Noma, Exploding Cakes, and the Ethics of Eating - an interview with Blanch and Shock

Noma, Exploding Cakes, and the Ethics of Eating - an interview with Blanch and Shock

21 March, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

Food + art + principles = non-stop excitement and deliciousness. Tom Jeffreys meets culinary design studio Blanch and Shock.

In the last couple of years, meal times have become more than a little strange. I've licked chicken stock gel off a ceramic tile; lobbed lamb bones into a bloody pile on the floor; fished 63° eggs out of a water bath in my own office; sucked mint ice cream from a Petri-dish; and gnawed at bread rolls floating from the ceiling. I've even been served up as the main course to several hundred diners under the railway arches of London Bridge. All of this is thanks to London-based food design group Blanch and Shock. According to their own reckoning, I've actually eaten more of their food than they have themselves.

Before forming Blanch and Shock in 2007, the group's three members, Amy Houston, Josh Pollen and Mike Knowlden [pictured left to right, above] used to put on mixed art events together – across the visual arts, music and literature – so their innovative approach is hardly surprising, and they continue to work frequently with theatre groups, curators, artists and designers. They've made an exploding cake for Icon Magazine; used liquid nitrogen for ice cream at Harvest Festival; 'deconstructed' coffee at the Illy Galeria; and balanced the four humours at the Wellcome Collection. Their van contains all manner of strange equipment, and dishes often incorporate an amazing range of dusts, powders, gels and painstakingly sous-vided deliciousness.

What's interesting though is that, despite the theatrics, the most memorable moments have always been rooted in the flavours. For Blanch and Shock, unlike several other high-profile experimental food practitioners, the food always comes first. Strange (often foraged) ingredients – chamomile vapour, samphire, sea lettuce, hay mayonnaise, wood sorrel, kelp powder – are used for what they add to a dish rather than for the simple sake of strangeness. As Mike tells me over a cup of tea at the Artsadmin Café in Whitechapel, “our speciality absolutely is making food, and coming up with interesting and tasty food for people to eat, rather than necessarily coming up with the full concept for everything.”


left - pigeon, cherries and wheat on charred cherrywood
right - exploding cake for Icon Magazine

I was first introduced to Blanch and Shock in 2010 by critic and curator Crystal Bennes (my wife-to-be, incidentally) who dragged me up to Eastside Projects in Birmingham for a recreation of Gordon Matta-Clark's famous Bone Dinner (hence the bloody pile of bones on the floor). It was around the time that they really began to emerge, having done important projects with the likes of Artangel and Kindle Theatre. But since then my conception of them has shifted away from the idea of artists whose medium is food, and more to that of chefs who work in an artistic way. Mike agrees: “things have changed for us as well. When we started I was much more interested in those relational aesthetics – what can you do when you put people round a table – and now I'm much more interested personally in the food itself. The deliciousness of the food is the most important thing.”

The “artistic way” in which Blanch and Shock work is not so much about artful presentation – although their food is always delicately, innovatively presented – and more about the idea of practice. So, for example, rarely do they ever repeat a dish. In fact the only time they have was over a series of three dinners commissioned to accompany an exhibition Crystal curated right here in Spoonfed Towers. Even then there were noticeable variations each night. “The whole thing, says Mike, “has been based on continually moving – both physically and with ideas.”


left - tomatoes, garlic, Vincotto and leek powder
right - oxtail, razor clam, squid ink, seaweed and chervil root

Admittedly, part of this is through necessity: Blanch and Shock do not have a permanent space, although they're currently looking for something – more akin to an experimental food project space than a restaurant in the traditional sense. “I'm personally coming round to the position that it would be lovely to repeat dishes a little bit more because the finesse comes from that,” says Mike – hence the need for some kind of permanent presence. But so far it's proving tricky. “Although,” as Amy recognises, “working with food creatively is much more widely thought about than when we started, the idea of a creative space for food that isn't just a restaurant is not that common.” “What we really need,” adds Josh, “is a space in which to continue this practice that we've built for ourselves.”

It is in this sense that Blanch and Shock are aligned more with the world of art rather than that of the high-end restaurant. And it's a point that was crystallised by Josh's recent month-long internship at Rene Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen, recently voted the best restaurant in the world. “My time at Noma,” Josh explains, “was very, very brief – so brief that it was impossible to come to any true understanding of it other than a superficial glance at its philosophies and principles. But from the point of view of seeing an unbelievably well-run machine that produces some of the most exciting food around, it was incredible.”

“But,” he continues, “as somebody who has interests in, say, other bits of life, I was very much told by this experience that it wasn't for me. It showed me that there isn't room in a restaurant to be what we want to be – chefs ostensibly, but also designers and stuff like this – and there isn't room, or resources, or time, or inclination in what we do, to be like that. So I went there hoping it would illustrate a lot about the way we do things, and what it did in fact is show us quite how disparate these two things are.”


left - ox cheek and short rib burger
right - brassicae, rocket, wild garlic and fennel

One thing that does link Blanch and Shock with places like Noma is in terms of their attitude towards ingredients. As Amy says, “one of the reasons for getting involved in food in the first place was to demonstrate the way we believed the food trade should happen. So Blanch and Shock is demonstrative of our opinions, and in a sense you have to be quite unreasonable about it.”

This means a focus on the local and the seasonal, and a personal relationship with almost all their suppliers. As Mike puts it, “it almost goes without saying that the quality of the produce is really important, but it's so much more than that. For a start, everything is predicated on the seasons: before there's an answer to a project brief there's a menu, and before there's a menu there's what's available. Secondly, it seems like there's an implicit relationship between a good person to be buying from and good produce.” Josh agrees: “Good people – or people that you can class as good in whatever vague way that is – tend to produce food that stands up ethically and in terms of quality, and a lot of times in terms of price, which for us on a small scale is very important.”

All of which means that when you eat with Blanch and Shock, you know that however strange the dining experience, the food will always be exciting, different, beautiful, thoughtful, playful, ethically sound and, of course, delicious. I think back now over past dishes, and simply salivate: fat, juicy mussels with braised cauliflower in a light watercress broth; puckery Russet apples with burnt raison meringue; rich, rounded bread and butter pudding with brioche, quince and bone marrow; meltingly delicious pig cheeks with bouncy English peas, their shoots, and summer savoury vinegar; and, most recently, soft, fatty 16-hour sous-vide pork served with medlars, parsley root and a spleen pâté. It's hardly surprising that I – and many others – keep coming back for more.

www.blanchandshock.com

All photos copyright Blanch and Shock, except top middle (Chris Keenan); top right (Illy); and bottom right (Sanna Fisher-Payne)

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Tom Jeffreys