Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking | Hacker News Reader

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

modernistcuisine.com

144 pointstyleo138 comments

This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades.

In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people, it was narrowly focused and dated almost immediately. But some of the techniques and "moves" became genuinely mainstream and it's fairly reliable as a reference to them. And some of the others didn't, but could have and are useful, and unless you were cooking at one of a couple dozen restaurants from 2002-2008 you're unlikely to find another detailed guide to how to do them.

That said, for a lot of the detailed technical stuff, they generally chose to authoritatively select one specific approach to a technique, eliding details that can definitely be a big deal at this level of precision. Sometimes the "recipe" is really more of a demo, silently depending on details like a neutral pH, making it prone to failure if modified but too basic to be usable in its presented state.

Also some of the techniques simply don't work as written. Specifically the ones that are presented as novel simplifications for complex molecular gastronomy operations are really hit or miss. I suspect these are just really bad cases of the previous point, where there is a hidden variable they didn't document, that didn't come up in testing. But there is a replication crisis in cookbooks too, this is not out of the norm though it is frustrating.

It also raises the annoying question that's been in my head for 15 years now: wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?

I worked at the lab. “Modernist” was chosen from what I remember because he didn’t like “molecular gastronomy”, which is what everyone was calling texture manipulations and laboratory techniques applied to food at the time, and to differentiate it from “classical” cooking - the Escoffier through Marco Pierre White era basically.

We cooked a lot of dishes from the book for special events, but it was often the same lot of dishes over and over. Writing the recipes was an absolute pain in the ass (I was a cook, I was not used to documenting things in a lab manual), and I absolutely believe lots of hidden variables got lost - again, while there were lab-trained chefs there - Chris I believe had a background in biology or something - us grunts were line cooks beforehand.

i hated the era of foam, gel, and sous vide everything. as a home cook, i want the randomness that comes with hand technique, but if im paying for a 2/3 star meal i still also want the randomness and authenticity that comes with hand technique, not to be bored out of my mind or trying to show me some impressive lab grade "consistency".

in another 20 years, we'll look back on this like we did mayonnaise and meat aspics from the 1950s.

I mean the things you mentioned are deeply out of style in restaurant cooking right now. So we already do look back on this in a similar way. And they were never that common either. This trend had a short peak and the training, staffing, equipment, r&d costs were all sky high. The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless you were specifically seeking it out.

Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking.

> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking.

I was reading the first part of your response and my mind was immediately going "but sous-vide is everywhere" It's one of those things that's just really useful. However it has fallen off slightly, i didn't think anyone is cooking eggs sous vide anymore.

Circulator eggs never made a whole lot of sense, because you already have a reference temperature to work from and so cooking any number of them is just a matter of setting a timer (do what the Ideas in Food people do and steam them).

I can't remember the last time I circulated a steak. But we did a rib roast for Christmas, and I did that in the circulator, in advance, "for insurance purposes", and then cooked it off in a ripping (toaster) oven on the day.

There is no better way to prepare sausages. I would replace my Anova circulator immediately if it broke, simply so I can keep going to Paulina Market, buying a couple of every sausage, circulating them all, and keeping them in the fridge/freezer for ready-to-go meals.

I still poach eggs in the shell in my Anova Precision Oven often. The 13 minute egg is pretty unbeatable.

I think the decline in sous vide use in commercial kitchens is largely just because befuddled health regulators pushed everyone toward CVAPs, which do the same thing without the plastic.

Now that I’ve got the APO, I cook nearly everything in it. I wish I could get a regular oven-sized version.

Miele makes wall combi ovens that are standard sized. Well they lose some cooking volume for the steam components.

Thank you, those are awesome. I'm stuck with freestanding at the moment but may build a house soon and I would for sure get these!

The APO is new to me. Looks interesting. Can it really “sous vide” a steak? Does it brown it too?

I have an APO too and love it. While it’s possible to add a second phase to the cook with 0% steam, it isn’t enough to give you a crust on a steak. I still use a cast iron pan to sear it.

The main issue I have with SV, either bagged or bagless, is that the meat needs to be thoroughly dried before searing. So I normally cook it without steam but at 200F or so with a wireless thermometer telling me when it is 10F below my target doneness. A lot like sous vide and the APOs precise temp control still comes in handy.

You can just blot the meat with a paper towel really quickly. You don't want surface moisture of course, because evaporative cooling means anything with water in it basically only cooks at 100C, so basically you'll have to cook it longer to get the same sear and thus overcook more of the meat below the surface.

