Heston kelps the NHS

His latest experiments involve the use of seaweed to boost levels of levels of umami - a Japanese term for the fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

Last year chef Heston Blumenthal took to the challenge of changing the dinner menu of Alder Hey Children's hospital on his televised show, Heston's Mission Impossible. The NHS's largest children's hospital was experiencing a problem with the food in that the children wouldn't eat it, and recovery was suffering as a result.

Blumenthal is not the first chef to investigate overhauling hospital food - Loyd Grossman was recruited by the NHS in 2001 as part of the Better Hospital Food Initiative, aimed at improving menus for patients. The programme ran until 2006.

Ideas for Alder Hey included a Flying Saucer sandwich, Kenny’s Stuffed Tomato (a beef tomato stuffed with mince) and Elaine’s Mint-Aliano Feast (layers of peppermint custard, cream, lime jelly, chocolate sponge and mint chocolate sprinkled on the top). Together Heston and the chefs proposed a menu of a cold buffet lunch with greater focus on the dinner time meal. Their proposal was to serve patients sandwiches with healthy fillings for lunch, made at the bedside by a member of the catering team.

To encourage children to choose a healthier option, the evening menu also included an 'I Bet You Can’t Eat This Challenge' which dared patients to try a dish with a risky name or ingredient. Experiments included a Caterpillar Pizza (pizza with real worms), Vomit Soup (chicken and sweetcorn soup) and Snot Shake (apple and kiwi fruit smoothie). The menu was rolled out across a couple of wards during filming.

An alternative to salt?
More recently, Blumenthal has come up with the idea of using kelp (seaweed) to make food more flavoursome without using additional salt. The idea is to enhance levels of umami - a Japanese term for the so-called fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The flavour can be found in foods such as parmesan cheese, tomatoes and shiitake mushrooms.

“Obviously you can’t put too much salt in food because that has health implications, so you can increase umami,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Cooking broths and stews with the seaweed, which has high levels of naturally occurring glutamate, has been shown to give them a more meaty flavour, the chef said.

Tests were now being carried out to see if patients enjoyed mince cooked with seaweed and initial results were “fantastic”.

Blumenthal is half way through the three-year project, which involves scientists from Reading University and is based at the town’s Royal Berkshire Hospital. It is hoped that if successful his improved meals could be rolled out across the NHS.

He said: “If this does go through I think it could make a massive difference to the ability to produce better tasting food in hospital.”

Environment change
The current project is looking at quite a narrow area of improving the taste of dishes but further changes were also needed, he suggested. One possibility was to “change the lighting, maybe change the colour, put some smell in the room, do something to inject a bit of fun”.

Blumenthal believes that enjoying food would ultimately make people feel positive and get better more quickly. He said that the “amazing” work of doctors and nurses was in contrast to patients being served up “stuff that most of us would never eat”.

Blumenthal said: “I think if we can just get to the point in hospitals where you can have something like a sandwich, a shepherd’s pie, a cottage pie, some scrambled eggs, a bowl of soup, made with inexpensive ingredients, just well made and tasty. If we can get to that point I think that would be a revolution.”