Dinner by Heston

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park
66 Knightsbridge
London SW1X 7LA
Website


Next stop on our London Weekend of Eating - after breakfast at Ottolenghi, and an appetite-inducing walk through Borough Market - was lunch at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. Months ago, when I was in pre-trip planning mode, I had thought of making a trip to The Fat Duck, but apparently, if you have dinner there, you have to stay the night in Bray, as the trains back to London finish earlier than the tasting menu does! (A clever move by the Bray tourism commission, perhaps?) My trip to Germany was already quite short, and taking five days out for London and Paris was already a bit of a stretch, so I canned the idea of The Fat Duck, and chose Heston's more casual restaurant, Dinner, instead - right in the heart of London! As a bonus, my dad generously offered to shout my meal too - thank-you Dad!!

The dining room

Booking a table at Dinner was quite easy - even though they have an online form for reservations, which "operates on a ninety day rolling basis", I just emailed them eight weeks before my desired date with my time preferences, and they responded very promptly and slotted me in at an available time. Easy! (N.B. you do need to give credit card details to secure the booking, so you can't just book for a bunch of different dates and rock up whenever you want!)

On the plane from Melbourne, the in-flight entertainment system happened to have How to Cook Like Heston available! I watched the episodes: "Chocolate", "Cheese", and "Potatoes" - and totally drooled over his famous triple-cooked chips! I could not wait to try them for myself!

Dinner is located in the rather upmarket Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge, but the restaurant itself doesn't feel stuffy at all. In fact, the stated dress code is: "comfortable", and most people seemed to opt for smart-casual. Clarice and I found all the waitstaff to be well-presented and professional, but still warm and friendly. We also appreciated the whimsical touches around the dining area. Look - jelly mould lamps!

Jelly-Mould Lamps

We decided to share an entrée, so that we'd have enough room for a dessert each. Priorities!

We started with some house-made bread, served warm with delicious salted butter. The bread was sourdough, crusty on the outside, and wonderfully chewy on the inside.

Bread

We only had one slice each to begin, as we didn't want to fill up, and thought that we might want to save some bread for our entrée... the famous Meat Fruit!

Meat Fruit (c.1500) - Mandarin, chicken liver & foie gras parfait, grilled bread - £15.00

I'm sure you've read about this before, but essentially, the Meat Fruit is a chicken liver and foie gras parfait, encased in a thin mandarin jelly, carefully textured and moulded to look like a real mandarin. So cute!

Meat fruit

The parfait was so incredibly smooth and light in texture, its richness offset by the tart and sweet mandarin jelly. It was such a treat, and I'd definitely recommend ordering this if you visit Dinner! The slightly smoky, crisp chargrilled bread complimented the parfait perfectly - we just wished there was slightly more of it. Luckily we hadn't eaten all of our bread, so once the chargrilled bread was gone, we just moved onto the normal bread.

Mmm, smooth parfait

Roast Turbot (c.1830) - Leaf chicory, sea purslane & cockle ketchup - £34.00

Clarice felt like fish for lunch, and was tossing up between the roast turbot and the cod in cider. The turbot won in the end, as the ingredients were a bit more unusual. I had a little taste - the fish was exceedingly fresh, and cooked beautifully, with the cockle ketchup providing a slightly stronger, almost briny, flavour to the dish. (Knowing Heston's recipes, I'm sure there was a lot more going on in that dish, but the most important thing is that it tasted great!)

Hereford Ribeye (c.1830) - Mushroom ketchup & triple cooked chips - £34.00

As I usually do, I requested my steak cooked rare, but the waitress advised me that they're better cooked just a little bit more. Apparently it's quite a fatty cut, and - with apologies to the squeamish among you - it's nicer if the fat is nice and warm and silky soft, rather than more solid. Sounded good to me! And when it came out, I felt it was cooked perfectly...

Steak

The steak came with a mushroom ketchup, a jus and the triple-cooked chips. On reflection, given that we were at a Heston Blumenthal restaurant, I feel like I could have ordered something a little more adventurous than a ribeye steak - but there was no way I was missing out on those chips! I must say I preferred the jus to the mushroom ketchup, although having said that, the steak didn't really need any extra adornments.