But you want the meat to be as moist as possible, it helps keep the seared portion shallower. Searing dries out the crust, so you want that all to happen as fast as possible, meaning you want it as hot as you can get without "torch taste". (Contrary to popular belief, torch taste comes not from torch fuel but compounds formed at too high heat, that just only happens with a torch.)

So full steam plus hit with a low power torch (Iwatani) is my daily driver and if I'm cooking for a lot of people I use the Searzall but that's like once a year. But it's fun for the whole family to finish the prime rib roast that way.

I have an APO as well, and use it extensively, but I'd note that a) they have never released an API as originally promised (and eventually scrubbed all mention of the promise) and b) as of August of last year, new purchases will be charged a subscription fee for using the mobile app, which is necessary for most of the things you'd get an APO for.

That’s good info! And a terrible business.

You wouldn't really brown it that way. It's basically a very large, very accurate wi-fi toaster oven. You could maybe open the door to let the steam out, put the top heating element on full, and broil it, but you'd probably end up overdone in the process. I just recommend a torch, a cast iron pan, or your oven's broiler for finishing most thiungs.

I also do the Paulina Noah's Ark, and it's a great move for a summer bbq, sending out one variety of sausage at a time and letting people try all that sound interesting.

Chicken breast is my favorite use for SV. I don't eat a lot of it, but my wife loves chicken salad, and it's nice for a green salad as well. Eating chicken breast that isn't dessicated is transformative. There's other ways to get there, but boy is SV easy.

Other assorted uses: pasteurizing eggs for cocktails, for the squeamish or immunocompromised; making N/A liquor replacements, in particular the Aviary's Campari replacer; Dave Arnold's mom's stuffing; not owning a smoker

How do I not know about Dave Arnold's mom's stuffing?!

It was featured on an episode of Dave Chang's recipe club podcast and it is really damn good. Forget fancy stuffing, this is what you want.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YueMZVAl9NMwORfXuxFl0iEN...

I have my notes somewhere but I think I did this in an 85C bath for an hour or something, then put it in a 13x9 in a hot oven with the turkey breast on top of it. I asked Dave on cooking issues for time and temp right before Thanksgiving last year and those about the direction he gave me.

The Parker house rolls are also really good, which is a shame because I already have a family recipe for dinner rolls and I'll have a revolt if I change it, and Dave's are easier.

is the Aviary Campari replacer from their book on non-alcoholic drinks? it's very interesting to me!

Yep! You'll need to buy half the spice shop, but it is really good. It's not quite as bitter and notably more vegetal, but it really hits the spot, especially in a spritz.

The Zero book from the Aviary is a lot more cookable than their original book, not as cookable as the summer or holiday books. The Campari replacement is really good, I've had less luck with the other liquor replacements.

There's a drink in there called the bramblin man that is probably my all time favorite N/A cocktail

>Circulator eggs never made a whole lot of sense,

They make a great deal of sense in professional kitchens. If you're expecting to do hundreds of brunch covers, or a giant breakfast buffet, poaching eggs sous vide ahead of time is a game changer

How do you poach an egg sous vide? I know how to soft-boil them, of course.

13-14 minutes at 75C (in shell), shock in ice water, crack into a slotted spoon to drain runny white. I realize this is not technically poaching, but the result is effectively a poached egg, and that's what people are referring to (afaik) when they're referring to poached sous vide eggs.

I’ve never tried sous vide eggs, but I imagine the biggest benefit is easy consistency. I have a pretty solid recipe for soft boiled eggs adapted from Heston Blumenthal but it still leaves some room for imperfections. Can you share more about the steam eggs? Tried to find the reference but no luck. Is it from their book?

Put a steamer basket in a pot, put some water in the pot, bring to a boil, put some eggs in the basket (how ever many you want to cook), set a timer for 7 minutes, cover. In 7 minutes, remove the soft-boiled eggs.

(Longer for hard boiled).

> I can't remember the last time I circulated a steak

I find the results gross. The fat does not render away completely at the sous-vide temps, and since the cooking time is so much shorter you end up with raw fat under the surface layer.

It's funny that you mention eggs because there's actually been a recent paper regarding sous vide, soft-boiling, and achieving the "ideal" egg texture through a novel boiling process (novel to me, anyway) which they've opted to call "periodic cooking": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00334-w

There's a lot of cool diagrams which I'd encourage skimming that link for, but here's the basic rundown: the goal of the described process is to achieve a creamy yolk like what would be produced via sous vide whilst eliminating the unpleasant jammy eggwhite texture characteristic of that process. The recipe involves 30 minutes of carefully transferring an egg back and forth between two vessels repeatedly: one boiling, one room-temperature. You do that 16 times in exact two-minute intervals in order to achieve the "perfect" egg -- very simple and convenient for the modern home-cook in a hurry!

