Gastronauts are go

Smoked bacon ice-cream, cuttlefish cannelloni of duck, rabbit with violet. Welcome to the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire. Its chef-proprietor, Heston Blumenthal, has been making the headlines with his daring combinations - now, more than ever, with his new menu and newly refurbished restaurant and kitchen.

This is Blumenthal's year: he has already won the Good Food Guide 2001's Chef of the Year and the AA Guide's Restaurant of the Year. Not to mention the ruckus he is causing among the scientific community. He has wowed Swiss scientists with his culinary pyrotechnics and his seemingly impossible flavour and texture combinations have a basis - some of it unwittingly - in the laws of physics.

Blumenthal is without doubt one of the most innovative chefs working in Britain today, and one of a handful in the world - along with the likes of Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Cala Montjoi, Spain, Charlie Trotter in Chicago, and Pierre Gagnaire in Paris - who boldly go where no one has gone before.

And talking of space: "Space dust, yeah. You remember the stuff we had as kids? Well I'm working on a version," he says, casually. And there'll be a savoury version of candy floss next - he even has one of those fairground machines sitting out the back, still covered in plastic (he is trying to figure out where to put it in his tiny kitchen - see My NewKitchen, 9 November).

Blumenthal wants to surprise. "Main courses in Michelin-starred restaurants always seem to be the least remarkable part of the meal. It's the bit where hunger is satisfied but little else. Starters are always the most exciting bit."

At the Fat Duck, you get starter after starter. At first glance, the menu may be broken up into the traditional three courses (£55) - but that's not the half of it. Diners are treated to nine courses in all. "Lots of smaller courses give lots of flavour hits. It keeps the interest up. I'm after intensity, and intensity works better if you reduce the size of the dishes," he explains.

Small is beautiful

It also helps you digest the food better, he says. "Because you get smaller portions, and you are eating it over two or three hours, you will feel less bloated. When you start to get bloated, the receptors in your mouth stop working properly."

Enter the world of molecular gastronomy. Frenchman Hervé This is the world's first molecular gastronomist and has just opened the world's first food laboratory in Paris to explore this kind of stuff - Blumenthal will visit soon, of course. There's even a Molecular and Physical Gastronomy Group, which brings the world's top chefs and world-renowned chemists and physicists together. An Oxford physicist, the late Professor Nicholas Kurti (who helped create the atom bomb), set it up.

The group, now 50 strong, meets every two or three years in a monastery at Erice, in Sicily, and has inspired chefs all over the world - Blumenthal included. He has been invited to do a demo at next year's seminar: "This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to me, "he declares.

Last summer, Blumenthal got hold of a list of group members' phone numbers and decided to find his own physicist to work with. "Eureka!" said Bristol University's Dr Peter Barham, on the phone to Blumenthal. "At last, a chef who understands." That was in August 1999 and they've been working together ever since.

This wasn't the exact turning point for Blumenthal's food, as we now know it. He had been playing with wild flavour combinations and contrasting textures for a few months before that. It's just that he didn't know why his increasingly experimental dishes worked out the way they did.

Take lime and potatoes. He now offers a "surprise" course of potato purée and lime jelly,(as a pre-dessert, for extra impact): literally, puréed potato with small cubes of lime jelly folded into the potato that explode in the mouth. It goes amazingly well. But why, how?

"At home one day I grated some lime over a gratin dauphinoise. It was absolutely delicious. The lime gave the dish a real umami feel to it. It turns out that there's an oil present in lime that has similar starch molecules to the potato," says Blumenthal.

The same goes for another (surprise) course of garlic cream with jelly of coffee. "Same molecules, "he says. "The coffee and garlic come together on the finish."

That's also why another course of pea purée with pigeon jelly infused with onion and star anise and crab cream works so well together. The flavours are pure and intense, and the textures, and colours, are startlingly different (the pea is thick, the jelly soft and the cream smooth), but it's the similar molecules in each layer that pull the dish together.