Left to right: mushroom ketchup, triple-cooked chips, jus

Those of you who've been following me for a while will know that I have a weakness for fat soggy chips, and can't stand thin crispy French fries. (Where is the stodge?) These triple-cooked chips, however, had the best of both worlds. They were cut thickly enough that there was a generous amount of fluffy innards, but were cooked so well that they had a lovely crisp coating. Result!

Triple-cooked chips!

Dessert! While we're here, let me take a moment to say that I found the ye olde British names of the dishes (with historical dates for reference) on the menu quite charming. As you can see in my blog's sidebar, one of my current culinary passions is traditional British food, so I found this all very fascinating!

Quaking Pudding (c.1660) - Pear, perry, caramel & lime - £10.00

The quaking pudding was like a cinnamon-scented, very softly-set panna cotta. It looked so lovely! And tasted just as good. I loved the shape of the pudding - it looks like the jelly moulds my mum used to use when I was little.

Brown Bread Ice Cream (c.1830) - Salted butter caramel, pear & malted yeast syrup - £9.00

I saw salted caramel, I immediately went for the brown bread ice-cream. It was so beautiful! I loved the perfect quenelle of brown bread ice-cream, sitting atop what looked like a digestive biscuit, surrounded by pretty squares of pear and what I believe was a type of sponge cake. Gorgeous!

Brown Bread Ice-Cream

If you want a bit of theatre, you can order scoops of vanilla ice-cream as a kind of mini-dessert, which are made to order at your table with liquid nitrogen. But, they were £8 a scoop, and more importantly, we were very full, so we decided to skip that! (We saw some being made at the surrounding tables and they looked very cool, but I think we made a better choice by ordering the desserts).

We finished off with coffee and tea, and another little sweet surprise.

Espresso - £3.50

Whole Rose Buds (Iran) - Light, graceful, notes of sweet-edged rose - £6.00

Chocolate ganache, caraway seed biscuit

So that was lunch at Dinner! We had such a wonderful time, and literally couldn't fault the meal. Absolutely make the time for a visit if you are in London!

Eccles Cake!

For Christmas last year, I was lucky to receive lots of great gifts, including the fab cookbooks: Jamie's Great Britain and Heston Blumenthal at Home. One of the first recipes that caught my eye was Eccles cake - a traditional British pastry consisting of puff pastry and a filling of currants - which appears in both books.

I love British food and am absolutely mad for traditional British baking, so I filed Eccles cake away on my mental "to-do" list. (And just to share a few examples of my previous British baking exploits: Bakewell pie, Bakewell slice, Yorkshire pudding, mince pies, mince pies, mince pies, Christmas pudding... come to think of it, I am much more adept at British cookery than I am at Malaysian Chinese cooking, despite my background... I really should get on that.)

Anyhoo, It was seeing (and eating!) a lovely little Eccles cake at MoVida Bakery the other week that reminded me of my desire to bake these, and my friends hosting a Christmas-in-June party that provided the perfect opportunity.

I ended up using the Heston Blumenthal recipe for Eccles cake because the photo looked prettier, the recipe and ingredients list were much simpler than Jamie's (yes, really!) and, significantly, Heston serves his Eccles cake with potted Stilton, which sounded like absolute heaven to me!

I won't type out the recipe here because even though I made some small changes and was pleased with the final product, I still have to experiment with the recipe until I've got it just the way I like it and I'm confident that I could repeat the results consistently.  But as I said above, the original recipe comes from  Heston Blumenthal at Home, and was also published online at The Mirror last year, as part of a "perfect Christmas lunch" feature.  I know Heston has a reputation for crazy complicated recipes requiring dry ice and a million pieces of exotic kitchen equipment, but the Eccles cake recipe is very simple, with clearly written, precise instructions.  It's well worth having a crack at it!

Ok, so the only fruit in the filling is currants, with some allspice and red wine vinegar...


... to which you add a mixture of melted butter and caster sugar.

The mixture looks a bit like pulut hitam, don't you think?

