5. Plated-Dish Recipes

The recipes you’ll find in this book are quite dif­fer­ent from those you see in most cook­books. The point of Modernist Cuisine is that we’re look­ing at cook­ing from new angles, with a dis­tinct inter­est in sub­jects not com­monly cov­ered in culi­nary books. So it stands to rea­son that our recipes look some­what dif­fer­ent from those in other cook­books. The goal here is to break down recipes in such a way that you bet­ter under­stand not just the what (ingre­di­ents) and the how (meth­ods), but also the why. To accom­plish this, we needed a new for­mat for pre­sent­ing recipes.

Think of this as a text­book, with recipes used in the way that other text­books might use exam­ple prob­lems or case stud­ies. The com­pact, mod­u­lar form in which we present our recipes makes them a broader resource for instruc­tion and inspi­ra­tion. They’re meant to help you both under­stand the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions of culi­nary prin­ci­ples and visu­al­ize how you might apply those prin­ci­ples in other contexts.

In these four vol­umes, you’ll find a huge vari­ety of recipes and foods. Although we are telling the story of Modernist cui­sine, our recipes are not lim­ited to cutting-edge dishes. Instead, we cover every­thing from American regional bar­be­cue to inno­v­a­tive fla­vored gels. The point is not to tout mod­ern approaches or sci­ence for its own sake but to illus­trate how the prin­ci­ples of Modernist cook­ing can, and should, be applied across a wide range of recipes.