Anyway... you can watch this guy on youtube make it so that you may eat some other, more sufferable meal more vicariously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahGGanfPDJw

Plus, y'know, leaching plastic into your food is generally ill-advised.

It won't matter much if you don't eat out all the time / don't do sous-vide at home, but otherwise, yeah.. best avoided.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3222987/

> Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.

You can do sous vide without plastics. For example I infuse oil via sous vide with biomaterial in weck jars.

Yeah...what a weird derail. My sous vide has a small maybe 3"x0.5" plastic cap at the end and rest is stainless steel. I could have gotten a different one without the plastic I'm sure (maybe more expensive?), but I can read the science and be reasonably sure I'm not going to die horribly from that much exposure. Stainless steel or aluminum[1] pot and you're blissfully plastic-death free.

[1] I shouldn't have said that...the 'aluminum pots give you Alzheimers' crowd could descend at any moment.

It’s not the SV circulator but the plastic vacuum bags folks are most worried about.

Which you don't have to use either, but that makes more sense.

It is hard to not use plastic vacuum bags for sous vide. Although there are re-usable silicon bags, such as stasher, they are — personal experience here — not very good for sous vide.

Yes, I too have used a couple of different silicon bags as alternates. The stashers are barely usable, and the cheaper but more sous vide friendly are ok but are hard to clean if you're trying to reuse them. But is it about the heat transfer and stable temp, so anything that keeps what your cooking completely in liquid and can tolerate thermal expansion should work, right?

Or you could not worry about it, like most people do, and be just fine.

Or think they're fine, and then their attempts at having kids decades later take longer or fail completely, and they never connect the two. Hard to know which.

- their attempts at having kids decades later take longer or fail completely

Isn't that normal when you try to have kids "decades later"?

Except, of course, for Starbucks! [0]

And imitation salmon eggs still use that calcium/alginate technique the modernist cooks called "spherification"... [1]

[0] https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/2122116/single

[1] https://sushiuniversity.jp/sushiblog/today-you-will-learn-ho...

> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations

Problem is, Sous vide is good for certain proteins. For example, I cannot stand chicken breast Sous vide, as it, yes, more tender than "classical" chicken breast, but has very specific unpleasant texture. And now it is everywhere. Last time I had dinner in Indian restaurant which was new to me (this specific venue, not Indian cuisine as whole) and I got chicken breast sous vide in a souse as a carry. Not braised or stewed or simmered in souse. It was BAD.

> The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless you were specifically seeking it out.

I'm not sure what the backlash was (I'm nowhere near that scene), but as a tactic, it could be that the reason for the disproportionate backlash was to prevent this style of cooking from becoming more widespread, rather than in reaction to its presence.

I'm with you: Meat aspics and horrifying fruit jello concoctions endemic to the South was exactly what I thought of the first time I went to a Modernist restaurant.

Mayonnaise on the other hand...that didn't exactly fall out of fashion.

And, as a home cook, I find a sous vide very convenient. For example, I can do a little prep in the morning, drop some meat in, come home, do a quick sear and drop in on the plate. It's another kind of slow cooker. It only becomes a 'consistency' fetish if you let it.

hey some of us like meat aspics nothing wrong with some Kholodets/P'tcha with some horseradish

My uneducated guess is that Myhrvold was just trying to avoid, with "modernist", all the freight that came with "molecular gastronomy", a term that made literally no sense and invokes for many in the industry the specter of Herve This.

This comment is gold, and helps me contextualize a “book” which has always intrigued me. What are your takes on the later additions, Modernist Bread and Modernist Pizza? I have the Bread tome, and some of the base recipes have worked out.

I have no experience with the pizza one at all. I liked the information in the bread books a lot, about the history of wheat cultivation and the enzyme processes during fermentation and baking. I only ever did one recipe out of it (brioche) and it wasn't better or worse than the more traditional recipe I normally use. Seems fine if you like their recipe format, though there are a lot of great bread books out there.

Thanks! Yeah, so far the main value I'm getting out of it is learning the "why" behind some of the recipes in other books. It's helping me narrow down which variables I should tweak to achieve certain outcomes. But all of that info could probably be condensed to a normal 200 page book without all the glossy photos.

> career as a serious professional cook

Interesting. I was a chef for 17 years, 11 in restaurants and 6 as a private yacht chef. How did you end up on Hacker News? For me, I found joy in opening new restaurants which is engineering and followed that path to software.

I’m curious what did you find to not work as written? I’ve had no problems making any recipes out of it, but I’ve also not done so exhaustively.

