began floating around the cockpit, polluting the pristine oxygenated air and putting – so the astronauts feared – the instrument panels and perhaps even the entire flight at risk.
Within seconds the sarnie was stowed away. Official Nasa transcripts show the men quibbling over the decision to bring it onboard. “It was a thought, anyway,” Young told his co-astronaut Gus Grissom who shot back, “just not a very good one”.
A replica of the sandwich now sits embedded in acrylic at the Gus Grissom Memorial Museum in Mitchell, Indiana. A stale testament to man’s inability to launch halfdecent grub into space.
Since Young’s orbit we have landed on the Moon and made many further strides in exploring the final frontier – but food has not been among them. Half a century on, astronaut nourishment still comes in bland concoctions served via squeezy tube or pouch. The primary culinary instrument required is neither knife, nor fork, but a pair of scissors – and if you’re making an effort, a spoon to shovel it in.
But before becoming the first British astronaut to board the International Space Station last December, Major Tim Peake and the UK Space Agency aimed to change all that, enlisting celebrity chef and food innovator Heston Blumenthal to create seven dishes he could take up with him as part of the “bonus food” allowance granted to each astronaut.
The project has been some two years in the making and the results will be shown on Sunday on Channel 4 in a programme called Heston’s Space
Food. The idea, says Blumenthal at the launch in London, was to create recipes that are not just edible but also remind 43-year-old Major Peake of his wife Rebecca and their two sons Thomas, six, and Oliver, four, waiting for him back home.
For those tempted to dismiss the programme as PR guff of the sort which astronauts should not be wasting their time with, it is worth pointing out that Blumenthal agreed to get involved with the project long before the decision was taken to turn it into a television programme. He speaks with a seemingly genuine passion about the importance of revolutionising space food – and the European Space Agency has now expressed a real interest in developing the project further.
With Mars missions in the pipeline, astronauts may soon be required to spend far longer in space. Even though the nutritional requirements are broadly similar to those on Earth, it is thought that eating food that provides an emotional bond to those they have left behind could prove a crucial tool in their psychological well-being.
“You’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment and thousands of people working their socks off [with the space programme],” says Blumenthal. “What they do has evolved our lives significantly and we’ve learnt so much about ourselves and the evolution of life. These astronauts go through so much training and have to be everything from IT experts to doctors, yet somehow food, this very thing we have such an emotional relationship with, is just considered to be something used to plug them in and recharge. Tim’s going to be away from his family for a big chunk of time. I thought, ‘why can’t we tailor something to connect him to them?’”
Major Peake and his family met Blumenthal several times to decide on the food that meant most to him. On one occasion he and Blumenthal went walking in the woods near Sandhurst, from where he graduated in 1992 in the Army Air Corps.
“We went into the forest and just sat there,” Blumenthal says. “At first he spoke about food as if it is just fuel but after a while his memories and moments in his life where food connected him with family emerged. Just through that we got to know each other more and the process was fantastic.”
Major Peake started to describe the Alaskan salmon he caught and cooked on open fires while on military exercises and the sausage sizzle he and his boys eat when they go camping in Scotland. There was also Thai red curry, a favourite takeaway of his and Rebecca’s. To this they added beef stew, key lime pie, apple crumble, and what was to prove the greatest challenge – a bacon sandwich.
The blandness of normal space food is not just the result of preparation but also the environment in which it is consumed. Imagine your senses dulled by the tang of oil and body odour, as well as a constant 60 decibel engine noise akin to standing next to a hoover. Fresh food only arrives via cargo ship every few months. Everything else comes from a packet.
To counter this, Blumenthal and his team began to conduct experiments creating food in zerogravity conditions, monitoring salt thresholds, acidity, sweetness, and moisture migration. They also worked their way through previous generations of terrible US and Russian space “delicacies”.
“There were a lot of vacuumsealed pouches and freeze-dried food with Russian writing,” says Blumenthal. “Everything was overcooked and from my experience people just decided on a dish and then did the space version of it. The things that tasted OK were a bit of prawn cocktail and some of the compotes. Everything else was just varying levels of blandness – and that was eating it on Earth.”
Blumenthal’s new range was sealed in cans – even the bacon sandwich, which Major Peake gobbled up soon on arrival (mercifully for fellow astronauts, it had been designed to be crumb free).
He has also sampled some of the dishes in a live satellite link-up with Blumenthal in which the chef admits he became quite emotional. Not the unflusterable Major Peake, who donned a mock tuxedo for the meal, which took place at 17,500 miles an hour in orbit around the Earth.
“With all the astronauts I’ve met there’s a real calmness to them,” Blumenthal says. “Tim is very relaxed but also very comfortable in his own skin.”
Libby Jackson, astronaut flight education programme manager at the UK Space Agency, who is also in regular contact with Major Peake, agrees. “I have worked alongside Tim for most of my career and seen him through training but I have never seen him smile so much,” she says. His fellow astronauts are also “resoundingly positive” about the culinary trial. Perhaps a bacon sarnie may end up being Britain’s great contribution to the space race.
Now for mastering that cup of tea. ‘Heston’s Dinner in Space’ is on Sunday on Channel 4 at 6pm
‘Recipes needed to remind Major Peake of his wife and kids’