Fat Duck Cookbook

From the NYT, 06.12.09

Heston Blumenthal, the chef of the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Bray, England, is a brilliant obsessive of another school. Not afraid to geek out, he’s just as curious about how sound affects taste (diners who order a dish called Sound of the Sea listen to an iPod playing waves) as he is about 17th-century English cuisine. Last year, he oversaw the publication of “The Big Fat Duck Cookbook,” written with Pascal Cariss — 11.6 pounds and $250 worth of engagingly written personal history, scientific research and recipes from his lab. . . . I mean kitchen. Republished as the somewhat more portable and accessible FAT DUCK COOKBOOK (Bloomsbury, $50), it now weighs in at just under six pounds. A lavish extravaganza larded with cartoons and Ralph Steadman-esque illustrations by Dave McKean, the book downloads everything in Blumenthal’s head (which is a lot), including recipes for already legendary dishes like snail porridge as well as ­nitro-scrambled egg and bacon ice cream. If your dream cuisine involves liquid nitrogen and a rotary evaporator, Blumenthal’s your bloke.

[SOURCE]

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook

By	Curious Cook

This book is an accomplishment worthy of telling Blumenthal’s tale of discovery and evolution. It is in fact exactly what I had been looking for every time I had previously purchased an overgrown coffe-table cook book… usually to be let down by the quality, format or content.

Those three aspects: quality, format and content drive the perfect rating I served up. The book is weighty, with high quality paper so thick you will swear that two pages are between your fingers, not one. I seemingly always have trouble with book bindings that fall apart… not this time: the Fat Duck is quite well bound with marker-ribbons for placekeeping.

The art inside is a blistering barrage of jazz-era, inked sketches of Blumenthal at various stages of discovery superimposed upon vividly colored, intriguingly compelling and sometimes darkly disturbing swaths of imagery. If asked prior to reading the Fat Duck, art in a cookbook would have been the component I consider least important to it’s overall success. In contrast, here the art is an essential component, almost like theme music that drives audience emotional investment in a theater performance. The photographs are also of exquisite quality and sharpness, even when comprising the entire page.

Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics

Product Description
Fish and chips; roast chicken; spaghetti bolognese; steak and salad; pizza; sausages and mashed potatoes; black forest cake; and treacle tart and ice cream: all as good as they can possibly be. With this book, a tie-in to the BBC series of the same name, Michelin three-star winner Heston Blumenthal delivers the absolute last word in how to cook these timeless dishes. He looks at the origin of the dishes, how to find the best ingredients (in America as well as in the UK) and what to look for, and, of course, how to cook them to perfection. Along the way, readers are treated to priceless culinary lessons: everything from how to cut potatoes for flawless frying to where to find the choicest beef to the two secret ingredients in spaghetti Bolognese (nutmeg and cream!). Lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photos, and including “perfect” recipes for each dish, this unrivaled book deserves a place as a staple in every cook’s home.

About the Author
Chef Heston Blumenthal has been described as a culinary alchemist for his innovative style of cuisine. His work researches the molecular compounds of dishes so as to enable a greater understanding of taste and flavor. His restaurant The Fat Duck, in Bray, Berkshire, was awarded three Michelin stars in 2004, and voted the Best Restaurant in the World by an international panel of 500 culinary experts in Restaurant Magazine’s list of the World’s Best Restaurants 2005. Heston Blumenthal lives in Berkshire with his wife and three children.