The Modernist Cuisine At Home book was pretty practical for muggles and would probably be where I’d recommend people start if they’re just looking to make some stuff for sure though, the full series is more something you read.

Have you some recommendations for contemporary cookbooks or some that are just dated?

>wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?

He covers this in the first 5 pages or so, doesn't he?

I know what you're talking about and it's been a while but I remember it being kind of a headscratcher. He says some stuff about innovation and then mentions bauhaus but (in my memory at least) failed to connect the book or his approach to cooking to the modernist movement in a compelling way. And also failed to convince me that he knew anything about modernism except the name and a vague association with mid-20th-century aesthetics.

>failed to connect the book or his approach to cooking to the modernist movement in a compelling way

I had a completely different reaction to it, but then, I wasn't a member of the modernist movement.

I just like food that tastes good.

> wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?

I always thought he would have said "smart" if he thought he could get away with it. Or maybe "bright", in that particularly smug edge.org sense of the word. "Clever" might be another, but I don't think it captures the gestalt.

The good thing about Modernist Cuisine is that it goes deep into some niche topics (gelling and hydrocolloids, food safety, etc etc), so if you like that kind of thing (and crazy photography of sliced in half stuff), it's great.

In terms of recipes, some have mentioned it but it's barely practical, even if you like spending hours reproducing recipes from Michelin stars restaurant books. There are a few gems, like the truffle Arzak eggs done sous vide, but most of the time you don't find much. You'll have more fun with an El Bulli book if that's what you're looking for.

The at home version is a lot more practical but is also a bit dated at this point imo. The mac and cheese with sodium citrate is a good example of what to expect.

If we put aside Myhrvold (...), there's a lot of extremely talented chefs that worked on it (Chris Young worked at The Fat Duck during it's peak popularity). Some of them started a site called chefsteps a while back which tried to get a bit more practical yet still have some nice stuff. They do have a pretty useful chart (https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/a-map-of-sous-vide-cook...) that serves as a good reminder if you do sous vide regularly but never quite remember the temps. Their macaron course is also particularly on point.

The site has been bought by Breville (I think ?) and it's not super clear at this point how much they will still push content but it's still a cool ressource if you like that kind of cooking.

Forget ChefSteps. As far as I’m concerned, this is the reference:

https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html

Ehhhh. I've had lots of issues with it, and I can't cite chapter and verse but I think Dave Arnold has some critiques of it too. Really, for what the Baldwin guide is trying to do, you can just Google stuff off Serious Eats for.

What issues?

I’m not in love with Douglas Baldwin’s recipes, but his time/temperature tables for pasteurization are quite useful.

(replying to myself)

It seems like Dave Arnold and Douglas Baldwin even study each others' work -- see the comments here for example:

https://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=3304.html

Also, wow, the Cooking Issues people might be good at low-temp cooking, but they are not good at Unicode.

> The at home version is a lot more practical but is also a bit dated at this point imo. The mac and cheese with sodium citrate is a good example of what to expect.

That recipe is an absolute banger, so are you saying that the rest of the book is full of great recipes as well?

There are a few others yes, most are selected/adapted from original MC to be made more practical. A lot are around sous-vide (braised short ribs, potato purée, etc) so be aware of that. It's really a good starting point if you are open to sous vide (and if you don't, you're missing out on 70% of the book probably). There are a few recipes that use some unconventional ingredients like xantham gum, but they don't go extremely crazy with hydrocolloids from what I remember, and provide alternatives most of the time.

I think some absolutely underrated recipes are the soups - which require a pressure cooker. The caramelized carrot soup is one if not the greatest recipe imo in that book, and their other soup suggestions are also great. There's a bunch of other recipes around pressure cooking, and they are great too.

Sous vide lemon curd is also extremely good if you like lemon tarts. It's not a pastry book though, just like the original one, it's more focused on cooking.

+1, Sodium citrate is 100% a pantry staple for me now.

> The site has been bought by Breville

At $69/year I’d say it’s pretty clear the direction the site is going.

Chefsteps has been in that direction for a very long time. I was in their community early on, like 2013 or so, and the content they put out then was truly excellent. A paywall was reasonable really; the classes were well researched and informative and I am sure their operation is quite expensive.

But over time they became a bit less focused on interesting stuff and more focused on stuff that would play to social media. Their candy class was a hallmark - very informative, very interesting, and several great recipes that you typically wouldn’t find anywhere else. Like they have a starburst clone recipe that honestly most sites wouldn’t bother with because it’s unbelievably labor intensive. But I made it and it was extremely satisfying

If you go on their YouTube and go back a decade you can see the change in content. Their current stuff is basically cloning Epicurious but occasionally shilling really expensive brevile appliances that have very short warranties despite being 5x the cost of comparable products.

