THE FOOD REVOLUTION, PART 2: What happens to food when you take a pinch of science, sprinkle with psychology and add a dash of magic. Barry Didcock finds out

ON A SUNNY AUTUMN DAY IN BERKSHIRE, IN A BEAUTIFUL VILLAGE under the Heathrow flightpath, the hairs on my neck are rising. I'm not scared exactly, but having just watched a dollop of mousse freeze in a bowl of fizzing liquid nitrogen - and knowing I have to eat the result, I'm a little worried for tongue, teeth and tonsils.

Coils of graveyard mist still lick around the tabletop as the mousse, now a cold hard shell, is fished out of the Frankensteinian soup by a Frenchman called Eric. The epitome of glacial Gallic cool, he spoons it on to a saucer - carefully, I note - before dusting it with green powder and offering it to me with a flourish. A brigade of white-coated chefs looks on as I reach out a hand. Eric, meanwhile, is now pointing the nozzle of an atomiser at me. I pick up the morsel and see his trigger finger twitch. One, two, three chews then puff!

On paper, the thing now in my mouth is a Nitro-Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse, and it's served with a dusting of Matcha tea powder and a mist of lime essence. But no matter how descriptive the name, it can never capture the multi-sensory nature of the dish. Imagine snow and candyfloss and the remembered taste of your first, illicit vodka and bitter lemon.

The ears, of course, have already feasted on the sound of the thing poaching in the liquid nitrogen. That's partly what makes me so nervous, so anticipatory. My senses are sharpened even before I open my mouth. After the taste comes the smell as my nose is seduced by a "mist" intended to mimic the scent of a lime grove. I think I can even feel the vapour settling on my skin, though now, perhaps, my brain really is playing tricks on me.

Beside me, the creator of the dish is smiling proudly. With his shaven head and stocky build he looks like a nightclub bouncer, though his manner is more Willy Wonka meets M from the Bond films. He is Heston Blumenthal, a 42-year-old man whose twin obsessions - the science of food and the psychology of eating - have made him Britain's most radical and creative chef.

"Obviously it's theatrical," he says, "but the idea was to have a cleansing effect at the beginning of the meal. There's acidity to get the mouth going, there's green tea which contains tannins to dissolve residual fat in the mouth, and there's a little vodka in there as well for sharpness."

"Wow," I say, through a mouth that feels like it's been scoured with a particularly tasty kind of Vim.

We're in Blumenthal's "laboratory", a two-storey building in the car park of his three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck, voted best in the world in 2005. The quiet village of Bray is an unlikely place to find a food revolutionary, but it's here that Blumenthal created signature dishes such as snail porridge and bacon and egg ice-cream, and where he continues to create, cook and dream.

On the work surface behind me is a typical work-in-progress, a beautiful wooden bowl filled with what look like tiny green pears. In fact they're not pears at all but a mixture of veal and pork, glazed with some kind of green substance. I'm not sure if the bowl is edible. Knowing him, it may be.

"We've got the filling sorted," Blu-menthal muses, "but the hard part is getting the appearance right - and deciding whether or not we want some bananas in there."

Blumenthal is also working with a magician to add even more theatricality to the dining experience. He chuckles gleefully when he tells me about his Magic Water project.

"I haven't seen it, and I don't know how the magician will do it, but the idea is you have a bottle of water which you can see. You ask if the diner wants still or sparkling, and whatever they say it comes out of the same bottle."

Another dish receiving the Magic Circle treatment is the Flaming Sorbet. It's currently served surrounded by a corona of twigs on a red leather plate, and burns without melting when a blend of four whiskies is poured over it. Meanwhile, liquid nitrogen is poured on to popping candy beneath the plate, which contributes "smoke" and a sound like burning logs. A special formulated scent releases the smell of leather, tobacco and wood for that Christmas-Day-in-front-of-the-fire feel.

"The magician came and showed us how we could set this up on the table and the waiters could just snap their fingers and all four sorbets would go up in flames. There's a slight cost issue, though."

How slight?

"It's £400 a bowl at the moment."

The stories behind these dishes and many others are contained in a new book, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook. Equal parts autobiography, recipe book, philosophical essay and science text, it's illustrated by Neil Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean and looks like the sort of illuminated manuscript you find behind glass in monastic libraries. With a price tag of £100, it will not be vying with Jamie and Nigella's offerings on the Christmas bestseller list. Leaf through the index and you're as likely to find entries for Marcel Proust, Charles I and glycoproteins as for carrots and peas. An esoteric labour of love, then, but typical too of the perfectionism that drives Blumenthal's cooking.

All chefs are perfectionists in their way, of course. But what makes Blu-menthal different from anybody else is his tireless spirit of inquiry. There are no borders round his interests, which range far beyond food and its preparation to psychology, science and neurology, particularly memory.

This becomes clear when we retire to his office for a cup of tea: he has books on these and other subjects on the shelves that line the room, and as we sip Earl Grey he talks knowledgeably about reward mechanisms, flavour perception, learned association and synesthesia, the neurological condition whereby people experience sounds or tastes as colours. These aren't subjects that stand still for long either.

"Just when I get a grip of what I think is an overview of how flavour perception works, some other bit of information comes up that makes the whole thing more and more and more complex. I think that's part of the fascination of it."

