Cape Town - You know how airline food is mostly bland and boring? Turns out it’s got more to do with how flying affects your tastebuds than the food you’re served.
So British Airways has consulted British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, famous for his Fat Duck restaurant at Bray, near Windsor, with its three Michelin stars, for help.
Remember when you were told as a child not to play with your food? Blumenthal missed that lesson. His food is strange, different and fun.
One of the items on his fabulously expensive tasting menu is meant to remind you of the Mad Hatter’s fob watch – the one he idly dipped in the teapot during his tea party. Blumenthal’s version of the Victorian standard mock turtle soup involves a consommé set solid in the shape of a fob watch, which is then covered in gold leaf. You dip it into a clear glass teapot of hot water, resulting in a broth zinged up with flecks of gold.
This might not be quite your cup of tea, har har, but you have to admit it’s different, inventive and a long way from a bowlful of clear salty dishwater.
The trouble he goes to is astonishing. The basic consommé is frozen, ice-filtered, refrozen, put through a centrifuge, freeze-dried, and then coated with the gold leaf – just one item in the 15-course tasting menu.
And that’s why it costs an eye-watering £190 (R2 649).
Blumenthal, a self-taught chef, believes that the enjoyment of food relies on more than taste, and even more than the senses. There’s aroma, of course, but also texture, sound and sight, and then memory and association.
When he started the Fat Duck in 1995 with only a pot washer to help him, Blumenthal was planning a conventional bistro offering steak and chips. That’s what he says, but he’d already perfected the art of triple-cooked chips (first boiled in water, cooled, then deep-fried in oil, dried, cooled, and then fried again), so I suspect his menu would always have strayed into unlikely byways.
The dish that changed everything, he says, was his parmesan ice cream, based on a Sicilian recipe.
He explains: “It seemed weird because we grow up with the idea that ice cream is sweet. That’s the association we have. So I started questioning the links between taste and flavour and association.”
He put crab ice cream with crab risotto on the menu, which he describes as radical for the time (and still pretty radical in Cape Town, I’d say.) Some people didn’t fancy it at all, until he called it frozen crab bisque, and then they were happy.
Much of our pleasure in the taste of food is cultural. We’re happy to eat ice cream, while the Maasai people like to drink warm blood; we don’t fancy the idea of eating grasshoppers, but cheerfully eat prawns. Blumenthal said he once served a dish that a Japanese man found utterly repellent – creamy sweet rice pudding.
What has all this to do with airline food?
Earlier this week Blumenthal’s new TV series began, Heston’s Mission Impossible (BBC Lifestyle on DStv 174 at 8pm on Thursdays), and the challenge was to identify well-known sources of bad food, such as that found in hospitals, factory canteens and aircraft, and see what could be done about it.
British Airways bravely volunteered to be the airline guinea pig, and what Blumenthal and the airline chefs discovered has led British Airways to introduce what they call Height Cuisine, a menu designed to counter the effects of altitude, dry air, and that loud white noise that is the soundtrack to all flights.
Last week Blumenthal was in Cape Town to spread the gospel about airline food and his new series.
Speaking at the gorgeous Ellerman House in Bantry Bay, he told Weekend Argus they first proved that pressurised environments really do affect your tastebuds. They got a taster to drink water samples flavoured with increasing amounts of sugar and salt, and to mark the point at which he detected the flavour. When the experiment was repeated in a pressurised room, much higher concentrations of the flavours were needed before he noticed them.
Aircraft are pressurised to around 8 000ft, at which point you lose about 30 percent of your ability to taste. Altitude is also why airline tea or coffee is never really hot – at that height water boils at 91°C instead of 100°C.
The dryness of pressurised air affects your sense of smell too. In this case you’re apparently better off in economy than first class – the number people in economy keeps the air more moist.
They compared humidity on the ground at Heathrow – 65 percent – with that on a flight, and found it was 35 percent in economy, 12 percent in business, and just 6 percent in first. So there has been an effort to rehydrate the air.
The noise level in an aircraft also affects your appreciation of food; you should be able to hear crunchy food crunch.
At the Fat Duck they serve what they call toast sandwiches, tiny triangles of bread spread with something delicious, then a layer of thin toast, another filling, and finally a last layer of bread.
The answer, says Blumenthal, is to boost texture and to create bursts of flavour. One way of doing this is to use ingredients high in umami – the fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salt. Umami occurs in foods like tomatoes, mackerel and parmesan cheese.
Coriander seeds – whole, not ground – will provide a mouthful of flavour. Star anise deepens flavour when you’re cooking meat and onions. “Don’t put in too much – you shouldn’t be able to taste the spice – just the meatiness. It always works.”
British Airways is now serving dishes that include strong-tasting items such as citrus juices and spices, curries and pasta with tomatoes and olives.
The food might not solve the legroom problem, but anything that makes flying more pleasant is a welcome addition.
And when you get to London, you could always head for the Fat Duck and try the Mad Hatter’s fob watch.
- Weekend Argus