Heston Blumenthal | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:07Heston, thank you for joining me. That's a pleasure, pleasure to be here. Tell me, who is Heston Blumenthal? Well, first he's a human being, but he's also a human doing. So I say that the being and the doing, the being side is more feminine energy and the doing side is more masculine energy. One hits the sympathetic nervous system, which is the doing, and the parasympathetic, which is the being. So you think in terms of feminine energy, that's where the creativity and imagination sort of lies, whereas the manufacturing or production is in the doing side. So in terms of cooking, the human doing side is 200 grams of something or other, 50 grams of something else, put it in the oven for 25 minutes, cook it until it's 80 degrees, whatever.

0:58That recipe is doing. So it's a structure, an instruction of a process, making something. The being also embraces failure as an opportunity to learn, but the doing is fear of failure. By default, you have to, right? You have to. Countless recipes and things you try. Yeah, absolutely. But those two things both, it's like imagination. Creativity is the next step on from imagination. We imagine something, there's something called, so I'm sounding a bit geeky here, but there's something called myelin. and myelin you know in an electric cable you've got the wires and then you've got the plastic sort of shiny covering so it's like plasma plasma fatty um covering on from the the neurons and when they transfer from the front to the back of the brain you get imagination so we can join dots that you I don't think any other creature can do this you can imagine say a giraffe with a top hat a monocle and a walking stick teaching theoretical physics to a classroom of penguins clapping sounds like a film that's imagination human beings it's a unique thing there's I said the the great late great Ken Robinson who's done that brilliant TED talk is the most watched that before.

2:25Amazing. Yeah, how education can kill creativity. When he died, they asked five people, half of the people, to finish this sentence, imagine if. And my answer was, imagine if we lived in a world with no imagination. It's terrifying. Nothing would happen. Frightening. Yeah. I mean, you are a creative genius. And what's so interesting about just listening to how you introduce yourself, so much maturity and perspective, because you've been on a journey, right and you still are yes you're piecing it all together adhd bipolar yes always been creative so now harnessing that do you feel like you've got more understanding of your own creativity you've only never lost that right yeah it's always been a difficult question to answer you know how do you come up with these ideas and you know there's hundreds of books trying to tackle this subject.

3:17Thousands of pages of information. And I realised with me, just like the example of the giraffe with the penguins, it's dot joining. And find things that won't on the face of it go together, but you can put them together. So for example, sound, the use of sound to highlight an element of the food. So for example, we did one, it experiment where it was bacon and egg ice cream. The same ice cream but half the people were played and would listen to a sizzling bacon and the other half would listen to a chicken. When the bacon, the sizzling bacon was played, it was perceived that the bacon had more flavour than the egg.

4:09When the clucking sound was played, the egg was stronger. Interesting. So you're manipulating? Yeah, manipulating, playing, discovering. Another one. If you work with coffee, but the best way is a glass of red wine. You write the word wine in really sharp letters like this. There's no curves. And then write the word wine in really curvy, almost like made out of balloons, have a sip with the same hand, have a sip of the wine looking at the rounded letters, then take another sip but this time you're looking at wine in the sharp letters. The wine is sharper. Wow. Yeah, it makes a big difference. So you understand this and you have probably tried and experimented on countless recipes.

5:01Bacon and egg ice cream, right? Yes. Liquid nitrogen is something we have to talk about, right? You brought engineering, doing, you brought almost science into the kitchen. Have you nearly blown up a kitchen before? Have you had a few things where you're just like, oh my God, that absolutely didn't work? Well, funnily enough, and this wasn't ultra modern stuff, in the early days we had the fact that there was a pub, and I had this pub oven, six gas rings, two of them didn't work. It was an old oven, got reconditioned, but the pilot light didn't work. So I was going to put something in there, turn the gas on.

5:40Oh God, I haven't got any matches. So I walked out to the front of the house where the bar was, got the matches. I think the phone rang, and I said somebody, people used to think we were a Chinese restaurant in the early days. Anyway, probably told them about, you know, come in and have a pint and a pate or something. Anyway, I went back to the kitchen. I was probably gone for a couple of minutes. I lit the gas and the oven blew up. It didn't blow up. There was this massive gas explosion. Lifted me up and put me sitting on the fridge. And then I noticed my hair, I smelt this burning smell. I burnt most of the hair on my head.

