Smell it?
- Yeah.
Delicious!
And then we do this on a very large scale at some of our events.
And all different flavours, and like,
two people have boilersuits and all the gear on
and then we have a big bin full of liquid nitrogen
and big pots of and chuck it in
and we get, like, a really nice big explosion.
I'm Sam Bompas of Bompas & Parr,
and it's a joy to have you in our studio.
So we call ourselves, at Bompas & Parr, experience designers and
the onus on that is making sure everyone
comes along to one of our events, be it a dinner,
cooking with lava,
epic fireworks show —
the most important thing is
the experience that they take away.
The memories they have.
The photos they capture.
It's all about them.
It's all about you, if you're coming along.
Our work all started out with jelly.
And, you know, actually,
a lot of the problems inherent in jelly.
We wanted to make jelly for thousands of people,
wanted to make huge jellies, but we found we could only make
tiny ones, about this big.
And so we then started looking at
how can you engage all the senses
to make a small dish —
that's about that big —
have a much greater impact,
and something that people tell stories around.
And initially,
by engaging all the senses,
you're able to do that.
We've just been working on the world's lightest dessert.
Aerogel is a innovative, super light material
that was invented in 1930s,
probably for insulation,
and then probably forgotten about
until NASA started using aerogels
to capture comet dust.
And I was reading some of the inventor, Kistler,
in the 1930s paper where he speculated
on making aerogels out of egg albumen.
And that's where we thought, “Oh my God,”
that's basically a meringue.
Could we use his process of making aerogel’s supercritical drying
to make a super, super light meringue?
And what would it taste like?
It tastes like whatever you put into it.
It’s more a textural medium for flavour delivery.
We've made everything from jelly that weighs 50 tons
and encase the SS Great Britain,
which is a boat up in Bristol
for a great public feast,
with the aim of trying to get people into museums
that don't normally go to museums —
food is a really good medium because it's something that
everyone's an expert on —
to ice creams that don't melt.
So using a technique that was actually developed in World War II
to make floating iceberg aircraft carriers
when Britain was running out of steel.
We transferred those techniques into ice lollies
to make ice lollies that don't melt.
We’ve cooked with lava.
So lava at 1,350 degrees Celsius.
Flavoured fireworks —
that's taking the spectacle of fireworks,
which most people love.
Taking flavouring technologies that we do a lot with.
Taking delivery systems from the special effects industry.
So putting those three industries together —
that don't normally talk that much —
thereby creating something new,
a firework show for a quarter of a million people
where they can taste what's exploding in the sky.
We tend to be generalists,
but enthusiasts,
but whenever we get interested in a subject
we’ll try to find the world expert.
If they didn't get back to us,
we’ll email them furiously,
try and get them in for lunch at the studio.
If they don't get back to us,
we'll try and find someone else.
The future is all around us.
It's happening all around us at any time.
If you want to make a genuinely new future,
a really good way is combining two things that already exist
or disciplines that don't typically speak to each other.