Lunch at the Fat Duck - Part 6

And now, a classic:

"SOUND OF THE SEA"

Heston Blumenthal has always been interested in what he calls multi sensory eating. The idea is that it is not only the taste and flavour of what you put in your mouth that contributes to the experience. All your senses are involved in making you feel whatever it is you are feeling during a meal. Many have experienced that the simple pasta dish that you enjoyed so much sitting on a balcony in Italy looking out towards the distant hills of Tuscany becomes just a simple and possibly a bit boring pasta dish when eaten in a hurry alone by the kitchen table at home. So the theatre that goes on in a restaurant, the "cast", the "props", the smells and the sound are important parts of the food experience.

This next course started by the waiter bringing a shell for each of us containing an iPod. We were instructed to put on the ear plugs to get in the right mood. We did and were immediately transported to the seaside. The sound of crashing waves were every now and then interrupted by seagulls and other birds. I could almost feel a light breeze brush against my forehead.  Or perhaps that is just an romantic afterthought, but anyway, it effectively put us in the mood.

Then the next course was put before us. This was definitely one of the most visually stunning pieces of nourishment I had had for quite a while.  The "plate" was specially made for the dish and consisted of a wooden box filled with sand and topped with a sheet of glass. On the glass was what looked like more sand, pieces of seafood that visually gave me the impression of a coral reef, and some foam that looked like a wave of seawater had been frozen in time just as i crashed onto the reef.

The sand on top of the glass was of course not not sand. According to the recipe in the the cookbook (which may have been altered since the book was written), it is based on tapioca maltodextrin. I actually guessed that when I ate it because I have tried using that stuff myself. Tapioca maltodextrin has the property of being able to dehydrate fat or oils. You can see this in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5TToltpSUM

And you can buy the stuff here:

http://www.modernistpantry.com/tapioca-maltodextrin.html

There are several types of maltodextrin out there, but you need this type in order to bind oils as shown here. The nice thing about using this stuff in this way is that you end up with a powder that not only tastes like the oil you started with, but actually reverts back to its oily state when you get it in your mouth. So you can serve this as oil for a salad without the oil making the greens soggy, but once you get it in your mouth, it reverts back to oil.

So the sand on top of the glass is maltodextrin with an oil made from miso, cod liver oil and grape seed oil. This is mixed with sauteed baby eels, kombu, breadcrumbs and brown carbonised vegetable powder (whatever that is). By the way, according to the book, the real sand in the wooden box is a bit of Venezuela's shoreline. Just so you know.

The foam is (from what I can make of the recipe) based on a light broth made from different seaweeds, seafood and vegetables foamed by adding lecithin, just like I described here:

http://morten-moen.blogspot.no/2014/01/in-my-lab-foams-part-4-lecithin.html

The sand and the foam is then plated with different seafoods and seaweeds. It all came together as a dish that really took you to the seaside (nicely helped by the sound from the iPods). The delicate flavours of the seafood were heightened by the saltiness of the foam and the richness of the "sand". And did the sound help? Yes, it did. It actually generated an atmosphere of summer by the sea.

Amazing!