Heston Blumenthal Engineered the Perfect Chip — Boil It, Freeze-Dry It, Fry It Twice

Heston Blumenthal had no formal culinary training. He had grown up in West London, dropped out of various jobs as a young man, and become obsessed with cooking after a family meal at L'Oustau de Baumanière in Provence as a teenager — an experience he later described in terms of fountains and lavender as much as food. He bought a run-down pub called The Bell in Bray, Berkshire, in 1995, renamed it The Fat Duck, and ran the kitchen for the first stretch alone with a single dishwasher.

The restaurant's signature contribution to home cooking is the triple-cooked chip. Blumenthal's premise was that a chip's crisp shell only forms when its surface starches are completely dehydrated, but conventional double-frying leaves too much moisture trapped inside. His version: boil the cut potato to softness, then chill and dehydrate it (he uses a dedicated cooler) until the surface looks chalky, then deep-fry once at lower temperature to set the structure, then a second time at higher heat to brown. The result is mechanically rigid, with an outer shell so dry it shatters audibly. The technique appears in essentially every modern UK pub menu now.

The rest of his menu is more theatrical. "Sound of the Sea" — kelp, hijiki, baby eels, razor clams arranged on edible "sand" — comes with an iPod tucked inside a conch shell playing wave audio while you eat, on the premise that hearing surf makes seafood taste more vividly of seafood. "Snail porridge" is a green parsley risotto with snails, which sounds revolting and is, by most accounts, the best thing on the menu. The Fat Duck earned its third Michelin star in 2004, the third UK restaurant ever to do so, behind Le Gavroche and The Waterside Inn.