Hacker News Reader

Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

What are the things out of modernist cooking that I can actually, you know, use? I'm not going to "mold casts from real kumquats" and then use them to serve "sugar cubes that were rubbed on kumquat skin to extract its flavor". I like to cook, and I like to eat, and I'd have little qualms about using modernist cooking techniques, but they all seem to involve an expense of time and equipment that I'm not willing to invest given the alternatives.

I guess sous-vide is making it into some regular kitchens beholden to the laws of time and space.

View on HN

Buy _Modernist Cuisine At Home_, or, if you don't want to subsidize Myrvhold, _Ideas In Food_ and _Maximum Flavor_ (from the same authors). These books are full of applications of modernist cooking that are useful in home kitchens.

Here's an easy example: you can turn any cheese --- any cheese --- into a cheese with the texture and melting properties of American cheese; you heat it, add a little liquid and a little sodium citrate, in a ratio you can find in the books or online. The cheese melts and the citrate instantly emulsifies it, so even a veiny blue or a mature cheddar melts smooth. Pour into a cool metal pan, slice and wrap.

You're not going to make a lot of "airs" and foams and freeze-dried powders and powdered oils (though: the maltodextrin olive oil powder trick is pretty cool to play with), but there's a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff to modernist cooking that you'll use a lot once you know them.

It's tough for me. On the one hand, nobody likes patent trolling. On the other hand, one wants to support someone who would undertake such a monumental, bold project. Plus IV does some cool stuff in addition to trolling. Modernist Cuisine is a whole organization with lots of people that do phenomenal work.

"Buy _Modernist Cuisine At Home_, or, if you don't want to subsidize Myrvhold..."

Available free of charge on torrents

That's almost worse. Its best that if you don't agree with Myrvhold to simply ignore what he has to say altogether.

Personally, I think it more than a little ironic that his entire excursion into cooking began by being fascinated with and emulating the techniques of Ferran Adria.

No - letting his reputation limit your freedom to this information would be the real problem - no?

Not wanting to subsidize Myrvhold != wanting to pirate.

Yea, I never said that. I was saying that Myrvhold's quite interesting information is publicly available even if he doesn't want it to be.

Vive la content revolucion

From "modernist cuisine at home" which is kind of the diet version of the full $625 set, I have made the pressure cooked carrot soup and it is in fact the best carrot soup I've ever eaten.

So you need a pressure cooker. And probably an immersion blender or at minimum a blender of some kind.

I've also done a variety of extractions. Carotene butter (which I think you need for the soup above anyway). This requires little more than a vegetable or herb with fat soluble flavors (like lots of carrot) and some butter and a saucepan. And a juicer. Maybe I'm a weirdo (oh, who am I kidding, I'm a weirdo) but I like carotene butter on ... everything. Its like butter-ketchup, but tastier.

The recipes are not necessarily oriented around generating the maximum volume of food or quantity of food per unit of raw material input. So it takes a lot of carrots to make a large batch of carotene butter. So it does. And its worth it.

A lot of it is ideas and techniques. So the advice on homemade hamburgers was interesting and informative and I was able to successfully employ it. But I didn't "git clone" the recipe, I just kind of fixed up my technique.

Yep, the biggest takeaway from modernist cuisine is that knowing how food cooks and the chemical reactions therein means you can cook a better meal.

Its not necessarily about distilling the flavor of a thing and making it look like something else. Thats more a upscale restaurant thing.

The things I found most intriguing were how little we actually knew about the process of cooking. Like barbeque as an example, it boggles my mind that until modernist cuisine came around we didn't really understand how it worked at a fundamental level. Just a bunch of "well we do this and it works and tastes well", aka we hit a local maxima and didn't seem to want to move off that hill to see if there were higher peaks around by using binoculars.

The carotene butter sounds good, I'll try that. The recipe for the carrot soup seems to available on their web site (no centrifuge necessary!), so maybe that's next: http://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/caramelized-carrot-soup-...

Sous vides are great because they actually allow you to measure things properly. Do you consider pressure cooking "modern" because that's also great. There's also some cool stuff you can do with a whipping siphon[0]

[0] https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/whipping-siphons/landing

Pressure cooking isn't modern but is obviously enjoying a modern renaissance.

I have little issue with the methodology unless it's unreasonably expensive for unreasonable reasons (and I don't count sous vides here).

But things like molecular gastronomy are almost pure show - have you eaten many spheres or foams with your food? They're basically pointless from the perspective of taste.

Two responses: first, they're not pointless from the perspective of taste, because they impact how and when the components of the dish will engage your taste buds and nose; second, texture is a huge element of how you experience and enjoy food, which is why you don't take the best pizza in your city and stick it in a blender before consuming it.

You can do encapsulations and "caviars" and stuff in ways that are pointless, and a lot of coattail-following stunt cooks do that. But when Achatz or Dufresne decide to do something, there's usually a very well-thought-out reason for it.

