Heston Blumenthal, Professor Brainstorm of chefs, has written a book. As you'd expect from the proprietor of the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Berkshire, sometime winner of "Best Restaurant in the World" and purveyor of snail porridge to the gastro-nerd classes, it's a big deal. And we are talking big. At 5.4 kilograms and the size of a stack of paving slabs, it's not so much a coffee-table book as a coffee table.

It's more than three times the price (at £100) and twice the size, of A Day at El Bulli, the latest book by his friend, the equally regarded and just as wacky Spanish chef Ferran Adria. But Adria's tasting menu comes in at 30-plus courses, while Blumenthal's is a piffling 18 or so. Does Heston have something to prove?

The book is certainly theatrical. Inside the silver-edged pages, anecdotes from the Fat Duck sit alongside Manga-style cartoons of Blumenthal and his alter ego Child Heston. It's illustrated with arty photographs of carrot lollipop satellites spinning off into space and head-shots of Blumenthal gazing out moodily.

It certainly isn't gastro-porn: that implies mouth-watering recipes, and few normal people will salivate at the idea of snail porridge. But is it a proper recipe book, or a geek's handbook, like an atlas of the moon, unlikely to be of any practical use? Time to try a recipe.

Nitro-scrambled bacon-and-egg ice-cream sounds not exactly appetising but at least fun. The point, apparently, is to subvert our expectations by serving breakfast for pudding. I turn to the two tabloid-sized pages of instructions.

There are five parts to the dish. Heading the bill is the ice-cream mixture, injected into emptied egg shells and dramatically cracked into a pan at table, then stirred with liquid nitrogen, which at a temperature of minus-196 degrees, freezes the ice-cream instantly to a scrambled egg consistency. The supporting cast includes caramelised French toast, a tomato jam, a wafer of maple-syrup coated pancetta, and a cup of tea — tea jelly, that is.

Assembling the equipment is the first hurdle. There's the wide-bore syringe for starters. Luckily my husband, Richard, a doctor, can supply one, saving me from the credibility-busting explanation at the local chemist: "I'm not a drug addict, I just want to refill some eggs." I have a meat thermometer that will go down to the four degrees required for the tea infusion, and malic acid is tracked down at a home-brew shop. A commercial vacuum packer is trickier, but I optimistically think my home bag-sealer will work (it doesn't, but I manage). My local kitchen shop doesn't have a dehydrator for the pancetta, but luckily the amiable lady at UKjuicers.com can send me one overnight.

I set to work. My scales fall at the first hurdle, since they'll weigh only in two-gram increments, no good when you need 5.5 grams of gelatine sheets (the book's measurements are sternly metric only). I weigh out 10 grams, measure it with a ruler and break off 55%, feeling rather pleased with myself. The pancetta has to soak in a salty syrup for six hours (I give up on trying to vac pack it when half the syrup lands on the floor) before drying for 24. The bacon and ice-cream mixture needs to infuse for 10 hours, then mature for another 10.

The tomatoes and sugar steep for two hours exactly, as do the tea leaves and syrup for the jelly. The brioche for the toast has to dry out in the fridge for 24 hours then sit in custard for six. Getting everything ready simultaneously needs an entire time and motion study. I'm almost there, except that my tea jelly hasn't really set. Tea soup it is, then.

The final step, with the liquid nitrogen, is the tricky bit. My friend Caroline, who used to be a molecular biologist, tells me to try a chemistry lab. A few Googles later and I have a stroke of luck. Blumenthal's scientific mentor, Professor Peter Barham, works round the corner at Bristol University. Over the telephone he's helpful but refuses, point blank, to let me take any liquid nitrogen home.

"To start with, you'd need to do a three-hour induction course on handling it," he says. Spoilsport, I think, but all is not lost. Barham suggests I come up to the laboratory to "cook" the ice-cream. Armed with a trolley full of Tupperware boxes, I make for the physics lab.

Barham turns out to be a Bill Oddie lookalike with a penguin waistcoat. He inspects my French toast and pronounces it a bit rough round the edges, but he's impressed by the tomato jam and the bacon crisps. "You did this all from the book? You might even get a job at the Fat Duck."

He produces the liquid nitrogen, a clear liquid, in a suitably Harry Potter-esque goblet. But it's not steaming gently like dry ice. It's boiling hard, spitting and seething like an overheating panful of chips. Maybe he had a point. This isn't something to try at home.

The ice-cream mixture goes in a pan, the nitrogen is poured on top and we stir until it becomes, well, lumpy ice-cream. It looks a bit like scrambled egg, but it melts faster than a sorbet in Hell. Never mind that, says Barham, just feel the texture. "Nitrogen freezes the mixture so fast that ice crystals can't form. So it's extraordinarily smooth — much better than an ice-cream machine."

The ice-cream is indeed satin smooth, but weirdly porky. The whole dish is like an American diner breakfast of waffles, ham and maple syrup, sweet, salty and unbelievably rich. "You put too much bacon in the mix," says Barham. I feel peevish. After all, I followed the recipe to the gram. Well, the two grams. But there's the rub. Recipes can't be reduced to scientific formulae, because ingredients are never absolutely consistent. My bacon was just too bacon-y.

But the tea jelly has set after all, and it's sublime, refreshing and delicate. The French toast is the best I've ever tasted, and I'll make it again.

A laboratory may be a more natural home for Blumenthal's book, but when the paperback comes out I might just put it in the kitchen.

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The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, by Heston Blumenthal, out now, is published in Australia by Allen and Unwin, rrp $275.