Modernist Cuisine

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

The six volumes of Modernist Cuisine
Author	Nathan Myhrvold with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet
Cover artist	Ryan Matthew Smith
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	The Cooking Lab
Publication date	14 March 2011
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	2,438
ISBN
OCLC	711381030
LC Class	TX651 .M94 2011

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is a 2011 cookbook by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet. The book is an encyclopedia and a guide to the science of contemporary cooking. Its six volumes cover history and fundamentals, techniques and equipment, animals and plants, ingredients and preparation, plated dish recipes and a kitchen manual containing brief information on useful topics. At the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2010 the book was named "the most important cookbook of the first ten years of the 21st century" and was introduced into the group's hall of fame. Containing 2,438 pages and weighing in at 23.7 kilograms (52 lb), the book has been described as the “cookbook to end all cookbooks.”

The idea for the book came up when Myhrvold acquired a temperature-controlled water bath for sous vide cooking in 2003. He tried to find information about this new cooking technique, which had been invented in the 1960s and was in use at many restaurants by 2003. He could find only a few articles and one book (in Spanish) on sous vide, however. He posted messages on eGullet, a high-end cooking forum, asking for recipes or sources, but found that the process was poorly understood.

Myhrvold has attended Ecole de Cuisine la Varenne, a cooking school in Burgundy, France and has also cooked part-time at Rover's, a French restaurant in Seattle owned by Thierry Rautureau. He is also a scientist, having earned advanced degrees in geophysics, space physics, and theoretical and mathematical physics, done post-doctoral research with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University, and worked for many years as the chief technology officer and chief strategist of Microsoft. Drawing on his food and science skills, Myhrvold performed experiments and calculations to generate tables of times and temperatures for cooking various foods sous vide. When he posted these tables to eGullet, answering the question that he himself had asked in that forum about one year earlier, someone suggested that he should write a book. In 2006 he began to do so, but soon realized that he could not write the book he wanted himself, and that it would require a team using proper equipment.

Myhrvold started buying equipment for the research kitchen in the Intellectual Ventures lab. Much of the equipment was standard cooking equipment, but it also included items such as rotor-stator homogenizers, ultrahigh-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, a 50,000 G centrifuge,ultrasonic baths, and rotary evaporators. The laboratory already included other high-tech and industrial equipment, a 100-ton hydraulic press, a large water-jet cutter, an electrical discharge machine, and automated milling machines.