Taste is far from the only consideration in the sensualist approach to food. As just one counter-example, texture is a very big deal, and something with which the folks into molecular gastronomy do some very interesting things.

I don't doubt that it has a value, but I'd suggest that:

A. That value is overpriced in the market and B. It's more aesthetic than palpable

A. Price is a function of the buyer's willingness to pay it, not your sensibilities as an uninvolved observer or critic of the market. If it's too pricey for you, don't buy it. I, personally, think Bentleys are too expensive for a car, but I'm not buying one, so my opinion is immaterial.

B. This is a discussion of "taste" and similar preferences. Of course it's aesthetic.

Sure, I mentioned that it's my opinion already; I'm simply noting that the value is rooted less in taste (in the literal food sense) and more in aesthetic.

I'm not saying that the package is overvalued, but rather the underlying food that is; after all, it represents but a small - sometimes negligible - portion of the package as a whole.

Interesting molecular gastronomy idea: Take the carotene butter as mentioned, mix with tapioca maltodextrin to make a carrot flavored powder, then take carrot cake cupcakes with a buttercream frosting make with carotene butter and drizzle the powder on the frosting as a topping. I haven't tried this, but there should be enough carrot in one cupcake to turn your skin orange for a week.

You are generally correct that leaving in the same phase is not as interesting as changing phase.

That sounds amazing. You should make it and report back.

That would probably be my list as well. And immersion circulators (for sous vide) can now be gotten for very reasonable prices as they've gone at least somewhat mainstream.

I use my circulator and my pressure cooker on a regular basis and play with the siphon from time to time.

In the ingredients department, I picked up a variety of thickeners etc. to experiment with but, to be honest, I haven't done a lot with them.

There are some good ideas and techniques in books like Modernist Cuisine at Home. There are also instructions for making an omelet that would probably take hours. I won't be doing that.

I have a similar skepticism of modernist cooking. I have very egalitarian ideas about good food--it should be for everyone. This has probably never been true, but the fact that people are trying to make new foods that are even harder for the common person to achieve rubs me the wrong way.

Of course my idea of a perfect meal trends towards amazing Banh Mi from a food truck rather than Kobe Beef fillet mignon, so YMMV.

Of course my idea of a perfect meal trends towards amazing Banh Mi from a food truck rather than Kobe Beef fillet mignon, so YMMV.

This reminds me of the Iron Chef intro where we see Masaharu Morimoto eating a hotdog (or something) sitting on a step while reading a newspaper.

As a foodie myself I'm not sure why you have to choose one meal over another. I've lined up for Banh Mi, and warm jam doughnuts being sold from a truck, and I've spent hundreds of dollars on multi-course meals. They were all 'perfect' meals in their own context.

Relatively few modernist techniques are intrinsically expensive or exclusive. Many local yogurt shops now sell "fruit bubble" toppings. New gadgets make sous-vide cheap as well, and I'd expect to see that used by food trucks before long, despite the tight counter space.

Funny you should mention that. I just had the best Banh Mi of my life at Ferran Adrià’s new restaurant in Barcelona.

Clothing should be for everyone but high fashion has its place.

Quite a bit actually. Foams for instance are very easy and fun to play around with. Hydrocolloids aren't very expensive, let you do cool stuff, and often take very little time/effort to use. Toss an eight of a teaspoon of xanthan in your next salad dressing and watch it get creamy as all hell and not separate.

Beyond that, there's a lot of info in there about classical cooking too that is quite informative. You'll improve the performance of your charcoal grill by lining it with foil, for instance. It's neat seeing how proper wok cooking works, even though you can't try it at home because you'll never get a hot enough burner.

Its just an "artisan" way of using techniques from industrial food manufacture. So buy junk and preprocessed food if you want the cheap option!

>they all seem to involve an expense of time and equipment that I'm not willing to invest given the alternatives.

Not to mention an unhealthy obsession with triviallities in food, the same way others fixate on model airplanes.

Model airplanes are a hobby. I don't want to know a man who dosen't have a hobby. I don't mind if a person uses food as a hobby. My dad didn't have any hobbies besides work. When he retired he was lost. Godbless you Dad--I know you had a tough life. I did love you. I wish we were closer. I tried, but we were just different people with different values. Happy Father's Day to all of you!

Cook your steak in the oven with an in-the-oven meat thermometer. Set oven to 250 and cook until proper internal temperature matches preferred doneness

I think many steak lovers will miss the distinctive "brown" taste caused by the Maillard reaction, which occurs at higher temperatures.

When oven cooking is required, I typically use a variation of Alton Brown's "cast iron pan" technique.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pan-seared-ri...

I should have provided this link (http://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/low-temp-oven-steak/) You sear it first in a hot pan. I even did while completely frozen and it was awesome.

Great idea! Thanks for the link :)

You can make salmon sous vide in a kitchen sink with a zip lock bag and a thermometer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com