6:21And I tried to do service in the evening with a bag of frozen peas on top of my head. I've had that, I gave myself frostbite from liquid nitrogen. When the nitrogen first came in it was so exciting. But it's minus 200. So you wouldn't drink, have a sip of oil from a deep fat fryer that's about 200 degrees. You fry the food in it but you, and so nitrogen is a lot safer than that. But I put a banana in it and it It froze the banana, so if you tapped it with a pestle and mortar or something, it just... Shatter. Shatter. So I just thought, oh, I couldn't wait. I had a bite. Stuck here and stuck here, and I basically gave myself frostbite on my lip and on my tongue.

7:06But you're experimenting. I'm experimenting. I have had some accidents. I wondered. Almost like the mad scientist bringing that into the kitchen. But look at where that's got you. It's a bit like Professor Brainstorm. Yeah. He had all those glasses and he kept on making this stuff up and it would more often than not blow up, but he'd get there in the end. Yeah. But you've never sort of relented, if you like, and I guess that's probably what's kept you so relevant. You've never got complacent. Have you still got that? Is there still experiments and things going ahead, joining the dots to look at the next thing that you can do, or have you calmed down with that?

7:45Well, I've calmed down with that, but because I've been fascinated in the microbiome for 10 years, 12 years, and we started off in evolutionary terms as a single cell bacteria, and then over millions of years we became human beings. Particularly after my bipolar diagnosis, I'm finding more and more connections between bacteria and mental health. so I'm exploring that as well basically it's all the things to do with senses I'd say that I've been in the business of emotion and feelings and just happened to use food in cooking that's interesting because it does feel like almost a focus of what was experimenting with food with the ADHD and more recently the bipolar diagnosis you've almost been experimenting with your own behaviour and we were talking before we started filming as well but you starting to reflect and realize how other people might have felt working with you and around you getting a bit of perspective and empathy where you're like oh i must have been a handful i must have been i must i mean i wasn't driving things forward um i think i didn't have i didn't have too many looking back at it episodes i think because i I mean, I kickboxed for 15, 18 years, and then I spent all those hours over the years in the kitchen.

9:14Gives you a focus, right? It gives you focus. And I'm not sure some of my levels of exhaustion, I tried to light a blowtorch once, just to brulee a lemon tart, sprinkle it with sugar, light the blowtorch and give it a blast, and melt the sugar and it goes crisp. Anyway, I took the blowtorch, I walked over to the sink, and I turned the hot tap on and I remember thinking you can't possibly light a blowtorch with cold water. Very Alice in Wonderland. But I tried to light a blowtorch. I tried to light the gas with water. This goes back to joining the dots. There was a misalignment. Yes, and I don't know how much of that was just me.

9:55Exhaustion, ADHD. And there's a big crossover between ADHD and bipolar as well. But bear in mind, And I mean, this is for me coming into this conversation as an entrepreneur. You are an entrepreneur. You're a pioneer. You've got the three Michelin star fat duck. Yes. That's kind of how people would know you. And these quirky liquid nitrogen. But you've built a business. You've built a brand, a personal brand. Yeah. At the same time as putting yourself out there for what you're doing. Have you enjoyed that journey? Because that focus, that relentless energy you've had for it, which again has probably been fueled by having adhd you've used that hyper focus to be but you know do you have that perspective now where you can see it all makes a lot more sense you've been able to do it because setting up a business is not easy long long hours you know relentless down yeah and stress i know for the first 10 years i worked it out i'd had 20 hours that's 20 hours sleep per week oh my god i'm just trying to do the maths that's 120 hours a week roughly working with some nights no sleep or were you getting was it just an average of one and a half two hours i'd go to bed about two wake up at five and i don't know how i did it looking back at it now but i did and that was probably a mixture of i had no choice because i it was my first my first paid job as a chef was opening this little pub i just wanted to cook i thought maybe one day I could get a star.

11:22The idea of two or three never came to me, but I wanted to cook. So I jumped in hook, line and sinker and then I didn't have any choice. So the deadlines at 12 o 'clock the doors open and at 7 o 'clock the evening the doors open for the customers. Did you keep the passion? So you set your goal, your North Star of being a chef and ultimately trying to get the star. In those long, long days, were you still enjoying it? Were you still fuelled with the enthusiasm? Or did it almost become like there's a tip over sometimes? It was a cross. You know what I mean? Yeah. We've got the Heinz Hedge, which is a pub that's got a Michelin star next door to the Fat Duck.

12:06About 500 to 600 euro building. There's a fireplace there, wooden fireplace. And in gold leaf, across the top, on the front of the fireplace, there's this saying, which I think is brilliant. It says, fear knocked on the door, faith answered, and no one was there. So by faith, you just say belief. So you can't have one without the other. You can't have a hot without cold, fast without slow, tall without short. And so if your belief, fear, we all have fear in some shape or form. but if the belief is stronger than the fear, then you go in the direction of the belief. Sometimes the fear is stronger than the belief.

