What on earth makes anyone, let alone a celebrated chef, think of combining porridge with snails; ice cream with mustard; oysters with passion fruit; and filling half his restaurant with the smoke of liquid nitrogen squirted on the eggs broken into a saucepan at the guest’s table, resulting in instant ice cream? What next?

A great deal, actually. It’s all the outcome of continuous experiments by Heston Blumenthal, chef-proprietor of the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire. The experiments and the creations of new dishes happen in a separate building, an ‘experimental kitchen’, actually a large laboratory where he calls the "scientists" experimental chefs. The Fat Duck has been written up dozens of times without trying to penetrate Blumenthal’s exceptionally imaginative brain rather than his palate. How do such amazing ideas keep occurring to him? Reading the unique names of dishes on the menu you need to swallow your prejudices as most of the resulting tastes excel. It was a great surprise that this nice and modest man is an honorary member – and a Fellow – of the Royal Society of Chemistry (he tells me that the only other two are Nobel prize winners), a Master of Science and an Honorary Doctor of Reading University; not to speak of his OBE.

It all started with the 15-year-old being taken to one of my oldest favourites, Ousteau de Baumanière in France, where “it hit me”, he says. I thought he meant a dish or the famous proprietor receiving guests in his nineties, or the wonderful location, swimming pool, etc. But no. It was “the smell” (lavender, would you believe), “and the sight and sound which all affected my senses and I am still trying to capture of the combination of what hit me,” says the man ruled by his senses. At first he didn’t mention the food at all which I still remember as heavenly. I had to extract from him and then he recalled, after 22 years, a red mullet salad and a gigot d’agneau en croûte. Significantly, his priority was not the memory of his palate but his still prevailing puzzlement by “the senses: smell, sound and sight”.

He is self-taught. After finishing school he wrote to 30 top chefs trying to start as anything in a reputable kitchen, but only Raymond Blanc of the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons replied and engaged him for one week. Blumenthal stayed on to learn (and befriend Marco Pierre White working there at the time) and also attended a brief course in Restaurant Management at Prue Leith’s cookery school.

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Anyone thunder-struck by a restaurant's 'newness' alone is the worst kind of ignorant food snob

Egon Ronay

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For hours, I was totally fascinated by the origins of his extraordinary combinations that keep being invented in his laboratory: “It’s not true”, he says “that I tried to imitate the 3-star El Bulli in Spain.” And sure enough this deservedly world-famous place also serves outlandish food combinations I had experienced but none related to Blumenthal’s dishes and some were inferior to his.

He is preoccupied by the scientific precision of ingredients: for instance the passion fruit jelly served with the oyster absolutely must be of 14° sugar density, so it’s measured with an appropriate instrument every time it is prepared otherwise, crucially, it could make the jelly too sweet for the oysters or not sweet enough. Why passion fruit? “Simply an inspiration,” he says.

And the new concept of "red cabbage gazpacho"? It turns out that red cabbage contains a modicum of mustard flavour which stimulates appetite. Hence mustard is also one of his ice cream’s ingredients and it is why, like the red cabbage gazpacho, it is served at the beginning of the meal. Why put it into ice cream? “Well, the whole idea happened to occur to me when ice cream was being made, so I thought why not?” I pressed him further: surely liquid nitrogen (with its fumes spreading in the room) is a gimmick to use making ice cream at the table. I was wrong. This is where the now almost forgotten Mrs Marshall came into it, a cook celebrated at the end of the 19th century even more than Mrs Beeton was. She wrote famous cookery books (one of Blumenthal’s hobbies is to read ancient cookery books) and she used, 100 years ago, liquid gas for making ice cream!

And why does he break up cherry stones? "Because I found that they, too, contain strong almond flavour. But I find the stone in peaches better as their flavour is even stronger.” What on earth for? “Well,” he says nonchalantly, “benzaldahyde” which, he explains, is “a single-aroma molecule also present in marzipan." He adds it to the cherry compote he serves with his delicious foie gras.

“It is a scientifically proven fact,” he rightly adds, “that the more excited you are in a positive way about something, the better the food tastes. And unpleasant emotions adversely affect how your food tastes."

I confess to having been mesmerised by more and more fascinating ideas born from Heston’s unprecedented degree of interest in the scientific aspect of cooking. Here was a man who unhesitatingly knew his own - exceptionally inquisitive – mind, peppered with what I would call the “why not?” factor, perhaps surpassing his great cooking talent. So I confronted him: is he driven by the passion to create something – anything – startlingly new, or to create a better dish? He got quite worked up about this dilemma and stressed that it is all definitely in aid of creating a better dish. He may well believe so but, frankly, I don't. His real passion is to create new combinations that work well. My conclusion is that he is a great chef who will go down in history as the greatest culinary innovator whose brain matched his palate. And he is only 41. As I said, what next?

© Egon Ronay

For exclusive recipes by Heston Blumnethal visit Times Online Food & Drink

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