My head is very sensitive to heat. I can tell the temperature of a room within half a degree between 18 and 24C by what my head is doing. The rest of my body is fine. Jay Taylor, who has directed a lot of my TV shows, said to me that it must be the worst superhero power: I’m Head Thermometer Man. So what do I do? I choose one of the hottest jobs – apart from glassblowing or feeding a steam-train furnace – that you can do: working in a kitchen. Now I’ve gone to live in one of the hottest places in France. I’m not sure what that’s about either. Perhaps I’m creating my own adversity so new life can grow or something.
I’ve fallen back in love with cooking. I’ve done more than 100,000 hours in the kitchen and, a couple of years ago, I’d just had enough. I sound like some old, retired gunslinger hanging up his gun, but I just felt like a hamster on a wheel. In the last six months, let’s say, I started not only falling back in love with it, but I’ve brought with that my past, all of the pantechnicon, loads of information, discoveries and techniques that I created over the years. Rather than putting so many ingredients in, which is what I did before, I keep it really simple: applying that to a fried egg or a piece of toast even. It’s a bit like if you paint, I suppose: you add more colours and then you put on another colour and it’s too much.
The movie Ratatouille is probably the most accurate gastronomic film about three-Michelin-star cooking that has ever been made, if you take away the rats in the kitchen.
My earliest positive food experience was going for ice-cream with my gran and sister when I was six or seven. She would drag us around this Steptoe and Son bric-a-brac market off the Edgware Road, with people selling old junk off the back of a horse-drawn cart. It was the last thing you wanted to do as kids, but on the way back we went past Regent Snack & Milk Bar, an art-deco ice-cream parlour run by a couple of Sicilian guys. I remember getting ice-cream in a little tub with a wooden spoon in a brown paper bag and we couldn’t touch it until we got back home. It was about 10 minutes’ walk, but that walk seemed to last two hours. Later on, you realise it was like working for a reward. It became such a magical thing for me.
Basically all the work that I’ve been doing for the past few years has been on water. We know what to do with water: we bathe in it, we swim in it, we drink it, we cook with it, we power engines with it. But we don’t know what it is.
Is there any food I can’t stand? The only food I remember eating that my throat decided to tell the rest of my body to get stuffed was on a fishing boat in Iceland. I was given kæst skata, which is fermented skate: I think they used to pee on it, but now they bury in the ground to let the ammonia develop. The flesh looks really beautifully cooked, and it’s a delicacy for older people in Iceland, but I went to swallow it and my throat basically catapulted the fish straight out of my mouth. My body or my gut said: “No, you’re not coming in.”
It’s funny how people are happy to eat a prawn but they wouldn’t eat an insect. The first time I used insects, I made worm pizzas for Alder Hey children’s hospital and the kids loved it. It was a bit like Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes. At home, I’ve got cricket powder, small mealworms, which have lots of umami, the fried ones are like eating popcorn. And they are incredibly high-protein.
This is the most excited, motivated, focused, energised, contented, fulfilled that I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Watch this space – it’s like a new chapter, a big new page turn. Maybe I needed that break, maybe I benefited from Covid, but I certainly had the longest time with myself that I’ve ever had. Which isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do, but in terms of self-awareness, it was incredible.
My favourite things
Food?
I don’t have one. Do you mean my favourite food right now? Or my favourite food in winter? My favourite food at Christmas? My favourite food on my birthday? My favourite food on my kid’s birthday?
Drink?
Water.
Place to eat?
Chez moi, in Provence.
Dish to make?
If I was to pick one, it would probably be ratatouille. It’s a Provencal dish, so I live with aubergines and peppers and tomatoes and courgettes and onions, but it’s also something that I’ve spent a lot of time on.
Is This A Cookbook? by Heston Blumenthal (Bloomsbury, £27) is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com
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