"I first started out with lots of aromatics in the pigeon stock - fennel, celery and so on - but the more I decreased them and increased the onion and star anise, the more the flavour of the pigeon intensified," says Blumenthal. "Then I learned from Peter that the star anise and onions had similar molecules to one another." Blumenthal uses a whole pigeon to make just three servings of jelly (so 150 pigeons in one go). "I know, I'm not going to make Business Man of the Year,"he giggles.

Barham also put him on to the benefits of liquid nitrogen, which Blumenthal squirts on to his foie gras and cod (when he's not squirting it on his brigades' socks) as soon as it hits the pan to bring the temperature down and encourage more uniform cooking.

He admits that it's all going a bit too fast for him. "I'm going faster than I can actually understand what is happening," he says. Though not fast enough for a bunch of Swiss scientists who are fascinated by Blumenthal's findings. Geneva-based flavourings company Firmenich invited Barham and Blumenthal to their laboratory in August this year. "It's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," he enthuses. "Their latest discovery is that the bit that links our palate to our brain is the same part of our brain that learns how to speak and learn a language. It's the most intricate part of our body, even more so than the reproductive system - do you know what that means?" he says, excitedly. "You can train yourself to like anything."

He tried it out on one of his chefs, Joe Cathers, when he got back. "He hated peas - couldn't go near them - so I got him to make the pea purée, and got him to check it all the time. He can eat them now," Blumenthal says, with a grin.

He particularly liked Firmenich's "tasting" machine that measures the level of intensity of particular foods. Blumenthal tried it out with a piece of chewing gum. "After 12 minutes of chewing I lost the flavour. But it's not the flavour of the gum that goes, it's your brain switching off because it gets bored. The flavour of that gum actually lasts for three hours."

Palate cleanser

The first course at the Fat Duck is a cleanser - to rid the palate of any traces of bud-numbing toothpaste or tongue-furring fat: a green tea and lime sour. "We actually chewed on some toothpaste before trying this out," he explains. "One of the best cleansers is green tea, and alcohol neutralises fat - so I took it from there." The tea is infused for several hours at 60 degrees to extract flavour, not tannins. It is then added, along with lime zest, to vodka, then mixed up in a soda siphon with a light sugar syrup and whisked egg white.

This was followed by the pea purée, pigeon jelly and crab cream. Then comes a crab risotto with rocket, red pepper cassonade, crab ice-cream, chlorophyll and passion fruit jelly (he had seen a dish of shellfish and lychee somewhere, so thought he would give passion fruit a try). The "starters" then begin: a cuttlefish cannelloni of duck, maple syrup, parsley and perilla broth; lasagne of langoustine, pig's trotter and truffle; ravioli of oyster with truffle and goats' cheese, brawn; roast scallop with caramelised cauliflower purée, jelly of oloroso and cèpe.

Mains to follow: veal kidney cooked in its fat, sauce Mac-vin, chips cooked in kidney fat and tomato ketchup; rognonnade of rabbit with violet; pot-roast best end of pork, gratin of macaroni, pig's ear sauce; roast spiced cod, castelluccio lentils, braised cockscombs and pea purée; sweetbread cooked in hay and a salt crust, crusted with pollen, cockles à la plancha and parsnip purée.

Just desserts

Blumenthal has let his imagination run riot with desserts: chocolate fondant, avocado risotto, coconut sorbet and sweetcorn purée ("sweetcorn and chocolate was used together in Italian cooking over 100 years ago," he says); smoked bacon ice-cream, pain perdu, caramelised tomato, purée of cèpe; butternut Bavaria, goats' milk ice-cream, melon-coffee-pepper.

Regulars might recognise many of the dishes, but they have been refined further, as their molecular structure is examined by the physicists. "But the ultimate thing for me is texture and taste. The dish has to eat well," he assures.

With all this extra help from the physicists, it's anybody's guess where Blumenthal will be in a year or two. "Look at these," he says, rattling industrial sample bottles of essence he was given at Firmenich (he is already using the bergamot in a gâteau of pralines superfines, bergamot tea and orange flower water ice-cream, cumin caramel), though he hasn't quite made his mind up about the re-built flavourings (as opposed to natural essences) that Firmenich and co manufacture. "I tend to think if the flavour is there and there is no physical damage then it's safe. If I can get a stronger taste with the re-built flavours then why not go for it?"