Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal leaves the kitchen for the laboratory

For someone who’s created an edible house, pioneered the use of liquid nitrogen in the kitchen and paired white chocolate with caviar, Heston Blumenthal’s latest obsession is surprisingly mundane.

Heston Blumenthal’s latest obsession is surprisingly mundane.

For someone who’s created an edible house and lickable wallpaper and the world’s biggest boiled egg, who pioneered the use of liquid nitrogen in the kitchen and paired white chocolate with caviar and introduced the concept of multisensory dining to global acclaim, Heston Blumenthal’s latest obsession is surprisingly mundane. Water.

But, as with anything the most famous self-taught chef-slash-scientist in the world has turned his attention to, his focus is on anything but the everyday.

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“Water has a memory,” he explains.

“It remembers data and has many different textures. If you apply sonic energy to water, if you put water in a Tibetan singing bowl and bash the bowl, its viscosity is different, it tastes different. If you subject it to photon energy or electromagnetic energy, it goes into a different phase.

“There’s a lot of work being done on this. People started looking at it in the ’70s and ’80s, but they were considered a bit crackpot.”

To understand the properties of water and how it affects the mind and body and applying that to what we eat, Blumenthal, 52, has spent months setting up a laboratory on a farmhouse property near the Alpilles national park in Provence, where he has lived for the past nine months.

Chef Heston Blumenthal will be back on MasterChef later in the year.

The move to France marks a metaphorical full circle for the triple Michelin-starred British chef.

His new home is but a short drive from L’Oustau de Baumanière, the restaurant where a 15-year-old Blumenthal had a light-bulb moment that sowed the seeds of what has become a global juggernaut.

It encompasses restaurants — the theatrical Fat Duck and the historically inspired Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London, Melbourne and next year Dubai — television series (Heston’s Feasts, Heston’s Mission Impossible, Heston’s Fantastical Food), books, podcasts and product endorsements.

Blumenthal is no stranger to thinking big. This is the chef, after all, who moved his Fat Duck restaurant to Melbourne only to move it back six months later to Bray, 50km outside London. Simultaneously, his first permanent restaurant outside the UK was opening in Melbourne in the same space at Crown that the Fat Duck had temporarily called home.

The world famous Meat Fruit at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at Crown

But it came at a cost. After this period, an exhausted Blumenthal retreated from public commitments, and stepped back from the day-to-day running of the restaurants and business.

“I realised how lonely my life had become,” he says.

“I was this hamster on a wheel. If someone asked me at the time I wouldn’t have said I was lonely, I was out and about seeing people, doing things, being busy. In fact, you can be isolated in a crowd.”

This period of reflection and clarity followed the birth of his daughter, Shay, now 15 months, with wife Stephanie Gouveia.

He says he’s enjoying fatherhood the fourth time around — he shares three children with ex-wife Zanna: Zack, Jessie and Joy, now in their 20s — especially being present for those milestone moments he missed the first time.

“I was working 120 hours a week for the first 10 years (of the Fat Duck). I was out of the house at 5am and back at 2 in the morning. I missed my (kids growing up). We can’t change the actions of what we do, but we can certainly learn from them. My kids are now adults. So, it’s never too late.”

Heston Blumenthal with Stephanie Gouveia, with whom he has a 15 month-old daughter, Shay. Picture: Julie Kiriacoudis

While Blumenthal’s days still begin before dawn, that’s now due to the demands of his daughter, not his Duck.

After spending the morning with Shay, Blumenthal typically will ride his mountain bike 25 minutes down a rocky trail — he’s still sporting a temporary cast from a fall in which he broke both kneecaps and his wrist a few months back — to a 13th-century monastery where he meditates before cycling back through vineyards and olive groves in an area once home to and painted by van Gogh and Picasso.

“It’s fantastic, beautiful. The air is so clean, the sunlight is so strong, the photon energy is so strong. It has the highest concentration of gamma rays in the world,” he says.

“Mobile phones don’t work, only sometimes. At first, it was infuriating, but then you come to embrace it.”

Many of society’s ills, Blumenthal believes, can be traced to the mobile phone and its paradox of connection.

“We make these things to make our lives easier but we’ve got less time than ever before. We have more choices but it’s harder to make a choice. We’re losing the ability to connect with a group. We’re connecting with more people, but through these,” he says, pointing to his phone.

This is the root cause of much of the anxiety he says is a debilitating issue.

“So many of us carry unaware levels of anxiety. Some of us, probably most of us, even when we’re aware of our anxiety, might not be aware of how much we carry and bury. I think carrying subconscious anxiety is the biggest killer. I’ve got rid of a lot. But I’m still learning,” he says.

“My priorities are one, my relationship with myself. Without that I can’t be the loving person I want to be. Then stability. There’d been lots of moving around, opening here, to-ing and
fro-ing.

“Getting some stability to a place that I thought would be emotionally healthy to my family. From a practical point of view, we’re doing structural changes within the organisation, selfishly to free me up. I don’t want to be distracted. I’ve got more energy and more clarity and more motivation than I’ve ever had.”

While his past obsessions included creating modern incarnations of historical recipes, such as the Tipsy Cake now served at Dinner, Blumenthal’s latest is more elemental: water.

Blumenthal was in Spain recently for the inaugural World Congress of Science and Cooking, where he was awarded for his culinary work influencing science.

“What we were talking about 15 years ago (multisensory dining and molecular cooking) was at least 10 years ahead of what the scientific world was looking at. These awards are, for the first time, the science world acknowledging this. It feels like, retrospectively, everything I’ve done up to now has been the foundation (for his current work). This is the beginning.”

So what will water have to do with food? Who knows? Not even Blumenthal. But he says it will form “a new approach to wellness”.

“I believe the more in touch we are with ourselves, the more we can take responsibility for our emotions, the more we can do things like mediate and connect with ourselves, connect with the moment, connect with nature, the more we can laugh, connect with each other, that would have a major impact on gut flora. The more connected we are to what we put into our mouths, the healthier that food will be for our bodies.”

After his whirlwind trip to Melbourne last week, Blumenthal stopped in Thailand to visit a shaman healer who makes medicine from plants, an enzyme expert who works with pre- and probiotics, and a medicinal mushroom expert.

“All this work will have an application through food. Without a shadow of a doubt.”