He then instructs you to let the mixture cool completely, roll it into little 25g balls, and stash them in the freezer to solidify.  Some people might find this level of precision annoying, but I think it's fantastic!  How much easier is it to achieve consistent results with instructions like that, rather than the usual "roll them into walnut-sized balls" or "roll tablespoonfuls of the mixture into balls"?  Besides, I have a very precise set of digital scales (very cheap and effective) that I love to distraction.  I actually can't stand working in cups and volumes - American versions of cookbooks drive me nuts! - and I find weighing ingredients to be so much easier.  I've noticed that almost all the ingredients in Heston Blumenthal at Home are specified in terms of grams, even things like water, vinegar, olive oil , so precision is obviously very important to him.

Once the filling is frozen, the next stage is to wrap them up in puff pastry.  I instinctively wanted to buy super-yummy buttery Carême pastry, but it rises like crazy, and I had visions of big, puffy, Eccles cakes that were more air than pastry.  (Remember when I tried to make mille feuille out of Carême?  Eek!) Sometimes I think Carême's crazy layers are more about showing off than practicality!  So I actually bought a standard supermarket ready-rolled all butter puff pastry, which worked very well.


You know, for all my talk about precision and weights and measurements, I wasn't very precise with cutting out the pastry circles.  The recipe specifies to cut out the pastry into 9cm circles, but I don't own a ruler and just used the largest round cutter I have.  It turned out that the pastry circles were too small to enclose my frozen 25g balls (heh), so I had to resize my filling balls before I could continue. Whoops!  I ended up with twenty-seven cakes, as opposed to the sixteen specified in the recipe, so mine must have been quite a bit smaller than Heston's.


In the end it was all good - I formed my (smaller) Eccles cakes, sealed them up, and did the requisite triple-slash in the pastry.  From here they need to be frozen for at least half an hour, or longer.  This made it quite easy, as I assembled them the night before the party, and glazed and baked them from frozen the next day.  (They are much better fresh, apparently, so I wanted to bake them as close to eating time as possible!)

Frozen raw Eccles cake

Covered in egg glaze

Whilst they were baking, I made the potted Stilton, which just involves whizzing together butter, Stilton and mascarpone, before drizzling in some water, Pedro Ximinez sherry and a dash of vinegar and mixing until smooth.

I found that the solids didn't cohere too well with the liquids, no matter how much I whizzed the mixture, resulting in a rather unattractive mixture of white solids floating in a grey liquid.  I think this is because I didn't soften the butter and Stilton sufficiently before whizzing them up - next time I would make sure both are super, super soft before mixing!  If I'd had more time (and my kitchen wasn't already in a huge mess), I would have transferred the mixture into my Kitchen Aid and beaten it on a high speed until smoothly combined.  However, the taste wasn't affected, and it looked fine once decanted into little ramekins and refrigerated.  Phew!

Here are the little cakes, all baked!


You'll see that loads of the sugar mixture leaked out during baking - I musn't have sealed the pastry seams sufficiently - but once I picked them up and placed them on a cooling rack, you couldn't really notice and the presentation wasn't really affected.  (It also meant the bottoms were nice and caramelized - bonus!)


Once cooled, I packed them up, took the little ramekins of potted Stilton and carted it over to my friends Carmen and James' place.  (You can just see the pecan pie I also baked for the party - any excuse to bake!)


With all the baking, I totally forgot to bring a proper plate for the Eccles cakes, so just arranged them on the lid of my container... until James saw it and was like: "Er, if you've gone to the trouble of baking those, perhaps you'd like a proper plate!", and whipped out that pretty silver plate you see at the top of this post. Fab!

But how did they taste?  The cakes themselves were extremely sweet, rich and intense - too intense to eat by themselves, actually.

Eccles Cake - Looks like a Hneoh Pneah, right?

But once you add the potted Stilton, it just became magic.  The buttery pastry, the intensely sweet and spicy filling, and the sharp blue cheese combined perfectly, and I absolutely loved it.  (It might seem unusual, but the combo of flavours was similar to, say, having quince paste or muscatels on a cheese board).

I found that the best way to eat these was to take a little bite, spoon on some potted Stilton and then inhale.