IF you want to see food through Heston Blumenthal’s eyes, pop a biscuit in your mouth, pinch your nose and breathe in. It won’t taste of much as flavour comes entirely via aroma molecules, he explains. But it’s the kind of experiment that inspires his day-to-day cooking and has helped him to turn dining out into a quixotic art form.

In his latest book, Heston Blumenthal At Home, the three Michelin-starred chef attempts to lay bare his thought processes, without recourse to the epic commands contained in his 532-page Big Fat Duck Cookbook of three years ago.

To recap, his bacon and ice cream mixture needed to infuse for 10 hours, then mature for another 10, before you poured on liquid nitrogen.

This time sizzling culinary facts intermingle with easy-to-imitate recipes.

“If you ask me for my guilty pleasure, it’s prawn cocktail,” says Blumenthal.

“When I was growing up in the Seventies you could only get one type of pasta, and you could only get olive oil from chemists, but that’s not to say there wasn’t food from that era you didn’t grow to love. For me it’s prawn cocktail.

“When I get home late after working in the Fat Duck there’s nothing I like better than to raid the fridge for it. Being such an addict, I’m deeply resistant to attempts to muck around with the ingredients, but putting a little chopped basil and tarragon into the mix introduces some fresh, lively extra flavour, as does scraping the seeds from a vanilla pod and adding them to the mayonnaise.”

Reading his cookbook, filled with tips on how to cook ‘sous-vide’ style (food sealed in airtight plastic bags and plunged in a warm water bath) and the joys of smoking candyfloss, it’s easy to get absorbed by his bold tactics.

Even if you do think spritzing Kirsch into the air to accompany your Black Forest gateau, or smearing fan blades with a maritime scent to accentuate the flavour of your salmon dish, might be going too far.

“I'm a bit weird,” admits Blumenthal, as he analyses why he cooks in such extreme terms, and dreams up dishes such as snail porridge.

“We’ve got a psychometric test we do for staff, and I thought, ‘I’ll do it myself’.

“It tends to put people in two categories – creative or logical. I’m literally chalk and cheese. I’m left-handed with chopping and writing, everything else right-handed.”

This could well explain how his madly creative impulses sit so easily alongside a love of rational, scientific exploration. During the past four years, TV viewers have been treated to his extreme approach via his Feasts series, Little Chef and Heston’s Mission Impossible.

And this year he opened his second high-end restaurant, Dinner, which provides a tour of Britain’s culinary past and includes your average Blumenthal twists, such as meat fruit (chicken liver parfait wrapped in mandarin jelly to make it look like a tangerine).

“At one point when we were opening Dinner, we had 600 dishes in development between the restaurants, television, Waitrose and other projects,” he says.

“So that involves tasting, and tasting, and tasting, and tasting, and tasting, and tasting.

“Fear of failure is a big driving force so I know I have to drop myself into one situation, pull myself out again and then do it again, trying to keep my head above water again.”

Although it’s hard to imagine Blumenthal’s ever less than 100 per cent in control while in the kitchen, he begs to differ.

“There are some times when you think, ‘I've bitten off more than I can chew’. Even with Feast. In the second series, we were panicking the day before, thinking we had nothing to serve.

“But because of the length of the programme you don’t see all that. You miss the bit where I was madly panicking!”

Here are three recipes from Heston Blumenthal At Home...

• Heston Blumenthal At Home is published by Bloomsbury, £30