Recently a woman asked me, with a squeaky roll of her eye balls, what I thought about “all those foams and sauce smears” she saw on MasterChef. Around the same time I started receiving requests for my food predictions for 2015. Would it be Korean BBQ or pimped British motorway services snacks or more of that raw food bollocks? Both questions are, of course, flip sides of the same coin; they’re about food fashions, and don’t we just love whingeing about those. Watch Twitter the night a MasterChef contestant pumps up the nitrous gun to produce a carrot “air” and you’d think the tabs had splashed with stolen nudie pics of Emma Watson, such is the outrage.
I was a bit late to the foam game, but I still recall my first one. It was the green tea and lime palate cleanser that Heston Blumenthal was knocking out at the Fat Duck around 2000. I thought it was fabulous. And here’s the thing: I still think it’s fabulous. I love the way a good foam releases its flavour on to the tongue without coating it, so you no longer know where smell ends and taste begins.
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