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Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

144 points by tyleo 2y ago

skyyler 2y ago
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.
- alwa 2y ago
  Later sold separately as a standalone volume, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine https://modernistcuisine.com/books/photography-of-modernist-cuisine/chapters/ 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-halfa-not-so-essential-part-of-modernist-cuisine-at-home/ https://seattlefoodgeek.com/2011/11/cutting-your-cookware-in...
  - gilbertbw 2y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/IZY8xbdHfWk?t=239 Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566
josephmosby 2y ago
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 https://www.kenjilopezalt.com
- nh23423fefe 2y ago
  same. it got me to sous vide a lot more
fumoto 2y ago
At $625 for the volume, beauty is a prerequisite.
- esafak 2y ago
  It's a beautiful set of books.
M4R5H4LL 2y ago
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.
- jofer 2y ago
  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?
  - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
    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.
    - shalmanese 2y ago
      Per pound, the book is actually a lot more affordable than most cookbooks.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  maybe check out the content first...
- skyyler 2y ago
  > 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.
giardini 2y ago
[flagged]
giraffe_lady 2y ago
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?
- dluan 2y ago
  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.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    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.
flower-giraffe 2y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dluan 2y ago
  and founder of the largest patent troll "Intellectual Ventures". both efforts now feel dated and cringey.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    I don’t hear about it anymore. What happened to it?
    - AlanYx 2y ago
      They're still around. They spawned a whole minor industry of patent licensing entities.
    - erikerikson 2y ago
      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.
tyleo 2y ago
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.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Does it show how to stay free, and/or reduce modernist contaminations, or is that intellectual venture part of the 'molecular kitchen'?
- Moosdijk 2y ago
  What do you mean?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
    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?
    - Moosdijk 2y ago
      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.
fnordlord 2y ago
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-breadcrumbs/ https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/modernist-breadcrumb...
kjellsbells 2y ago
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.
- fmajid 2y ago
  Because Myhrvold is the single most notorious patent troll, bar none.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Never sous vide your heros
- quesera 2y ago
  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!
  - Agingcoder 2y ago
    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.
balfirevic 2y ago
One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos
- cwizou 2y ago
  Yep, for those who have an air fryer, have a look at his air fries video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk 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.
  - charlie0 2y ago
    I've never had tripple cooked fries. What do they taste like?
    - statnamara 2y ago
      They taste pretty much the same as any other fries, but the texture is really great. Crispy outside, fluffy inside.
      - cwizou 2y ago
        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.
- Shadowmist 2y ago
  He also has combustion.inc which is a thermometer for nerds.
  - tptacek 2y ago
onename 2y ago
It seems Nathan Myhrvold also made a TED talk about it. https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_seen_before https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_s...
cwizou 2y ago
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-cooking 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.
- fn-mote 2y ago
  > The site has been bought by Breville At $69/year I’d say it’s pretty clear the direction the site is going.
  - hellotheretoday 2y ago
    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.
aaron695 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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yumraj 2y ago
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.
- lmm 2y ago
  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.
- diego_moita 2y ago
  The Cooking Light magazine has been doing that for decades.
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago
  Moosewood cookbook is a good one. Alice Waters is controversial in the cooking community, but her cookbooks are probably good, especially Simple Food
- wnissen 2y ago
  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?id=QqR5DwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/A_New_Way_to_Cook.html?...
shalmanese 2y ago
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.
janmarsal 2y ago
I'm more of a post-modern chef myself
galfarragem 2y ago
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.
zabzonk 2y ago
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-David/dp/1904943713 https://www.amazon.co.uk/French-Provincial-Cooking-Elizabeth... And all her other books, if you can.
- NegativeK 2y ago
  Not mutually exclusive.
  - diego_moita 2y ago
    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.
    - Moosdijk 2y ago
      by that definition, almost everything you do is mutually exclusive with everything you're not doing at that moment, which does not make sense.
- lmm 2y ago
  Read through the entirety of the sample trying to find the actual recipes, and looks like there aren't any. Nope.
diego_moita 2y ago
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.
- wbl 2y ago
  Once I moved to California I understood farm to table.
- Moosdijk 2y ago
  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"?
  - diego_moita 2y ago
    > 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.
m463 2y ago
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'.

