Higgs boson? Probably Heston again

Heston Blumenthal can be a bit pretentious. Take his recipe for green bean salad:

1. Build a zero-gravity space capsule and fill with water. Bring water to boil.
2. Chop ends off beans using Navy SEALS LASER tracking system.
3. Insert vacuum-packed green beans into the capsule.
4. Cook for 265.3π seconds, monitoring the crunchiness of the beans every 0.0000000001 seconds using the Vickers hardness test, set to HV10.
5. Refresh beans with liquid nitrogen cooled Amazonian rain water and dry in CERN Particle Accelerator.
6. Serve with injection moulded mustard vinaigrette.

It’s enough to make me scream “Nobody cares! Nobody cares!” It‘s just overenthusiastic drivel from what appears to be a slightly unhinged, borderline OCD chef. It’s all too much when chucking the beans into a pan for 3 minutes and then drizzling with olive oil would have done just fine. My brother, knowing my disdain for overcomplicated cooking, gave me Heston’s At Home book for Christmas – a bitter-sweet respite from the hilarious annual gag of planting a chocolate willy in the bottom of a used, otherwise empty PlayStation 3 box. Although the last laugh was on me when, during my college canteen-inspired squelchy vegetable soufflé demonstration on Boxing Day, the liquid nitrogen container spilt over his leg and he lost four toes.

This, I immediately decided, is how chips are supposed to be. This is what the potato is for

There is, however, one seemingly unnecessarily arduous recipe in the book that is worth the bother. That makes my initial anger look rightfully misjudged, that I should just “calm down dear”. I used to think a potato was just a potato, that to make chips all you had to do was boil them for 10 minutes or so and then fry them. Heston has taught me otherwise. First, the potato chips need to be rinsed under running water to remove any surface starch. They are then boiled in a pan of simmering water for 20-30 minutes and left too cool. They then go in the freezer for at least an hour, before being fried in grapeseed oil to create a light crust. By this stage, used to meals prepared in under half an hour, my stomach starts grumbling. Then it’s back in the freezer for a further hour as my stomach starts to invoke the Battle of the Somme, before being fried again at a higher temperature until they are golden. So, that’s around 3 hours to make some bloody chips. It all seems a bit like when the US spent millions of dollars developing a special pen that could work in space, and the Russians just took a pencil.

When I first made these triple-cooked chips, I dived straight in for a golden finger starving as I was after 3 hours of waiting. But WOW! What a corker! This, I immediately decided, is how chips are supposed to be. This is what the potato is for. This is what happens when a nerdy chef cooks and re-cooks different potato recipes hundreds of times and uses science to guide him. Odd how you can forget what really good food tastes like. And each time you rediscover it, you wonder how you ever put up with anything else. Why you should live to eat. The chips crunched gracefully, they didn’t splodge. The middle was as soft as mohair. These are chips as I have never known; they surprise you. One immediately feels privileged that this fellow has shared his secrets with us. It’s like Fernando Alonso giving you a driving lesson, or Stephen Fry showing you how to use Twitter. It’s just… well, it’s just lovely.