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Blumenthal’s recipe has a few unique elements, at least to my eye.

Firstly, the meat used is a mixture of minced oxtail, which provides a lot of the flavour, and pork shoulder, both meats that will work well with the bolognaise sauce’s traditionally long cooking time. He also uses star anise as a flavouring for several parts of the bolognaise sause. He cooks the meat and tomatoes seperately until two hours before serving (giving the meat, onions and other veg approximately 8 hours cooking time), and uses a selection of unconventional flavourings in the tomato compote, including Thai fish sauce and Worsester Sauce. Finally, he stirs an absolute ton of butter – 150 grams, in total – shortly before serving.

(I was particularly interested by the addition of the Oriental notes here. I’ve been using Oyster Sauce in my Bolognaise for a while now, and the fishy/sweet notes – represented in Blumenthal’s recipe with star anise and fish sauce – really do add to the flavour.)

The recipe also contains a number of classically Italian touches that British audiences might not be familiar with, most notably its extremely long cooking time, and the use of milk – 250g of whole milk – in the meat sauce, which seems weird at first, but which I’ve been doing for a while in my bolognaise, and which works remarkably well. I believe the sherry vinegar, used as a sweet and sour agent both, is also traditional.

So. “Perfection” hit the real world with a jolt in Waitrose, where I discovered that, two days after Christmas, I wasn’t going to be able to lay hands on oxtail or star anise. Some frantic faffing around the shops ensued, but to no avail. Sainsburies didn’t stock them. The town butchers were shut. The sleepy little town of Ringwood in Dorset just didn’t have the ingredients I needed. In the end, we went with stewing beef rather than oxtail (beef shin, another suggestion, also wasn’t available), and chinese five-spice rather than the anise.

Faffing around had meant that we’d gotten back around 13:00, rather than the 12:00 I was hoping for, but I didn’t figure on that being too much of a problem – I’d already figured on reducing the principle cooking times from 8 hours to 6 hours for the main bolognaise, giving me a total of 8 hours’ cooking time, for an ETA of 21:00. Later than my grandparents are used to eating, but we’re a pretty Continental family. We’d manage.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake?

Fifteen minutes into chopping a kilo of onions, I was pretty sure I’d found it.

Even with Mum jumping in to assist with chopping and peeling, the initial chop/peel/season/slice stage involved well over a kilo of veg. I’d not anticipated the time that it would take, nor the fact that we’d then got 20-plus minutes of slow stewing of onions, celery and carrots before we could even get to the main stewing event. Add to that the fact that I’d sorta forgotten to have lunch, and had to break for that, and we were already running late when I got to browning the meat.

Heston likes his olive oil. He likes to use lots of it. For browning the meat, he uses 50ml of the stuff, just to brown 500g of meat. Well, I’ll give him this – it browns damn fast and damn well. It also throws up a fine mist of boiling oil around the hands and forearms of whichever poor bugger happens to be flipping the meat to ensure it gets browned properly. With howls, curses, and possibly just the faintest whiff of deep-fried Hugh emenating from the kitchen, my grandparents were starting to look distinctly concerned.

Meat – browned. Onions – caramelised. Soffrito (that would be “all the other stuff” in Italian), er, soffrited. Dump it all in a pot – I discover that we have a legacy cast-iron stewpot and dance the dance of triumph, then mutter the swearword of a man who’s just danced around with a 4kg stewpot.

Deglaze the crap out of the meat pan. Discover we’d accidentally washed up the other pot I was meant to deglaze. Swear (under my breath. This whole “cooking around relatives” thing is a strain to a man who likes to think of his cooking style as 50% Floyd, 50% Ramsey – although with about 2% of the talent that implies). Pour the rest of the wine into the meat pot and reduce it anyway – 375ml of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay just for the deglazing. Dump that in the pot too. Milk, water to cover, low heat, and we’re done for about 4 hours.

One trip to the post-Boxing Day sales and a watch of “Celebrity Mastermind” (Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall got his ass kicked) later, we’re back in, and we’re getting with the compoting. I’ve been smart this time – I’ve allowed 15 minutes’ prep time. Sure, I’ve also got to soften some onions in that time, but other than that, all we’ve got to do is prep the tomatoes. Plenty … of…

Whoa. Prepping 1.2 kg of these-could-be-a-lot-riper vine tomatoes, straight from sunny Spain, is a bit of a challenge, particularly when neither I nor Mum ever peel the damn things. But Heston, he say peel, so we’re peeling. And peeling. And peeling. We’re getting pretty fast, but 1.2 kg of tomatoes is a whole sodding lot of toms. The onions are starting to turn, so it’s off the heat with them. And after that, I’ve got to clean them of their seeds (which are tenacious little bastards, and don’t want to be seperated from the Mothership), then “roughly chop” the tomatoes – which I get quite aggravated about at the time, as it’s imprecise, but it turns out what Heston means is “do whatever the hell you want, you’re going to be reducing them to a fine mush in a minute anyway”. Pile of bizarre and less-bizarre condiments go in, and it’s off to the simmering races – about 15 minutes later than intended. Bugger.

A bit more planned-time chopping later, and we’re looking at about a 1 hour simmer for the tomatoes, and then 1 hour 30 or so for the finished sauce. The bolognaise sauce, meanwhile, is looking good, but bloody hellfire is there a lot of it – and on tasting, it’s awfully, well, sweet. I’m at a loss for why until I remember it’s got about half a bushel of caramelised onion in it. I trust Dr Blumenthal’s cooking (yes, he’s a doctor now), but this is starting to look a bit.. perculiar.

