Chefs as Chemists

[livius drusus]

I keep bumping old threads lately but I swear it's not a campaign, just a coincidence. We've talked about so much shit that whenever I read something new I remember that one time we talked about it.

In this case the occasion is the publishing of Modernist Cuisine, a five-volume (plus a recipe book) illustrated encyclopedia of the history and science of cooking by Nathan Myhrvold, a multifold genius (he was accepted to UCLA at 14), entrepreneur and cook. Smithsonian magazine has an article about this masterpiece.

Yeah, this shit is cool

Today, he runs a business outside Seattle called Intellectual Ventures, a technology think tank for inventions such as a laser system to identify, track and incinerate mosquitoes in flight. IV, as the firm is called, has also served as a base for Myhrvold’s culinary experiments. He was drawn to cooking from an early age, and even as a software executive spent a day a week cutting vegetables and boning ducks as an apprentice in a tony Seattle restaurant. He went on to win important awards in competitive barbecue, before falling under the spell of Ferran Adrià, the wildly creative and acclaimed Spanish chef credited with inventing a style of cooking that is known to the Food Network-watching public as “molecular gastronomy.”

Myhrvold, Adrià and other chefs reject that label as inaccurate. Besides, as a phrase to lure restaurant customers it’s not exactly up there with Steak Frites. But I think it captures Adrià's unique perspective, his ability to transcend the inherent attributes of vegetables and cuts of meat. For most of human history, cooks took their raw ingredients as they came. A carrot was always and forever a carrot, whether it was cooked in a pan with butter or in the oven with olive oil or in a pot with beef and gravy. Modernist cooking, to use Myhrvold’s term, deconstructs the carrot, as well as the butter, olive oil and beef, into their essential qualities—of flavor, texture, color, shape, even the temperature of the prepared dish—and reassembles them in ways never before tasted, or imagined. It creates, says Myhrvold, "a world where your intuition fails you completely," where food doesn’t look like what it is, or necessarily like food at all. One of its proudest achievements is Hot and Cold Tea—a cup of Earl Grey that by some chemical magic is hot on one side and cold on the other. "It's a very odd feeling," says one of Myhrvold’s two co-authors, a chef named Chris Young. "Kind of makes the hairs stand up on the back of your head."

As gross as those tofu pearls upthread look to me, I cannot deny finding this fascinating. But wait! There's more! There's video!1 The first segment is charcoal being lit in extreme slow-mo, and the second is an amazing series of slow motion captures of a gelatin cube in motion. A. May. Zing.

[wei yau]

Note: Don't get too annoyed that the video is auto-play (stupid ad). It's really worth a look.

[livius drusus]

Not autoplay anymore. I fixded it.

[Vivisectus]

Did you ever watch the Heston Blumenthal series "In search of perfection"? It is well worth having a look, although I do not recommend trying to follow his recipes, as he is a man who thinks NOTHING of inventing a recipe that takes 3 days to cook, or requires a 10 foot deep barbecue pit to be dug in your garden, or that requires you to find some way of creating you chocolate mousse in a vacuum.

Now THERE is a man who takes his food chemistry seriously. I am definitely going to make a point of taking her indoors to the Fat Duck one day to sample his culinary extravaganza.

[Anastasia Beaverhausen]

We get Heston's Feasts down here. It's pretty awesome, and he talks about food chemistry (like the 80s episode when he figured out how to get cheese to go all gooey and stringy).

[viscousmemories]

I read a big long article about Modernist Cuisine in Wired a few months ago. Very cool stuff.

[Qingdai]

I did try to read part of The Fat Duck last year, talk about a cookbook with recipes you can't follow!

[Beastwars]

Well, the gelatine will move like a liquid because it is a liquid.

Contrary to macroscopic appearances, gelatine (being a hydrocolloid) is actually a mesh of solid particles contained within a liquid. What you actually get, therefore, is a liquid held in place by a 3D microscopic net.

Freezing the gelatine will poke a few holes in the net and allow very small particles (inc. water and flavour molecules) to filter through as the gelatine thaws.

[Janet]

That book is ridiculously expensive. ABE Books posted last week that they had a few copies listed and they were in four figures. Since my reference budget for the cookbook section is about $500 and due to be cut I know I won't be buying it for the library.

[Vivisectus]

Hey its a mere 250 dollars
Amazon.com: The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (9781596915503): Heston Blumenthal: Books

this man does EVERYTHING to truly ridiculous standards.

[Janet]

Fat Duck I bought, it was fairly reasonable. Modernist Cuisine is the ridiculously expensive one.

[livius drusus]

They should donate a copy to any library that wants it.

[lisarea]

A ha. I knew there was a thread here where I could put this:

A review of culinary illusions, and the douchebags who’ve pioneered them. – HiLobrow