I think the turning point was Chris Young leaving, that really lowered the technical level of everything they published

Yeah. Grant and Nick worked on modernist cuisine but it’s become clear they were more of the chef side where Chris was more of the food science side.

Chris does have a youtube channel now that has some okay content but the best stuff is like a lot of the peak Chefsteps stuff: rehashed fat duck recipes. It’s a shame Heston blumenthal seems to have stopped making as much around 2014-15 because his books and tv content were truly excellent and most of the modern “haute cuisine” stuff goes right back to him. More recently it appears he had manic depression, was pushing himself far too hard, and finally got treatment. I hope he is doing well. His contributions to the culinary world are tremendous and imo under appreciated.

Also followed them pretty much from the start, bought all their classes, pass, but ended up not renewing this year (and probably shouldn't have last year either).

They tried to make money with their own sous vide circulator (joule) which had some good pros (very compact and works in tiny depth of water) but at least for me, infuriating cons (no screen/buttons to adjust on the fly, check remaining time, etc, must use their app for all that and with dirty hands in the kitchen, it's really not great). Mine failed early too which didn't help my impression.

Content started pivoting post joule release and now you can't even sort the recipes to see the latest they posted, if they post any. But still worth a look for the free, older content.

I never got a joule because I couldn’t fathom why they would build a device without physical controls. It seemed like such a hostile decision imo bc even back then I had cheaper “smart” devices like lightbulbs where the apps were quickly abandoned and then delisted/no longer working after 3-4 years and several iOS updates. I had some confidence Chefsteps wouldn’t do that (and tbf they didn’t) but why risk it? If they hadn’t been successful, purchased by breville, etc, would that have come to pass?

The control freak is really what gets me. It does look like a very well made piece of kit tbf. And the feature set is quite nice, there are comparable devices for 1/3rd the cost like https://www.sunpentown.com/product/sr-658rt/ . Also I already mentioned this but given the extremely high price of the control freak I would expect more than a 1 year warranty

Yes and the app wasn't even that great in the beginning, trying to put you into a "flow" where you have to pick a recipe, pick the width of your food, pick doneness from pictures, etc... and at least back then, you couldn't adjust much afterwards, you were set in what it decided for you (and I disagreed with the durations).

There was also no manual mode where you could just say, I want 54°, beep me in 45mins but keep that temperature afterwards. It was just needless friction if you had the modicum of experience. And that's without the e-waste question if they didn't get bought out. I think they had committed to opening their app if they went under at the time (I could be completely misremembering that), but such commitments don't mean much.

I think seeing them pushing the control freak all the damn time was also the tip of the iceberg that got me to cancel my pass. Setting the "temperature" with a sensor below the glass seems completely futile to me as a concept on top of it. I just don't see a practical application for it, but maybe I'm missing something.

Doesn't look like they sell it here in France, it's really a baffling, absolutely overpriced product.

setting the temperature is very useful when you need control, like keeping the oil temperature stable when frying or avoiding overcooking a creme anglaise. That said, the constant ads (because they're ads) for Breville products are tacky and off putting

I went through my third joule and I share the annoyance you feel, what did you ended up using instead? I do value its compact form factor.

It's a bit orthogonal but what I ended up doing is buying a dedicated polycarbonate sous vide bath (basically a rectangular container) so that I don't have to constantly mess with grabbing out my pressure cooker (which I used previously). I leave it on the counter of my kitchen as I sous vide 2/3 times a week. Some have lids, or you can get some balls to limit evaporation (I went with that solution).

I did have a Sansaire model from a previous Kickstarter that I reused for a while, but ended up replacing it with a bargain bin "KitchenBoss" from Amazon with no connectivity, just buttons and a screen but with a high wattage (1100W). At the time I wanted to get an Anova but that was out of stock.

I did have a bunch of other circulators including one I bought in 2012 that was basically a laboratory pid. The most important thing in my opinion is preheating speed, which is directly connected to how many watts it uses. Most compact models (including Anova's smaller models) have a lower wattage so, unless you don't care about time, I would definitely avoid those. I would go for a dedicated bath and a high wattage model. Anova is likely the best option but I find the basic KitchenBoss (no app) perfectly fine too.

I have used Modernist Cuisine at Home for years. The techniques are a little more approachable for the home chef, and the results are A+.