12:53Hence life being. Hence life being like that, exactly. Yeah, I get that. Do you fear anything now? Because you've got a lot of clarity and perspective. You've got a maturity to look back on things that may not have made sense, a drive to be successful. You've got three stars you set out to just try and get one. Do you have anything that... Well, I wouldn't say, but I, since I didn't have, I have had, how do I say this, I have more fear now than I did before my diagnosis. Can you explain why? No, the only reason I can think of is because the manic highs and lows have been, so a manic high like this and then crashing down, up, crashing down, think of it as a piece of string.

13:41You pull or stretch that string out. To smooth out the extremes, right? Yeah, and it becomes more like rolling hills. It takes apparently a minimum of two years to really settle down on the medication. So my medication, I'm on about 10 % of what I was on when I left, came out of hospital, which is just over a year ago actually. There were times when I felt zombified, but it was just softening everything. So I don't have those manic highs anymore. Things like, I see things like, I'm not great in crowds, I don't feel that comfortable in crowds. I, airport, I used to go, I was lastminute.com checking through, I missed a handful of planes but that's it, but right last minute.

14:26I think, and I would ignore when they say gate open, quite often they're boarding. So now I get to the airport nice and early, work out where the gate is, how long it's going to take me to get there, and I keep an eye on the timings. So there's things like that. But that's come with the experiences you've not enjoyed and they've created extremes that you're trying to now, coping mechanisms and ways of managing. Yeah, I didn't have fear of that before. The medication makes a difference, definitely. But once, I think the diagnosis of this, it's like, say, ADHD, the diagnosis is really important for me, and I think for everyone.

15:12What you do with a diagnosis is a different kettle of fish. And I've got my coat of arms here. And the motto is, my motto is question everything. But everything has two perspectives, minimum. them. So everything, like you question the whole thing, whether it's our whole body or whether it's the whole universe, but also everything, so every single thing that's in the big everything, that makes sense. That taps into your creativity, doesn't it? You're constantly looking to understand, you're naturally curious and you're, dare I say, also not just inquisitive, but apprehensive. Apprehensive. Yeah, looking into something almost with a fear.

15:57I think the fat duck's tiny. The kitchen now is way bigger than it was. And because everything's tiny, I think I hyper-focused. If I'd had a kitchen that was five times the size and a restaurant with big gardens,

16:19there's many more things to try and take care of. But being small, I realised I wanted to find the minuti of stuff, zooming right in. And at the beginning I had, as I said, the pub oven that basically blew up on me. I didn't have all the modern equipment. So to get consistency, I was sort of forced, not forced, I wanted to know why things worked. So I've been zooming in on molecules, flavour molecules, let's say, for example. I didn't know, I couldn't believe this, I couldn't know the meaning, the dictionary meaning of gastronomy until six months or a year ago. I never looked it up. I thought it was to do with fine dining.

17:11But in fact, it's sourcing, preparing, cooking and eating good food. It could be a sandwich. And so the term, I didn't really like the term molecular gastronomy, but now it's okay because it's doing the same thing. You just zoom in on a smaller scale on how to get the right texture in pasta. You look at what happens when you, how you roll the dough, do you dry it? What temperature do you dry it for? How long do you dry it for? Cooking meat, realising that there's an enzyme at 57 degrees plus, you kill it, but while it's below 56, it breaks down the proteins and tenderises the meat. Fascinating.

18:00So I had to set the temperature at 56 and then try and cook it for 6 hours, 12 hours, 18 hours, until we went up to 48 hours of cooking and do the taste test. So is there anything in particular that has really surprised you in all these experiments and all these things you find out from being naturally interested is there is there one thing that stands out you're like you know just blown away by and being able to use that in in the restaurants i mean the use of sound was a big thing there's certain dishes that were real landmark dishes for me that that uh first one was a crab ice cream to go with crab risotto and people don't really bat an eyelid now when mentioned about the crab ice cream but in 2000 it was pretty radical.

18:43Groundbreaking. And I realised that if I'd called it a frozen crab bisque, ah it's much easier to understand. And this led our first paper I co-wrote, Sussex University, they took this and did it with smoked salmon. So you either called it frozen smoked salmon mousse or smoked salmon ice cream. And when it was called smoked salmon ice cream it was found to be something like 15 % saltier just by the name because you have an expectation of sweet and get salt instead of an expectation of getting salt and getting salt so the difference between expectation and delivery is more marked so that that led me into the whole thing of using words in the shapes of letters and I was amazed at all of the impact that can have.

