Heston blumenthal net worth

His father is a Jew born in Southern Rhodesia, his mother a British citizen who converted to Judaism, while the surname has distant Lithuanian origins and means "flowering valley". His first encounter with gastronomy occurred at 15 when he visited France on a family vacation.

Heston blumenthal now

Thus, he started developing an interest in French cuisine, which he cultivated through the Les Recettes Originales series, among whose authors Alain Chapel stands out. Over the next decade, he worked a variety of jobs, from an auditor to a debt collector, while in the evenings, in solitude, he diligently studied the classic repertoire.

However, his nightstand also held other readings: in he was struck by On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee, which introduced him to molecular cuisine. From that moment, his still private approach to cooking changed radically: every action needed to have its rational explanation. His motto became and remained: "Question everything".

All this while he continued to travel through France in search of restaurants, wineries, cheese producers, and artisans, acquiring an enviable knowledge for a complete self-taught.

Heston blumenthal food

The turning point came in when he purchased a dilapidated pub in Bray, named "The Ringers", and renamed it "The Fat Duck". Although he described it as a bistro, the first critics who dined there sang its praises and the progression was rapid. Some of his signature dishes quickly became legendary: for example, the world's best fries, subjected to triple cooking; Sounds Of The Sea, a marine assortment with foam and edible sand, which the guest tastes while listening at the table to the breaking waves through an iPod hidden inside a shell, in order to enhance the taste perceptions via synesthesia; the Botrytis Cinerea dessert, with 20 components, which aims to recreate the taste of grapes infested with noble rot, the digressions inspired by Alice in Wonderland, and many other wonders.

In the following years, the scope of his interests never ceased to expand, extending to include food pairing and neurogastronomy with his usual precision. Memory provides us with a wide range of references flavors, tastes, scents, shapes, sounds, emotions from which we constantly draw while eating". But at the end of the '90s, he made a breakthrough discovery about cooking history while reading Le Vivandier, a fifteenth-century manuscript.

Heston also collaborates with the University of Reading, so much so that in he was awarded an honorary doctorate and he is an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry. To seal his place in the pantheon of great Britons, the Queen finally awarded him the Order of the British Empire OBE for his contribution to national gastronomy.