Ultimately, he says, it's all about the brain. "The senses send information to it, but it's the stuff that comes back again that gives you the feeling. And the things that control that are so complex, there's so many of them."

His enthusiasm is as palpable as his Nitro-Poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse. "The thing that's most exciting for me," he says, "is to work with people who are pushing the boundaries in different disciplines, whether it's sound engineers or magicians."

To that end, he regularly contacts academics in this field or that to ask questions and elicit expert help. He is currently preoccupied with research into digestion, which leads us into a discussion about burping.

Meanwhile ideas bounce around his shaven cranium like fleas in a circus, inspiration coming from the unlikeliest sources. He recently heard a radio programme about how Agatha Christie structured her novels, for instance, and now wants to bring some of the same techniques to his restaurant.

"It would be brilliant to do - work with a scriptwriter on a menu and try to create intrigue, suspense, all those things."

He has also turned to Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland for inspiration. The book is a long-time favourite of his. In 2002, mindful of a quotation from it ("You might as well say that I see what I eat' is the same as I eat what I see'"), he created a jelly dish with a difference: two are served, a red one that tastes of orange and an orange one that tastes of beetroot. Now he has created a Mock Turtle Soup, which will soon be part of The Fat Duck's menu, and is working on another dish called Mad Hatter Tea.

"For me, the ability to try to use food and elements of the dining experience as a trigger for the imagination is fantastic."

Blumenthal's obsession with memory and the psychology of eating are in part a result of the seminal event that led to his wanting to cook - a visit, in 1982, to the three-star Michelin restaurant L'Oustau de Baumanière in Provence. He was 16, in France for the first time. He went with his parents and they dined outside. The way he tells it, he remembers everything about that night: the crunch of feet on the gravel, the sprays of white roses in the sunken garden, the way their scent mingled with the smell of the lavender, the shafts of light from the coachlamps, the colour of the honeyed stone, the shape of the ornate wrought-iron balconies, the tinkle of glass, the ballet of the waiters - and, of course, the food.

It took years of hard study and hard graft to take him up through the culinary ranks, but he now realises that his entire career has been about trying to recapture the magic of that night.

"I am convinced now that the reason my food has gone down this route - looking at sights and sounds and smells - is that for years I was desperate to move The Fat Duck to a place that had a garden or a river or a mountain or something that recreated the amazing experience I had in Provence. When I realised I was staying put, I knew I didn't have my olive grove or my mountain or the noise of feet on gravel or the smell of lavender. It's as if having The Fat Duck with none of those natural surroundings almost forced elements of the food to try to tick those boxes."

In March, Channel 4 trumpeted its capture of Heston Blumenthal from the BBC with a press release referring to him as a "gastronomic artist". He himself recently took part in a symposium at the famous El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona, which gathered together artists, critics and curators to discuss the relationship between art and gastronomy. I ask him if he views what he does as an art form. There's a long pause before he answers.

"The problem for a lot of people is that because the basic function of food is as sustenance to keep us alive, because you put it in your mouth and swallow it, it's difficult to see how it can be art," he says finally.

Because of that, he's previously been inclined to say food isn't art. Now, however, he is less sure.

"It still sounds a bit pretentious for me to say it, but I do think that if you can create an emotional response with paint, brushes and canvas, or with sculpture, then you can do the same thing with food."

But, he adds, "it doesn't matter how gastronomic and complex a restaurant becomes, the key thing is to have fun." He is wary, he says, of "over-intellectualising" the dining experience.

The Feast series for Channel 4 will see him offer his own twist on classic dishes from history. He's also undertaken to help revamp motorway dining chain Little Chef for a series of as yet untitled programmes which will also screen next year. So what's the appeal of television? Certainly not vanity, he says.

"I shouldn't say this, but I get requests to do everything from Celebrity Big Brother to Strictly Come Dancing, so if I wanted to get myself on television I could. If I wanted to do a range of microwave meals or something, then maybe I would do that."

Instead he uses television's resources to further his own ends. "It sets up challenges, helps creativity and focuses on research and development," he says.

He is creating between 20 and 30 dishes for the Feast programmes, and around half will end up on the menu at The Fat Duck. I've already seen prototypes of some of them in the lab - the pork pears, for instance - though I'm glad I missed the ejaculating Priapus, a special dish created for private parties.

"That was a real challenge," he says. "Mandarin, saffron, all bubbling up at the table. We must have done 100 versions of that before we got it right."

Wow.

The end result of all this will be a major shift in The Fat Duck's menu. It currently offers à la carte options alongside a taster menu, basically a succession of dozens of eye-catching (and headline-grabbing) mouthfuls. What Blumenthal wants to do now is create an entirely new menu. It's a response to what he sees as the most significant new developments in modern cuisine: the rediscovery of classic British dishes like shrimp tea and Eton Mess, and the introduction of sensory design to the dining experience.

"We've been championing British produce for a while, and so we should, but I think the emergence of a British food culture is going to get stronger," he says. "The realisation now is that there is a wealth of historic British recipes."

Don't think for a second, though, that his Lancashire hotpot will be like any you've ever seen before. Things look, taste and sound very different when you follow Heston Blumenthal down the rabbit hole.

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook is published by Bloomsbury tomorrow at £100