19:35Then when I started playing around with sound I met this professor at Oxford University who was working on crisps so he put me in a booth, headphones with a mic and connected me up to this sound kit that I could hear. I was listening to my crunch through the headphones just in real time or just about in real time. So when he changed the volume and the frequency, it changed the texture of the crisp. So when the sound was more crisp, the crisp was more crisp. When it softened, they almost tasted a bit stale. So then I did lots of experiments with sound and ended up with a dish called Sound of the Sea, which looks like sand, but it's all edible, looks like the sea lapping up against the shore, which is the sort of foam source.

20:37Then there's foraged sea vegetables and cured fish. We serve that with a seashell. And in the seashell is a little iPod Nano or an MP3 player, a tiny one, and you put the headphones in and you listen to the sound of the sea. That's proper creativity, right? That's unique. unique. And I'll tell you what I love as well is that if you consider Heston as the chef, it instantly goes into that kind of creativity of the dish. There's so much more to it. Then there's the ambience of the restaurant. And then a key thing I'm learning from just always trying to understand, sort of be a better version of myself, if you like, is it's not just what we eat.

21:19It's when we eat and who we eat with. It's that sense of community. So you bring that together in a restaurant environment and probably tapping into the mental health conversation as well. That sense of community and eating together, which the Mediterranean diet is sort of now becoming more, people are more aware that it's not just what they're eating, it's the fact that they all get together. They eat together, they spend their weekends eating. If you don't eat together, if you eat alone, if you do it mindfully, that makes a big difference. So the classic one is you eat a raisin, one raisin. I mean generally what we'll do is get a handful of raisins and put them in.

21:52Take one raisin, look at it, imagine where it's come from, where it's been grown, how it's been dried, all of that stuff. And then you look at where, for example, where the light and shadows are, the little wrinkles and the raisin. You then pick the raisin up and roll it between your thumb and forefinger and you feel how it's softening. And all along you see, then you wonder how it's going to smell. Then you bring it up to your nose, you start smelling it, see what you can smell. Then eventually you put it maybe against your lips and then in your mouth. Let it sit there, what's happening in your mouth.

22:26Maybe some saliva, if it feels a bit juicy, some saliva is coming into your mouth. And then you start eating it and you just be aware of the change of flavour as you bite into this raisin. and excuse me do it you do it slowly and then swallow it and you'll never taste the same right you never taste a raisin like it again you can do it with the cuba chocolate i literally lived that with you right i mean and there's me destroying a some sushi stood up at the counter yes and not appreciating anything of what i've just eaten and it polishes off in five minutes. That's not particularly healthy, right?

23:06No, it's not. So eating can be one, I'd say it's the most intimate thing that human beings do because we're putting, eating and drinking, we're putting this inside our body. So everyone has a relationship with food. We have likes, dislikes. Quite a lot of the dislikes come from something that happened in younger childhood. Art can be profound, can be mood changing, conjure, create loads of emotions and feelings. But if you don't look at art, you're not going to die. And food is so much more complex because if you don't eat, you will eventually not be here anymore. And it's also a subject, I got involved in the GCSE, O level food and nutrition which is it's shocking because it's um it's optional at GCSE level and they've removed it from A level but we still have to learn algebra but you still have to learn algebra and food and nutrition eating cooking eating is the only subject at school that every other subject comes underneath you've got maths in the ingredients you've got obviously language with recipes You chop things and you heat things, it's physics, you get new molecules get produced after you apply heat to ingredients.

24:37So those new molecules, it's chemistry, you eat it, it's biology, it's history, it's geography. Let alone, by default, what you're eating will probably be stimulating you to learn more in the... Yes. If you're eating chips and pizza for lunch, you're not going to have a great afternoon with concentration. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Real life. With the education curriculum is something I was actually going to talk to you about because you're self-taught as a chef. You don't learn that in school. You've now gone to another level of understanding nutrition and so on. It feels like there's a part of you that wants to give back.

25:08That exercise was part of it and maybe even mentoring as well. Is that a part of your life? Yeah, I think particularly since the bipolar diagnosis and I felt that I had a chance to share my experience. And one, it's a very, to be able to feel that you're giving something back. And I was surprised at how few people wanted to talk about it. Because when we talked about fear earlier, I was going to ask you about the fact that I see you as brave. Yes. Doing that. You didn't bat an eye that the minute you, from an ADHD point of view, the bipolar, you want to share it. and you want to share it because you know your lived experience can help people because you naturally seem to want to help people.

