My wife and I don’t watch a ton of TV, but we do like to watch food-related shows. We’ve watched several episodes of “In Search of Perfection” on the Planet Green channel lately. Here’s the gist of the show, according to its Web site:
Regarded as one of the greatest living chefs on the planet, Heston Blumenthal examines some of the UK’s everyday foods in an extraordinary way: bacon and egg ice cream. Snail porridge. Chips cooked using a desiccator.
Heston Blumenthal’s approach to food is as unconventional as it is original. At his restaurant the Fat Duck, voted the Best Restaurant in the World 2005 by Restaurant Magazine and the Michelin Restaurant of the Year 2001, Blumenthal has had great success with his scientific culinary methods and menus that challenge traditional perceptions of flavors. Now he turns his attention to eight of the UK’s favorite dishes.
Follow Blumenthal’s scientific expertise, his obsession and his overwhelming desire to create an incredible sensation and memory link through the palate. The series combines cooking sequences in a purpose built laboratory-style kitchen with trips to meet the UK’s most remarkable food growers and best ingredient providers. Also featured are radical new ways to film the cooking process with innovative cameras and techniques: infrared, ultraviolet, heat sensitive, micro-cams and graphics to illustrate molecular animation. The meals given the Blumenthal treatment include Shepherd’s Pie, Spaghetti Bolognese, Sausages and Mash Potato, Fish and Chips, Roast Chicken, Steak and Salad, Risotto, Pizza, and Treacle Tart and Ice Cream.
As for the show itself, while the lengths to which Blumenthal goes in preparing these dishes are impressive, they are also ridiculous and sometimes make his techniques impractical for the average person (who’s going to make their own cheese for a burger or spend three days roasting a chicken?). He also got on my bad side when, after he expended great effort to secure the freshest (and least stressed) langoustines and other ingredients for his fish pie, he topped it with FROZEN peas. Hey, you are British and you like your mushy peas, fine. But couldn’t you have at least gotten fresh peas?
That complaint aside, however, what really leaves me scratching my head is why this show is on Planet Green. After all, this is a guy who
- has a chicken shipped to his restaurant in England from France instead of using local chicken because it has better flavor
- conducts an MRI scan on a piece of chicken breast to see if the marinade for chicken tikka masala really has an effect (shocking conclusion: it does)
- serves his fish pies with an MP3 player so the patron can hear the sounds of Scottish coastlines while eating
- hires a backhoe to dig a giant hole in his parking lot just so he can build a tandoori oven to make chicken tikka masala
- goes to Holland for the sole purpose of meeting with a food science expert to determine the optimal height for a burger (2:45 mark in the video below)
So he’s not buying local, and I shudder to think about the size of the carbon footprint he leaves in his globetrotting research for one dish. I can understand the desire to find the best ingredients in making the “perfect” dish, but I just don’t understand how this show fits on a network with an eco-minded audience. You would think such a network called Planet Green would go with a cooking show that demonstrates how to use simple, local ingredients to make good, non-fussy meals.