Recently, sitting with friends in a pub, Heston Blumenthal got some free psychotherapy. They were joking around when one of his mates, a psychiatrist, suggested to the chef that he had attention deficit disorder. Blumenthal could not help thinking the shrink had drunk one glass too many. After all, wasn't the three-star Michelin chef a man famous for spending years – decades – in search of the scientifically perfect ice cream? A man who had devoted his late teens, when most of his mates were queuing up for after-hours kebabs and a punch-up on a Friday night, labouring into the early hours in his parents' kitchen trying over and over again to create a plate of chips that did not go soggy? Hadn't he survived on "15 hours of sleep a week, maximum, for about eight years" with the singular purpose of trying to establish his restaurant, the Fat Duck in Bray? It was, however, the psychiatrist insisted, a classic case. "He said all ADD kids have the concentration of a gnat until they find the one thing that they adore, and that occupies the whole of their mind; I guess that's me." Blumenthal says.

Anyone in this country who cares vaguely about what they eat is fortunate that the chef chanced upon the love of his life so early. For 20 years, Blumenthal has dedicated himself to proving that British food cannot only compete with the best in the world, but be the best in the world. The epiphany, as he has often recounted, was an accident. He was on holiday with his parents in France, as a 16-year-old, when they pitched up at the three Michelin-star L'Oustau de Baumanière in Provence. His dad was a "well-done steak man, a bit sniffy about 'agneau this and legume that'" so that first food adventure came out of the clear blue sky. Blumenthal has, it seems, thought about that meal almost every day of the 31 years since: it has become his shorthand for perfection. Not only the food but the whole "multi-sensory experience" – the crunch of the gravel, the weight and chink of the glasses, the smell of the lavender – all of which he recalls again now and all of which intoxicated his deficiting teenage attention and changed his life for ever.

It initially took Blumenthal 10 years to begin to bring that experience back to life ("all food is about memory eventually," he says). He left school with one A-level, in art, took out some of his natural aggression in kickboxing, all the time working out how he might recreate Provence off the M4 near High Wycombe. Looking back, chance seems a lot like fate. "Had I had a backer, for example," he says, "I would not have come here to Bray. The Fat Duck cost about 240 grand freehold back in 1995. We sold our house, car, borrowed a bit of money from my old man, got a mortgage on it, decked it out on a shoestring. What on earth was I thinking?"

You only have to go to Bray to see the sheer chutzpah – or naivety – of Blumenthal's choice back then. It is a one-road village, really; the restaurant is on one side of that road and his pub and "laboratory" are just across the way. Just around the corner, by the river, and the only other obvious place to eat, is the Roux brothers' Waterside Inn. When Blumenthal opened, the Waterside had been awarded three Michelin stars for each of the previous five years. Blumenthal was, as he says, "a self-taught chef, and I had bought an old pub with a tiny, cramped kitchen round the corner from one of the greatest restaurants there has ever been in Britain".

This bend in the river, adjacent to Stanley Spencer's Cookham, not far from Wind in the Willows and Three Men in a Boat territory, is in many ways at the heart of the heart of England. It is a conservative place. While rock'n'roll celebrity chefs were making their name in London, Blumenthal's playlist was more appropriate to the locale. In the early days, he says, the lifesavers for him and two assistants sweating all hours in the kitchen were Terry Wogan and Neil Diamond. "We were delirious from lack of sleep all the time," he recalls, "when madness seemed to be setting in, singing Sweet Caroline kept us going."

Thinking back it was also partly that sleep-deprived delirium that first led Blumenthal "down the rabbit hole" into the science of gastronomy, where he subsequently discovered all sorts of wonderlands. Crab ice cream and snail porridge don't seem quite so outlandish now, but when he first put them on the menu in 1997, couples were still coming into the Fat Duck expecting a roast dinner.

"Three or four times a week my maitre d' would come up to the pass and say, 'Sorry chef the table in the window says there is nothing on the menu they can eat so they are leaving.' I would say: 'We can just do them grilled fish and mashed potato, that's fine.' But no, they thought they were part of a practical joke or something and weren't staying a moment longer."

Times have changed. The Fat Duck, which books two months in advance, reportedly gets several thousand reservation requests a day. It has, Blumenthal says, now been eight or nine years since they had a plate sent back.

