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 ne

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.