If you want to see food through Heston Blumenthal’s eyes, pop a biscuit in your mouth, pinch your nose and breath 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 seminal 532-page Big Fat Duck Cookbook of three years ago.

Just 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 – both technical and trivial – intermingle with easy-to-imitate recipes mostly confined to one page of text.

“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.

“It’s funny as we think of vanilla as sweet, but if you chew a vanilla pod, it’s as bitter as coffee.”

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 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% 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. I’d be like, ‘I have a problem’. Next scene ‘Oh I’ve fixed it’. You miss the bit where I was madly panicking!”

Here are three recipes from Heston Blumenthal At Home…

Prawn cocktail

(Serves 4)

110g tomato ketchup

100g mayonnaise

¼tsp cayenne pepper

Worcestershire sauce, 12 drops

10g lemon juice

Salt and black pepper

400g cooked shelled prawns

1 iceberg lettuce, finely shredded

1 avocado, peeled and diced

Combine the tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, cayenne pepper, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Add the prawns to the sauce and stir to coat. Place the shredded lettuce on the bottom of four glasses or glass bowls, followed by the diced avocado, and then a generous spoonful of prawns and sauce.

Rack of lamb

(Serves 6)

2 racks of lamb, weighing approx 500g each

Extra virgin olive oil

16 sprigs of thyme

4 sprigs of rosemary

8 bay leaves

Salt

Jar of tapenade

You will need:

Sous-vide vacuum bags

Water bath (bain-marie)

Pre-heat the water-bath to 60C. Place the racks in two individual sous-vide bags with 15g each of oil and the herbs divided between them.

Seal the bags under full pressure, and place in the bath for one hour. Remove the bags from the bath and remove the racks from the bags, discarding the herbs. Pat dry. (Alternatively, place the sealed bag in a basin of iced water at this stage and refrigerate until required.)

Season the lamb with salt. Coat the bottom of a large frying pan generously with olive oil and place over a medium-high heat. When the oil is hot but not smoking, add the lamb and cook for four minutes, flipping the rack every 15 seconds, until the meat is brown on each side.

If the pan begins to smoke, lower the heat. Remove the lamb from the pan and allow to rest for at least 5 minutes before coating with the tapenade. Divide into cutlets to serve.

Eccles cakes with potted stilton

(Makes 16 mini Eccles cakes)

For the Eccles cakes:

100g unsalted butter

150g unrefined caster sugar

200g currants

25g red wine vinegar

5g ground allspice

500g all-butter puff pastry

Egg wash (1 egg yolk beaten with 2tsp milk)

For the potted Stilton:

100g Stilton, at room temperature

50g Mascarpone

75g unsalted butter, at room temperature

½tsp salt

30g Pedro Ximénez sherry

½tsp sherry vinegar

To start the Eccles cakes, melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat, then add the sugar and heat until the mixture begins to bubble. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the currants, vinegar and allspice. Allow to cool completely.

Portion the mixture into 16×25g balls, put on a tray and place in the freezer for 1 hour. Roll out the pastry to a thickness of 3mm, then cut out 16 circles using a pastry cutter (approximately 9cm). Brush the circles with egg wash, then place the frozen filling in the centre of the circles and wrap the pastry around it. Press together the overlapping edges to seal, and roll between your hands to form a perfect ball. Turn each cake over so the join is on the bottom and slash the top with a knife three times.

Place the cakes in the freezer for at least 30 minutes (they can be left in the freezer at this stage if making them in advance of serving).

Meanwhile, for the potted Stilton, put the Stilton, mascarpone, butter and salt into a bowl and blitz with a hand blender until smooth.

Gently warm the sherry, 55g cold tap water and the sherry vinegar together in a small saucepan until almost simmering.

Slowly add the sherry and water to the cheese and mix carefully until well combined. Decant into small ramekins or a single bowl and place in the fridge to set (approximately 1 hour).

To bake the cakes, pre-heat the oven to 200C. Brush the surface of each cake with egg wash and bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until the pastry turns golden brown.

Take the potted Stilton out of the fridge 10 minutes before serving with the warm Eccles cakes.

• Heston Blumenthal At Home is published by Bloomsbury, priced £30. Available now