Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
28 comments
·February 24, 2025giraffe_lady
dluan
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
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.
scarby2
> 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.
mcphage
> 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.
skyyler
>wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?
He covers this in the first 5 pages or so, doesn't he?
giraffe_lady
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.
josephmosby
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
nh23423fefe
same. it got me to sous vide a lot more
flower-giraffe
For those that don’t know the primary author is Nathan Myhrvold who was the first CTO at Microsoft.
dluan
and founder of the largest patent troll "Intellectual Ventures". both efforts now feel dated and cringey.
azinman2
I don’t hear about it anymore. What happened to it?
null
balfirevic
One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos
onename
It seems Nathan Myhrvold also made a TED talk about it.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_s...
M4R5H4LL
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.
skyyler
> 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.
jofer
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
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.
danielmarkbruce
maybe check out the content first...
tyleo
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.
skyyler
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.
fnordlord
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...
kjellsbells
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
Because Myhrvold is the single most notorious patent troll, bar none.
fumoto
At $625 for the volume, beauty is a prerequisite.
LargoLasskhyfv
Does it show how to stay free, and/or reduce modernist contaminations, or is that intellectual venture part of the 'molecular kitchen'?
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?