And if science-infused cooking is your jam, Kenji Lopez-Alt is another great read. https://www.kenjilopezalt.com

same. it got me to sous vide a lot more

For those that don’t know the primary author is Nathan Myhrvold who was the first CTO at Microsoft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold

and founder of the largest patent troll "Intellectual Ventures". both efforts now feel dated and cringey.

I don’t hear about it anymore. What happened to it?

A Texas court reduced the viability of the business with one of its rulings. This meant that Intellectual Ventures had to spin out a bunch of companies to actually defend the patents they held. I believe they had mixed success. An example is Pivotal Commware.

They're still around. They spawned a whole minor industry of patent licensing entities.

Is this an advertisement for a 5-cookbook set at $625? If I were a beginner, I would spend that money on a carbon steel pan, one Staub pot, a good kitchen and paring knife, one peeler, and I’d have some left for high-quality ingredients to experiment with myself. If I were more advanced, I would look into professional culinary institutes’ books. Everything in between is easily accessible on YouTube. An expensive book as beautiful as it is will never make a good cook; only good tools, ingredients, and practice will do.

> If I were a beginner

This book is not for beginners. It's not even for home cooks.

Also, hilariously, there's a list of equipment provided in the version for home cooks. It's quite different from what you're suggesting to a beginner, because even the version of this book that is for home cooks is not for beginners.

I'd say it's not really for anyone

It's for Nathan Myhrvold

I'd hesitate to call this a "cookbook". It's closer to a coffee-table photography book. It's somewhat more art than instruction, though it is both. It's inspiring, for sure, but is very different than most.

I also thought it had been out of print for years, but it seems I'm wrong... Perhaps this is news because it's no longer out of print? Or was I just misremembering?

I was given a "copy" about ten years ago. It came in a lucite box. I brought it home on the subway, and when I took off my pants later that night I found a horizontal line of bruises across my thighs.

As of a couple years ago there’s a gallery around Seattle’s Pike Place market that displays various photographs from the series.

Per pound, the book is actually a lot more affordable than most cookbooks.

maybe check out the content first...

The book set has been circulating in very good PDF form for about 10 years.

One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos

Yep, for those who have an air fryer, have a look at his air fries video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk

He basically invented triple cooked fries at the fat duck (precooked at 70° celsius then fried twice, with airing/freezing steps in between), and it's a pretty close approximation of them done much simpler.

I've never had tripple cooked fries. What do they taste like?

They taste pretty much the same as any other fries, but the texture is really great. Crispy outside, fluffy inside.

And it works a lot better with a thick cut (1.2+ cm), the contrast between a super glassy, not oily outside and fluffy, airy inside all throughout is really good.

For the same reason I would say, don't bother with thin cut with his air fryer version. Go thick or don't bother.

He also has combustion.inc which is a thermometer for nerds.

This is the real sleeper in this thread. I love my Thermapen, but combustion.inc looks pretty awesome for grilling/smoking. In particular, it could be a game changer with the SafeCook time+temp food safety calculations. And bellows that take into account the internal, food ambient, and grill lid temp could be bonkers. The ($125) sensor probe has 8 sensors in it to read temps at different depths and the ambient.

Which is a great product, for what it's worth.

Yes. I have one and I love it! Everyone I recommend it to balks at the price however.

I get that, I spent a long time obsessing over the $100 ThermaPen One, because the $15 ones I had were "good enough". But, I'll tell you, it's quite a nice luxury for someone who cooks all the time. It just has all the rough edges removed: it's super fast, the display rotates, it does auto on/off, and the support has been superb. In this situation, I had to return it twice over the last year because of what turned out to be a design flaw where the case was cracking (apparently for no good reason, not like I was overheating it).

I try to manually do the time@temp safety thing, but admittedly I usually overcook it just to be safe. So, I could see the combustion.inc being a game changer for grilling especially, and I already get rave reviews. I'm going to pick one up, and possibly also one of their grill thermometers.

The CI predictive thermometer actually does one better than the time@temp method for food safety. It integrates the temperature with respect to time (a method it calls SafeCook) and it does so with its estimate of the core temperature (based on which of the 8 sensors shows the slowest responding temp curve).

The previous comment about it being a cooking thermometer for nerds is bang on! I dunno how much it really helps improve my cooking but it gives me an incredible feeling of being in control! I love it!

Mine should be here in a week and a bit, so I'll have to try a brisket or something to put it through the paces.

A word of caution for cooking tough meats like brisket: temperature doesn't tell the whole story. People online will talk about "the stall" but it doesn't actually exist. You'll find the temperature graph over time follows a logistic curve, something you would expect for any process that reaches an equilibrium.