25:56Yes. I would suggest you didn't feel brave. You felt that you were doing exactly what you felt you should be doing. I didn't feel brave. No, I didn't. It was exactly how you said. Yeah. But that reception you got where people didn't seem to be talking about it and so on, did that surprise you? It surprised me how few people had the motivation for every reason to open up. However, on a couple of things I did, particularly after the news night, in a news night interview, dozens of comments came through, well hundreds, maybe more. And there was a woman, she wrote in, said she thought the TV was talking to her.

26:40I laughed out loud because I thought the same thing. Empathy, yes. How does that make sense? And then these are all classic bipolar things, hallucinations. So sound hallucination is when it's not a sound in your head. It could be a tune. It can be some voices. But you hear it outside. So sound and touch and obviously sight. So the part of the reason why I think the TV was talking to me was I do a lot of research on bipolar on YouTube. And if you do that or play certain types of music on YouTube, the algorithms, this is before I really thought about it, the algorithms, they're made for you. So I think that might have had something to do with it.

27:33Of course. I don't know. Yeah. It puts you into a spiral where you're consuming the same thing, which is almost feeding the 4U page, isn't it? Yes. It still becomes addictive, which certainly from an ADHD and bipolar point of view means you're then consuming stuff that in some ways you could be learning from but it could also send you into a spiral. Yes. You know and I guess you ultimately are managing that. I wanted to go back to food when we're talking about the kind of creativity side of putting foods together and so on I wonder what right now if you were going to have your last supper tonight what that dish would be.

28:08I've been asked this before and it sounds like a cop-out but I don't have a last supper it would depend where it was where it was right now so it's today it's beginning of February 2025 what would Heston have for dinner tonight what do you feel like I don't know okay good question what what should I have for again it's a cop-out I know but it depends how hungry I am I wondered that have you had a good lunch I haven't had lunch actually because I'm guilty of that you know you can salivate and fantasise over food when you're hungry and then obviously it's out of your head when you're not. I suppose where I'm going with it is, is there just a food that for whatever reason you go back to?

28:48It might be different variations of it, but is there a particular... No, I mean, it's so... I don't have any food hang-ups, let's say. I adore the smell of but I don't like eating it because it's so sweet. But that's about it. And because of that, I don't have a favourite food. No. So I'm not going to get a Last Supper. No, you won't get a Last Supper. We'll stay hungry. I used the term brave earlier because man to man, it feels refreshingly normal now. We can just be so open. 20 years ago, people weren't doing that. No. So I think that's probably why I use the term brave. Have you found an outpouring from people now coming to you that you can have support from as well as feeling like you're supporting them?

29:39Almost like a tribe? Yes, to find other people that have shared experiences. Because with bipolar, there's very clear characteristics about being bipolar. I paused then because I didn't want to say having bipolar. Yes, it's a mental illness. It's a categorised mental illness. But there's also working great benefits from it. You know, it's not all bad. It's basically just an exaggerated form of life, whereas all humans have highs and lows in their life. it's just this this is um they're much more extreme yeah i get that they are the same yeah and one thing that you've clearly been able to do um particularly with the fact that i being three michelin star is be successful i feel like i'm sitting with someone super humble no ego arrogance at all very present oh thank you to get to where you've got to you've had to have huge drive and relentless energy and ambition but sitting here now how would you describe success Mine's never been money driven.

30:58When I make a discovery of joining the dots sufficiently that there's an idea there, that feeling of an idea that you can then move towards creativity, because imagination is the imagining, and then when you do something about it you go into creating. And when that light bulb moment clicks on, the feeling is fantastic. Staying on almost that sort of achievement, you're like three Michelin stars. One, how proud are you of that? And I guess secondly, how important are they in context of the success of you and the restaurant? Yeah, I'm very proud of the three stars. I never imagined that would happen.

31:43when I was told on the telephone and the voice of the head of the mission guide on the other end of the phone said, are you still there? Just silence, totally silence. It's also a bit of a monster, you're holding on to a monster by its tail because also keeping it, you get marked every year. I was going to ask you that, so there's a criteria. So once you've got it, it's not a given, you'll just keep it. No, no, no. And was there a noticeable difference in the success of the restaurant from notching up the third? Yeah, because within a year, the third Mission Start and the best restaurant in the world award.

32:25Congratulations. Thank you. Then it all exploded. So it's really quite, because I can't think of another industry where there's almost that sort of barometer that you can win accolades in sport and so on. but in a business environment, doing what you so enjoy to then have a rosette kind of representing, you know, skills and experiences. Within reason, if I wanted something, so a piece of kit, I'd buy it, I'd get it, and then work out how to pay for it afterwards. I remember once, upstairs in the office, after lunch service, and my accountant was there, And he said, look, you made, I made 500 pounds that week, which was like unheard of then.