Heston Blumenthal Sends A Bacon Sandwich Into Space

Heston Blumenthal, the Michelin-starred chef known for pushing the boundaries with his innovative dishes, has brought his cooking to the final frontier.

Blumenthal created a total of seven dishes up to par with space food standards and regulations for fellow Brit Major Tim Peake to enjoy while on his six-month mission, reports Mirror UK.

It took two years of research and development to create the items Blumenthal and Peake agreed upon before Peake's mission. The menu included beef stew with truffles, as a reminder of a romantic meal Peake shared with his wife; wood-smoked salmon, which Peake ate in his military days when deployed in Alaska; and the bacon sandwich was a personal request from Peake, which ended up being Blumenthal's most difficult dish to master.

Blumenthal says, "The bacon, the bread, the butter, everything – it all had to go in a can." Once canned, the sandwich had to be heated "at something like 140 degrees for two hours" in order to kill off any germs and make the food "space stable." The chef tested countless combinations and methods to stop the water from migrating from the butter to the bread, and stop the sugars escaping from the bread to the bacon, "and meanwhile you're thinking you should be able to do this. Because it's only a bacon sandwich. IT'S ONLY A BACON SANDWICH," Blumenthal tells The Guardian.

In January, Blumenthal sat down for virtual dinner over a video link with Peake, about a month into Peake's mission. Blumenthal says, "We worked out that at different points we were between 400 and 500km away from each other. In other words, we were eating at the longest extendable dinner table in history." The dinner will be broadcasted as a Channel 4 TV series called Heston's Dinner in Space.