Heston Blumenthal is not a man afraid to experiment. The secrets of his culinary success are soon to be published in his five-years-in-the-making, 532-paged, five and a half kilo book, The Fat Duck Cook Book.

The tome, priced at £100, will allow readers to tackle recipes at home from his famous Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, where the tasting menu costs a cool £125 per head.

“It’s a real whopper! It contains Fat Duck dishes down to the milligram. Historically lots of chef’s books leave an ingredient out to keep the recipe guarded but we’ve given all the secrets away,” says Blumenthal.

Given that some of the ingredients listed in the book include spray-dried carrot powder, yellow pectin and golden frankincense tears only the most resourceful and intrepid home cooks will end up making authentic versions of Blumenthal's dishes.

Heston Blumenthal: autumn recipes

Three courses of autumn nights' comfort food from Britain's most inventive chef

• Pig out

• Champ

• Get your oats

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Sherry, however, is readily available and the self-confessed culinary alchemist has been finding new and exciting foods to combine with the festive favourite.

In an attempt to shake off its musty connotations, Blumenthal has discovered that sherry pairs well with a range of foods from Scotch quails’ eggs to peaches and pata negra ham to Eccles cake, Stilton and sherry butter.

This month Blumenthal launched his findings of research with the Sherry Institute in Spain and Reading University. The result is typically Hestonian: sherry contains food compounds known as DKPs (diketopiperazines) which have the power to accentuate the umami in umami-rich foods creating a whole new and exciting list of possibilities for food pairing.

But what is umami? "If you think that you get salt and sweet and sour and bitter - umami is the fifth taste. It’s a mouth feel and can be found in anything such as tomato ketchup, parmesan and shiitake mushrooms," says Blumenthal.

“In Japan they have understood umami for years and for them it is as recognised as salt is. In Europe they’ve been doing it intuitively without knowing it, like in pizzas for example where you mix tomatoes and parmesan.”

As a result Blumenthal has come up with a menu where he’s combined those foods high in umami with an array of sherries that will accentuate the flavours.

First on the list at a tasting was French bread topped with gruyere cheese and cloves to go with a Fino sherry. Like parmesan, when gruyere ages little crystals form like salt and these are the umami which Blumenthal says “work fantastically well with a Fino but on a different level to the aroma.” The result was, of course, delicious as the subtle taste of the cloves was accentuated by the strength of the sherry.

The next dish to be served was crab with paprika on toasted country bread combined with a Manzanilla sherry. As crab has umami-rich compounds the DKPs of the sherry brought out what Blumenthal described as “the meatiness” of the fish.

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