A chat with Mr Molecular gastronomy

Heston Blumenthal shares his tips on ice creams with GH cookery editor Emma Marsden

Heston Blumenthal is a serious food geek. He happily admits this himself. ‘As a teenager I was so intent on making the perfect vanilla ice cream I experimented with tens of different recipes until I was happy with the result,' he says. 

We're talking ice cream because I'm on a surreal ice cream masterclass he's running for Häagen-dazs. The Fat Duck chef, known for his culinary experimentation, has turned everything from crab to spam - made especially for a friend's wedding in Hawaii where they eat a huge amount of the pink stuff - into ice cream. He acknowledges that perception is a big factor in terms of what people will eat, ‘call it crab ice cream and no one will touch it but change the name to frozen crab bisque and it's a different story.' The savoury ice cream trend isn't as cutting edge as it seems, he tells us, as savoury ices were popular in Victorian times. ‘Cucumber ice, for example, was often served as a starter.'

Sadly there's none of his infamous egg and bacon ice cream to taste today, just good old vanilla. We scoop our way through tubs with added air - some brands have as much as 200% added, doubling the volume of the original custard base two-fold. Heston recommends looking for as little added air as possible as it means you're getting more for your money. Stabilisers and emulsifiers are also to be avoided as they affect flavour.

Other big no nos in ingredient lists include ground exhausted vanilla pods, a dubious process used by some manufactures, in which used pods with no remaining flavour are added to ice cream purely for their black specks rather than taste. Natural flavours are best, too, so avoid ‘nature identical' which just means chemically produced flavouring and ‘artificial flavours' which is pretty self-explanatory.

At times Heston's fanaticism means he gets a bit technical but you can't help but be carried along by his enthusiasm. If only all science lessons were this interesting...

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