An even greater achievement, in his mind, is the way that his confidence with food has spread outward from Bray. Not only has Blumenthal felt the divide between Berkshire and London closing in terms of expectation and adventure, but now that spirit exists all over the country. "There were some great restaurants here in the 80s, but they were all very French," he says. "Now there is a real sense of proper British cooking."

Blumenthal – who has traced most of his lineage back to the English shires 400 years ago, with a recent "Latvian/Belgian Congo/South African/Jewish convert grandmother thrown in" – has done as much to re-establish that tradition as anybody. He was thrilled to find that the English were first called rosbifs not as a slight but as a compliment. "In the 18th century, French chefs would be sent here to learn how to cook meat properly over an open flame. Nobody could do it like us."

Blumenthal became fascinated by gastronomic history. He got talking, at an Oxford food symposium (where subjects in 2003 included baby food in the Middle Ages), to two food historians from Hampton Court Palace. That meeting led him to unearth, exhume and revive a great tradition of English banqueting that is now the basis of his menu at Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental.

"Our food history is a broken one, strangely, in the way the Italian and French traditions are not," he says, "whether because of the greater effects of the Industrial Revolution, or rationing, I don't know. But discovering we had a food culture has been the start."

That reconnection provides the foundation of all Blumenthal's experimentation with flavours and context. It led in 2004 to his third Michelin star at the Fat Duck, and the creation of brand Heston: employed, with varying success, at Little Chef, Waitrose, on numerous TV quests for perfection ("that's my R&D") and beyond. Such projection rarely comes without a price. Blumenthal's reckoning coincided with midlife. It began with the norovirus outbreak in the Fat Duck kitchen in 2009, which made more than 400 diners sick and all the wrong headlines. Blumenthal was still recovering from that when bad news came in a three: his father died, his marriage broke up, and two long-term friends were killed in a car crash in Hong Kong, having been out with Blumenthal the previous evening.

All three events unsettled him in different ways. "I still find it really hard to talk about the deaths of Jorge and Magnus," he says. "You turn the page of a newspaper every day and see someone has died in a car crash. You never stop to think about how it affects so many people. Well I do now."

That period seemed like the end of a phase of his career, he suggests, and of his life. He has been helped through it by "a life coach, a Buddhist guy". A couple of things in particular have been enlightening. "The first was to take full responsibility for everything here. If somebody does something wrong in a kitchen, the chef's response traditionally is to shout. But my coach, says: 'No, you are the boss, it's your fault. There are only three reasons for things going wrong: you have chosen the wrong person, you are asking too much of them, or you haven't given them enough training.'"

It doesn't sound the most liberating of strategies, I suggest.

"Well, along with it, you have this other idea. The three worst emotions are blame, shame and guilt. You need to get rid of 'could have' and 'should have' in your life."

Does he feel more centred, as it were?

"Much more. I could only deal with things aggressively. I could never really share more complex emotions with people. I'm a lot stronger. Not physically – I have a dodgy hip and a bad back – and I would certainly have the crap beaten out of me by my former self. But I understand myself more. I think I always had this real need for people to love everything I did. When they didn't get it I hated it. I understand that more now – but I still try to make them see it." He laughs. "Coasting is never going to be good for me."

If we were to interview him in 10 years time, what would he be up to then?

"I would love to have a James Bond-style lab with a big metal door that goes sshhhtk when it closes," he says. "This morning was a bit like that. We had this piece of beef that we were reconstructing. We have been working with this amazing company in Switzerland that ages meat with mould; it's a mould that lives off animals that die in the forest and kills off all the other bacteria. Each cut of beef had been cooked in a different way, then we bound it all together and tried to roast it on a spit. We had fire on one side of the spit and liquid nitrogen on the other, fire and ice, so the skin heats up and cools, heats up and cools. You keep caramelising the fat all the time…"

Other than that, he suggests, warming Wonka-like to the future, "We are looking at a new system for putting aromas on the top of liquids so you sniff one thing and smell another. And we are investigating the weight and shape of a glass and how that affects the perception of creaminess in particular."

He thinks about that possibility for a moment. "I am very lucky," he says, "because if I wasn't doing this, I have no idea what I would do."

Historic Heston (Bloomsbury, £125). To order for £100 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop.

Heston's Fantastical Foods will be shown on Channel 4 in November