Half an hour into the simmer, and I taste the tomatoes. And they’re bloody fantastic. Possibly the best-tasting tomato sauce I’ve ever tasted. Just sensational. But they’ve still got half an hour to go, and when I taste later, the Worsester Sauce is starting to dominate. Was there too much in there? Did I over-pour?

Hour and a half to go! Tomatoes out. Dump them into the Bolognaise Sauce. Remember too late I was meant to roast them for a bit first. Another sub-parent-hearing-level Ramseyism. Oh, well, there’s nowt to do about it now but wait. Oh, and grate a metric asston of Parmesan, and prep the absurd amount of salt Dr Blumenthal insists, in several books, is the only way to cook pasta.

Both my grandparents have heart conditions, and I’m about to feed them pasta cooked in 50g of salt with 150g of unsalted butter in the sauce. This had better be the best damn Bolognaise ever.

Twenty minutes to go. “The Rose In The Smoke” is starting. Haute Cuisine, sadly, triumphs over Billie Piper in a corset. Time for the pasta.

Heston, or Doc B as I’m going to call him from now on, has this rather odd presentation method for the pasta, winding the spaghetti around serving forks, then laying them on a plate, spooning sauce over – it all looks complex as hell and frankly I’m not sure how you’re meant to eat it when you’re done. So I’ve gone for a simple concigle pasta instead, 500g so that we’ve got enough, and I’ll prep it as a standard pasta sauce. Into the water.

Waitrose says 25 minutes for the pasta to cook. That’s bollocks, surely? I think so, Mum thinks so, and about 12 minutes in the pasta thinks so too.

Drain, rinse in an attempt to get some of the salt off so that my grandparents’ cardiologist doesn’t come after me with a blood pressure meter fashioned into a makeshift garotte. Mum’s doing that, as I get to the final stage of the Bolognaise sauce, which involves seasoning with sherry vinegar – come on, Heston, more vinegar in a tomato sauce? You’re ’aving a giraffe – oh, no, wait, that does improve it. Damn you and your three Michelin stars both.

Parmesan (but not too much, reserving some to sprinkle over), and – gulp – 100g of butter, sinking into the sauce like a cardiovascular depth charge. Leave to stand for 5 minutes, stirring, in with the pasta and coat and – we’re done.

Start time? 11:25 when we left for the supermarket. Serving time? 20:52. Oh, and Heston’s claim that “the day’s your own” after some early preparation might be true if you’re arguably the greatest chef in the world, but if you’re some schmuck trying to cook food that’s been designed on a culinary level as far above what you’re used to as the B&Q power tools sale is above a flint club, you’re going to be rushing back and forth, chopping, peeling, tasting and worrying for most of the day.

Or that might just be how I cook anyway.

Tasting time. It looks pretty good, and amazingly the vast, vast amount of food I thought we had seems to have divided pretty neatly between the four of us.

Short version? It’s good. In fact, it’s damn good – rich, smooth, with almost no hint of the tons of onions, just a complex, multi-flavoured sauce that’s going to have the same sort of knock-out potential for hunger as Sudafed claims to have for sinus pain. The pork shoulder’s awesome – fibers melting on the tongue – but the beef’s pretty much disappeared. Oh, and there’s far too much sodding pasta. See that bit above where I reckoned I knew better than a three-star Michelin Chef? Technically, in the industry, I understand that’s known as “being a pillock”.

But the actual bolognaise sauce is going down a treat. Even adjusting the fulsome compliments around the table for the “blood relative has spent the day on this” factor, people seem very impressed – and my grandfather actually goes for second helpings of the sauce, which is a major positive sign. He didn’t even go for seconds of the Christmas day turkey (which he cooked, and was very nice indeed). We’ve got no Bolognaise sauce left, in fact, and I don’t think I’m the only one disappointed.

It certainly is very good – false modesty aside, at least at the level I’d expect from a good Italian restaurant, probably better. I’ve not had the Bolognaise sauce at Valvona and Corolla, probably our finest Italian restaurant in Edinburgh (in pure cooking terms, anyway), but I’d reckon this sauce could take it on about equal terms, maybe getting beaten, but not thrashed.

But it’s not perfection. And I think, on reflection, it’s the shortcuts I took that limited the perfection. I don’t know what the longer cooking time would have done, but a roasted note to the tomatoes would definitely have added something to the sauce. And what the sauce really needed was a heavy, rich, meaty flavour at its base – the flavour I’d have gotten from the oxtail, rather than the rather mediocre stewing beef. On reflection, I should have abandoned beef altogether and tried for venison rather than settling for a less flavoursome cut. It’s very clear to my palate that the sauce is pretty close to being something very special – but it’s not quite there yet. And that’s where the ingredients, and the cook, make the last 10% difference.

My suspicion here is that Doc B’s scientific approach to cooking extends to very, very precise ingredients – there’s no Jamie Oliver “just slosh it in” blarney here. Use the right quantities, the right ingredients and the right timings, because Heston’s tried it the other way too, and it wasn’t as good. On the upside, given how close we got on this try, and how the shortcomings can be directly linked to the bits we skipped, it seems like "Perfection"’s spot-on – do what he says, and good stuff happens.

Still, for a first time, it’s damn fine. It’s the best Bolognaise I’ve ever made, and given I’ve made at least one a week for the last 10 years or so, that’s saying something. And the recipe’s perfectly doable if you’ve got a day spare, even accounting shopping in a small market town. You do really need a second cook to help out with the peeling and chopping (I’d have been stuffed if Mum hadn’t jumped in to help), but for a dinner party, it’s achievable.

Perfection? Well, we didn’t hit it this time, but I think we can see it from here. Doc B comes up trumps on the first test.