Those of you who watched last night's Heston Blumenthal In Search of Perfection, where he made what he reckons is the Perfect Hamburger, might be interested in this, where a Guardian reporter wheedles his technique for making tomato concentrate out of him. Apparently it's full of umami (that's the intense savoury flavour you get in things like Parmesan, mushrooms and, yes, tomatoes) and enhances the flavour of meat. And unlike most Blumenthal recipes, it looks like you could do it fairly easily without a white coat, a pair of safety specs, a flask of liquid nitrogen, a femtosecond laser, and a hunchbacked assistant lurching around and calling you 'Marster'. So I think I might have a go.

I'm a little sceptical about Blumenthal, or more specifically, about his media appearances. He's clearly a miraculous chef and a good bloke; his food is wonderful (I've not eaten at the Fat Duck, but the Hind's Head, which is the non-poncey British Classics pub next door, is fully under his influence) and the spirit of never-ending enquiry about what makes food good, and the sensory experience of eating, is fascinating.
But the thing is, he's a professional chef in a professional (if eccentrically equipped) kitchen, and with a brigade of professional (if equally eccentric) staff to help him. His programmes are presented as cookery programmes, as if people could replicate what he does. Well, you could. If you were willing to spend three days making chicken tikka masalla (as he did last week) or an equal amount of time making hamburgers. And getting hold of sodium citrate to make the fondue topping emulsify properly. And trying to handle the dough for the burger buns. Believe me, any bread dough made that wet, and with flour that strong, is going to be an absolute nightmare — it'll be semi-liquid and so sticky that it'll seem to defy the laws of physics. It'll run up your sleeves, over the floor, and coat the cat. In six months' time, you'll find some on the ceiling. You've seen The Blob? You get the idea.
Yes, you could do it. If you were insane, and bored, and had silly amounts of time on your hands. But it seems that Heston's techniques, away from the restaurant kitchen, are likely to be more interesting to the food industry than to normal cooks, and that worries me. Because the food industry isn't primarily interested in nutrition, it's interested in making cheap stuff taste expensive; and Heston's techniques of brining meat to keep it juicy and using synthetic emulsifiers just give some of their dubious (and unhealthy) techniques an air of respectability.

It's interesting that the BBC's two flagship cooking programmes at the moment are so diametrically opposed. Nigella Lawson's programme is entirely about food as sensuality. There's no measuring, hardly any technique, and very few shots of the actual food — but lots of shots of lovely Nigella and her lovely family and her lovely friends (but never her husband, who isn't very telegenic), eating stuff she's previously been cooing orgasmically over. Which if you've read any of Nigella's books, isn't really what she's about.
And then there's science-lab Heston, the boys' cook, which is all technique and measurement and weird shit, and lots of shots of food and actual cooking, but with almost all the sensuality surgically stripped away. You might get a sequence of messy burger-eating, but if Nigella did that she'd roll her eyes, fellate her fingertips, and make the sort of noise that would get you chucked out of Waitrose. Heston just starts talking about mouthfeel.
The programmes are so distinctly styled that they might as well be coloured pink and blue. Although the food on both looks great, both of them are strangely off-putting. I'd much rather have the Hairy Bikers, or even Jamie Oliver's Channel 4 series, which balance the two sides of food much more evenly.

I made quince and brandy ice-cream yesterday. Italian-style, with no egg yolks. Very smooth, light and clean-tasting, it is, and more than a little Moorish. If I do it again, I'll cut down the brandy and add some rosewater.