The truth is rather complicated [1]. Most of the barbecue masters use temperature as a guideline but actual tests of tenderness as the final arbiter. They cook until the meat reaches a particular temperature and then begin checking for tenderness at regular intervals. The process can vary a lot even between two briskets of the same weight, purchased at the same time, due to individual differences between animals (the amount of connective tissues and collagenases present in the meat at cooking time).

Still, having the temperature information helps a lot, especially the surface and ambient temperatures provided by the CI probe. This can help you maintain the cooking temperature much more accurately to avoid excessive dryout.

[1] https://www.chefsteps.com/forum/posts/collagen-conversion-wh...

I agree with everything you say, but I'll say I've definitely observed "the stall" while cooking brisket (which I do rarely) and butt roast (much more frequently). By that I mean, seat of the pants, the temp is going up and up and up and then sits there for a few hours before starting to go up again.

I cook on a kamado, and generally don't have the fuel and patience for a brisket, so I just don't tend to do them. I prefer to just do the whole thing on the fire, but my ideal brisket would probably be ~12 hours in the kamado, then 12 (or more) hours in the oven. But for whatever reason, I just don't like doing that. "Feels like cheating" or whatever. So butt roast and turkey and prime rib are really my go-tos.

It's sold as a reference material, but the photography inside is beautiful.

Even if you think the techniques are outside of your reach, it's a really lovely "cookbook" to look through.

Later sold separately as a standalone volume, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine

https://modernistcuisine.com/books/photography-of-modernist-...

I remember being especially excited about the cutaways: photos of actual cooking apparatus sliced in half on a water jet, then photographed in the act of cooking. Some background on how that came to be:

https://seattlefoodgeek.com/2011/11/cutting-your-cookware-in...

There are also some lovely cut in half shots in Chris Young's YouTube videos (one of the people that worked on Modernist Cuisine). e.g. https://youtu.be/IZY8xbdHfWk?t=239

Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566

A few months after the book launch, some marketing manager at Barnes and Noble decided to do a 50% off any book promo, not thinking too hard about it and it instantly spread through all the foodie forums.

Later on, they did the same promo but Modernist Cuisine was prominently listed as a book the promo didn’t apply to.

Anyway, that, my friends, is the story of how I made $313 impulse purchase.

Being able to cook is an underrated skill - I'm always pointing this out - but starting here, no matter how glamorous it seems, is like starting with Shakespeare in a first English class for foreigners.

I’m surprised to see this on the front page! I posted this on a whim after buying Modernist Cuisine at Home last week. It’s essentially, “cooking for scientists and engineers” and has a great breakdown of ingredients, cooking tools, and why things are the way they are. It’s surprisingly written by Microsoft’s former CTO.

I shared the full version but haven’t read it. I’d highly recommend the home version if you are interested in cooking though.

This reminds me of another book, "The 4 Hour Chef" by Tim Ferriss.

Is it the opposite of Modernist Cuisine?

I thought of it as practical, not theoretical. Like: learn to chop vegetables. and don't bother measuring stuff, learn how to grab a pinch of salt with your fingers quickly.

It struck me as interesting when the book tried not to be other cookbooks and tried to head off 'failure getting started'.

I dont understand the hate for this book. A very smart and wealthy man spent a lot of coin geeking out on a passion. Doesnt seem very different from Jay Leno and his garage or Tom Hanks and his typewriters.

Compared to the ketamine and influence that our current billionaires spend their money on, it seems pretty harmless.

Myrvhold has a bad rep in the tech industry due to Innovation Ventures.

But re: Modernist Cuisine, I've always puzzled over the COGS and ROI math. Despite the high price, he might actually be selling at cost. A lot of effort went into these books. The photography was surely expensive to create, and definitely to print. The books must be very low-volume sales, you have to account for the wholesale price to bookstores, and add some required margin for the publisher... I wonder if they are above water for Myrvhold at all. Not that he needs them to be, obviously.

I also wonder about Don Knuth, and some of the TASCHEN specimen titles. Publishing is a tough business!

I know a bit about the taschen/luxury books business, having a very good friend who works in this space ( she’s built a publishing business, and makes a living out of it, typically her books print up to a few hundreds at most).

Basically, there are book collectors who are willing to pay for beautiful books ( my friend sells art pieces according to her , not mere books ), companies willing to buy them ( and sometimes codesign them if they’re say luxury brands ) and give them as gifts to their clients, and then people like you and me who will maybe buy one just because you really want it.

It’s not a highly profitable business by any means, it’s a small market, and it’s the opposite of the high volume mainstream publishing industry.

Because Myhrvold is the single most notorious patent troll, bar none.

