Heston Blumenthal hosts "Heston's Fantastical Foods"

It would be easy to assume that, after thousands of years of cooking our food, we've figured out all the details, covered all the bases -- nothing new under the sun, nothing to see here, move along.

Thankfully, that is not the case! Food pioneers on the cutting edge of the culinary world are regularly coming up with astounding new ideas, and British chef Heston Blumenthal is at the vanguard of culinary exploration. He's one of the U.K.'s most celebrated chefs and is frequently seen on TV screens across the Atlantic.

In his latest TV series, Blumenthal experiments with food some more, this time focusing specifically on size: he's on a mission to see just how BIG he can make some food favorites. "Heston's Fantastical Food" premiered last Friday on Cooking Channel, and you can catch a new episode airing Friday, Sept. 1.

In this episode, Heston tackles one of the most fantastic of food memories from many childhoods: the ice cream truck. He gets his very own decked-out truck, and devises a plan to craft the biggest ice cream cone the world has ever seen, and to share it with an entire sweet-toothed town. 

His plan calls for the finished product to stand over 16 feet tall, with a weight of more than 2,000 pounds -- that's so big, it takes over a month for the tasty treat to freeze! 

In another new episode next week, the culinary inventor turns his gaze to a daily British ritual: the tea break. Britons drink about 185 million cups of tea per day, and Heston challenges himself to make a packet of tea biscuits of record-shattering size. In the weeks that follow, he builds his own Willy Wonka-inspired candy shop, where he tries to make a meal out of chewing gum, as well as the world's biggest Rolos. Later, he crafts his own pub out of a giant hollowed-out pie, complete with a pool table that's made of fish and tartar sauce.

OK, so maybe making giant versions of everyday foods isn't the usual sort of ground-breaking culinary techniques the chef usually comes up with, but that isn't the point here. No, the point is that food doesn't always have to be the same: it can be fun, it can be exciting, but most of all, it should be delicious.

Catch a new episode of "Heston's Fantastical Food" airing Friday, Sept. 1, on Cooking Channel.