Lunch at the Fat Duck - Part 8, The first desserts

Bring on the desserts!

HOT AND ICED TEA

So, all the savoury stuff done with, on came another of Mr Blumenthal's most famous contraptions: The hot and iced tea.

Modernist Cuisine in general and perhaps Heston Blumenthal specifically is to many people known for creating strange dishes. I must confess that I was a bit concerned that the Fat Duck experience was going to be too much circus and too little food, but I was relieved to find that the predominant experience was good food and not "strange stuff", even though much of the food had obviously been prepared using untraditional techniques. The hot and iced tea, however, which is used as a sort of entry to the sweet section of the meal, is, in my view, mostly for show. A bit of novelty, just because they can. Humour in food, but why not?

For those of you who have not heard about this dish, it comes in the form of a cup (or glass) of tea. Nothing fancy there. Not until you take a sip. You see, half of this is hot, and the other half is cold. And it is divided vertically down the centre and there is no physical separator. This creates quite a surprising experience when you are not aware of it. And the glass is actually insulated so that you do not get any clue about the different temperatures until you get it in your mouth.

So how is this possible? The hot and iced tea was actually the second of our dishes that I had made myself at home. You can read about my attempt here:

http://morten-moen.blogspot.no/2014/01/food-from-fat-duck-hot-and-iced-tea.html

For those of you wanting the short version, what we were drinking was not a liquid, but rather two different, thin fluid gels. And now you will want to know what on the planet a fluid gel is. This I had the ingenious foresight to describe in my previous post which you can find here:

http://morten-moen.blogspot.no/2014/04/a-great-intro-to-fluid-gels.html

So the hot and the cold portions are thin gels that never the less are thick enough to stay apart. And they contain malic acid which when in your mouth makes you produce extra saliva witch helps dilute the gels in your mouth masking the fact that they art too thick. Now, that is clever.

RHUBARB

Sheep's Milk Yoghurt and Bergamot

What we needed now was something refreshing, and that was exactly what came next. The galette of rhubarb, the rhubarb sorbet and the dried rhubarb chip all combined with the tartness of the yoghurt and a light and fragrant experience into something perfect.

This dessert was very good and came as a perfect refresher in the meal that now started to get really big (this was the 12th dish), but it was the next dessert that really made us euphoric...