Never sous vide your heros

I've always wanted to check out these cookbooks but they are beyond my price threshold for cookbooks. For baking fans though, they did a great little podcast series to promote their Bread book a while back.

https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/modernist-breadcrumb...

It seems Nathan Myhrvold also made a TED talk about it.

https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_s...

Most cookbooks seem to optimize for taste.

Are there any cookbooks that optimize for nutritional/health value of food with a reasonable emphasis on taste? Not looking to be just pointed to vegan cookbooks.

Cooking Light definitely does that, they have many volumes though it’s got a bit of a “generic American food” vibe.

“A New Way to Cook” was perhaps more ambitious than the content warranted, but Sally Schneider certainly knows how to get the best of out ingredients that are reasonably good for you.

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_New_Way_to_Cook.html?...

I've been working my way through a second-hand copy of "Great recipes for good health" lately. I think the balance is probably slightly too far on the health over taste side, but there are some gems in there.

Moosewood cookbook is a good one.

Alice Waters is controversial in the cooking community, but her cookbooks are probably good, especially Simple Food

The Cooking Light magazine has been doing that for decades.

I'm more of a post-modern chef myself

At $625 for the volume, beauty is a prerequisite.

It's a beautiful set of books.

This book is just pretentious and expensive bullshit. It is just hype to grab fools' money.

If you want to know how much "science-infused" is this cooking just look at any picture of its author. Nathan Myrvhold is obviously overweight, a sure sign that he doesn't understand nutrition or basics of health science.

You don't need spherification, sous-vide baths or ultra-speed blenders to make tasty and healthy food. All you need is lots of practice, good taste and good quality ingredients.

Developed countries have this weird obsession of over-engineering things that don't need to be complicated. It is not only Americans that do that, Germans and Japanese are very much the same.

You're jumping to conclusions that aren't logical (at least not without you listing your assumptions that led to this post).

There's more science to food than just nutrition and health. Also, that you can make tasty and healthy food without the technology you mentioned, does not exclude the technology from having a place in a kitchen. Lastly, how do you objectively define "weird obsession". Can you give some examples of countries that do not share this "weird obsession"?

> There's more science to food than just nutrition and health.

Maybe. But nutrition and health is what should mater the most, if you don't want to end up with a country of overweight people.

> does not exclude the technology from having a place in a kitchen

Certainly. From fridges and washing machines to food processors and electric stoves technology is more than welcome to the kitchen. But is always a cost/value calculation. And if you're not a billionaire patent troll like the author of that book then a lot of the gadgets and techniques he advocates are just not worth it.

> Can you give some examples of countries that do not share this "weird obsession"?

On cooking? Sure! Mexico, India, Colombia, Brazil, most of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Thailand, ... all of them with fantastic cuisines based mostly on the freshness of their ingredients, with little preparation, straight from the ground/sea to the table.

At least the Arab world has a very wide range of dishes which require a large amount of preparation or require a fair amount of cooking time, so I would disagree with the ‘little preparation’ and ‘straight to the table’ descriptions you’re using. I’m most familiar with the Lebanese side of things , but I understand it translates to Morocco ( eg tagine, pastilla ) as well.

Now, this doesn’t invalidate your main point ( sophisticated tech is not a hard requirement for good food ) but afaik, some of the most famous dishes in the cuisines you listed do require specific equipment ( tagines, tandoors ) and don’t fall under the ‘ straight from the ground to the table ‘ umbrella.

Read that "Modernist Cuisine" book. It is what we're talking about in this thread, as you probably didn't notice.

The tools and dishes you mention are way off-topic when compared to the chemistry lab on that book.

Once I moved to California I understood farm to table.

Forget all this crap - just get yourself a pan and a knife an Elizabeth David's "French Provincial Cooking": https://www.amazon.co.uk/French-Provincial-Cooking-Elizabeth...

And all her other books, if you can.

Not mutually exclusive.

Considering that you'll need to spend your restricted money and time on the 2 different approaches then they are, to some degree, mutually exclusive.

by that definition, almost everything you do is mutually exclusive with everything you're not doing at that moment, which does not make sense.

Read through the entirety of the sample trying to find the actual recipes, and looks like there aren't any. Nope.

Does it show how to stay free, and/or reduce modernist contaminations, or is that intellectual venture part of the 'molecular kitchen'?

What do you mean?

Microplastics, VOCs, residual -ides, and so on, in the context of 'molecular kitchen'.

I mean, it's a lab. Can it be tailored to cut the crap?

Ik sure it can. Have you read why they call it the modernist kitchen?

It might mean something else than what you think it means.

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