Writers' rooms: Heston Blumenthal

Photograph by Eamonn McCabe

This is the Fat Duck’s development kitchen, also known as the lab. Before we got this space I was in a garden shed and then a porta-kitchen, which was all very Heath Robinson and involved lots of masking tape and mastic. So this is luxury, but I try to use the technology in a very practical fashion, the same way as I’d use a knife. But I can’t deny I’m fascinated by it, and my wife still talks about the time I got hold of my first scientific equipment catalogue. I became feverish with anticipation. There were humidifiers, distillators, desiccators, autoclaves. I didn’t know what half of them did, but they really excited me. On the bench is a vacuum filter and, in the middle, a rotary evaporator, which produces a condensed vapour of whatever you put into it – chocolate, garlic, whatever. It’s almost as if you can taste the smell. Some people still complain about technology, but purity would mean an open fire. Why is a centrifuge juicer from a department store OK, when a lab-grade centrifuge that splits amino acids isn’t? The only question should be: does it make the food better?

People imagine I wake up in the morning saying something like “I’m going to make an ice-cream that walks”, but 80% of the time I’m doing 40 versions of the same ice-cream recipe with different amounts of egg yolk. We’re currently working on a new dish called the Mock Turtle Soup Mad Hatter’s Tea. There are lots of Alice references and it comes together when the diner dips the most upmarket, gold-leafed, fob-watch-shaped stock cube into a bowl of broth to produce a gold-flecked consomme. However, to serve 250 of these a week will require a heavy-duty freeze drier that costs #40,000. You have to think about it. And the pie on the table? It’s for a TV series on feasts, which will be shown next year. It looks traditional enough, but you should know that the inspiration came from the nursery rhyme with four and twenty blackbirds …