Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team: Trials and Variables

In Parts One and Two of this three-part series, I described the processes by which we devel­oped the recipes and cap­tured the images for Modernist Cuisine. In this final post, I will explain how one of the most tedious aspects of our job turned out to be among the most useful.

With most cook­books, a chef must usu­ally spend a lot of time deci­pher­ing a par­tic­u­lar recipe in order to break down its com­po­nents to the essen­tials. Modernist Cuisine is dif­fer­ent in that we fur­nish the chef with para­met­ric recipes and tables that pro­vide the cru­cial com­po­nents of a dish, and then we offer some sug­gested variables.

For exam­ple, a typ­i­cal sausage recipe will con­tain meat, fat, binders, and spices cal­cu­lated to spe­cific mea­sure­ments. In con­trast, Modernist Cuisine pro­vides a table that shows a ratio of meat to fat to binder, plus any other com­po­nents, for dif­fer­ent styles of sausage. Providing a ratio allows the chef to intro­duce his or her own pref­er­ences and tastes to cre­ate their own dis­tinc­tive dish with­out hav­ing to reverse-engineer it from a sta­tic recipe.

These tables require a large, some­times exhaus­tive, amount of data. For exam­ple, just to fill out the addi­tives por­tion of the sausage table, we set up and tasted 56 vari­a­tions of addi­tives, binders, and emul­si­fiers, all in at least three dif­fer­ent con­cen­tra­tions! For the 14 tem­per­a­ture grades in our egg chart, we tested the entire range of 55–80 °C / 130–176 °F, degree by indi­vid­ual degree. The sheer num­ber of vari­ables became mind-numbing at times, but the util­ity of this raw data is invaluable.

The hot fruit and veg­etable gels table.

This series has encom­passed in a nut­shell what the kitchen team behind Modernist Cuisine does all day. While our work can be wear­ing, we think it is def­i­nitely worth the results, and we hope that you do as well. We look for­ward to the forth­com­ing release of the book and to find­ing new ways of push­ing the bound­aries of cui­sine. As we dis­cover more new and excit­ing things, we will post the results right here, so check back again soon.