144 points by tyleo 2y ago

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.

alwa 2y ago
Later sold separately as a standalone volume, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine https://modernistcuisine.com/books/photography-of-modernist-cuisine/chapters/ 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-halfa-not-so-essential-part-of-modernist-cuisine-at-home/ https://seattlefoodgeek.com/2011/11/cutting-your-cookware-in...
- gilbertbw 2y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/IZY8xbdHfWk?t=239 Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566

josephmosby 2y ago

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 https://www.kenjilopezalt.com

nh23423fefe 2y ago
same. it got me to sous vide a lot more

fumoto 2y ago

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

esafak 2y ago
It's a beautiful set of books.

M4R5H4LL 2y ago

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.

jofer 2y ago
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?
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  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.
  - shalmanese 2y ago
    Per pound, the book is actually a lot more affordable than most cookbooks.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
maybe check out the content first...
skyyler 2y ago
> 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.

giardini 2y ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady 2y ago

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?

dluan 2y ago
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.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  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.

flower-giraffe 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
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dluan 2y ago
and founder of the largest patent troll "Intellectual Ventures". both efforts now feel dated and cringey.
- azinman2 2y ago
  I don’t hear about it anymore. What happened to it?
  - AlanYx 2y ago
    They're still around. They spawned a whole minor industry of patent licensing entities.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    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.

tyleo 2y ago

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.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

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

Moosdijk 2y ago
What do you mean?
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  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?
  - Moosdijk 2y ago
    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.

fnordlord 2y ago

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

kjellsbells 2y ago

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.

fmajid 2y ago
Because Myhrvold is the single most notorious patent troll, bar none.
- genewitch 2y ago
  Never sous vide your heros
quesera 2y ago
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!
- Agingcoder 2y ago
  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.

balfirevic 2y ago

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

cwizou 2y ago
Yep, for those who have an air fryer, have a look at his air fries video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk 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.
- charlie0 2y ago
  I've never had tripple cooked fries. What do they taste like?
  - statnamara 2y ago
    They taste pretty much the same as any other fries, but the texture is really great. Crispy outside, fluffy inside.
    - cwizou 2y ago
      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.
Shadowmist 2y ago
He also has combustion.inc which is a thermometer for nerds.
- tptacek 2y ago

onename 2y ago

It seems Nathan Myhrvold also made a TED talk about it. https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_seen_before https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_s...

cwizou 2y ago

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-cooking 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.

fn-mote 2y ago
> The site has been bought by Breville At $69/year I’d say it’s pretty clear the direction the site is going.
- hellotheretoday 2y ago
  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.

aaron695 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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yumraj 2y ago

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.

lmm 2y ago
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.
diego_moita 2y ago
The Cooking Light magazine has been doing that for decades.
the_sleaze_ 2y ago
Moosewood cookbook is a good one. Alice Waters is controversial in the cooking community, but her cookbooks are probably good, especially Simple Food
wnissen 2y ago
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?id=QqR5DwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/A_New_Way_to_Cook.html?...

shalmanese 2y ago

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.

janmarsal 2y ago

I'm more of a post-modern chef myself

galfarragem 2y ago

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.

zabzonk 2y ago

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-David/dp/1904943713 https://www.amazon.co.uk/French-Provincial-Cooking-Elizabeth... And all her other books, if you can.

NegativeK 2y ago
Not mutually exclusive.
- diego_moita 2y ago
  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.
  - Moosdijk 2y ago
    by that definition, almost everything you do is mutually exclusive with everything you're not doing at that moment, which does not make sense.
lmm 2y ago
Read through the entirety of the sample trying to find the actual recipes, and looks like there aren't any. Nope.

diego_moita 2y ago

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.

wbl 2y ago
Once I moved to California I understood farm to table.
Moosdijk 2y ago
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"?
- diego_moita 2y ago
  > 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.

m463 2y ago

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'.