Jimmy Kimmel, Cryofrying, and How to Make a Laser Omelet

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Last night Nathan was a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” along with actress Jessica Alba and Congressman Barney Frank. Jimmy was very excited to meet and cook with Nathan — he’s quite the food enthusiast — in fact, he already owns a set of Modernist Cuisine and has been cooking sous vide at home for some time.

The Modernist Cuisine hamburger is a great example of the philosophy we extol in the book: even the most humble dishes can be worthy of extraordinary care and attention. You’d certainly lavish great care on your duck confit, so why not do the same for your cheeseburger? In the video below, Nathan demonstrates an abbreviated version of our cryo-frying method, which involves cooking the patty sous vide, giving it a quick dunk in liquid nitrogen, and then browning the outside by deep-frying. These steps ensure that your burger is perfectly cooked from edge to edge. But let’s be honest, it’s also pretty bad-ass.

It’s challenging to work in a kitchen adjacent to a machine shop and not get inspired to occasionally tinker. So we’ve developed a “recipe” for laser etching images onto the surface of an omelet! [Perhaps we’ll include this in a future edition of MC clip_image001] First, we make the same omelet base used in our iconic Striped Omelet recipe. We omit the mushroom stripes and instead cook a perfect disk of tender egg using a combi oven. A crucial step, it turns out, is vacuum-boiling off all of the gas trapped in the egg base before we cook it; otherwise, we’d end up with air bubbles and an uneven surface. Once the omelet cools, we put it in our laser cutter, turn the power down from “kill” to “stun,” and burn the image onto the surface. Some reconstructed cheese, cubed ham, and chives round out the dish.

This video shows the laser etching process, sped up 20x actual speed. Needless to say, the parametric recipe for the laser omelet would include additional celebrity faces.

Nathan also got to meet one of his favorite celebrities, Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier from the film The Artist. Nathan showed off a section of volume 3: Animals and Plants, and Uggie was particularly inspired by our rabbit recipe. Unsurprisingly, Uggie has a strong preference for free-range hare.

Tune in to Bizarre Foods Tonight!

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photo from travelchannel.com

Tune into Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel tonight to see what the team creates for the man who’s tasted it all. Part of a Seattle-themed show, the episode also happens to feature Andrew’s visit to harvest geoducks at Taylor Shellfish–the very place we get our giant clams from, too! At another place close to our hearts, FareStart, where coauthor Maxime Bilet and the Staff Chefs happen to be volunteering a few days from now, putting on a dinner, Andrew teaches a class on cooking offal. Andrew of Bizarre Foods also visits the famous Pike Place Market and Vashon’s Sea Breeze Farm, and drinks a lot of coffee.

This episode airs tonight, February 6, at 9 pm (8 pm central) on the Travel Channel.

Teaching Melissa Clark

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New York Times columnist Melissa Clark gave Nathan Myhrvold what many might consider the ultimate challenge: teach me recipes from Modernist Cuisine that I can make for a dinner party without buying any unusual ingredients or equipment.

Nathan isn’t one to turn down a challenge, and besides, cooking from Modernist Cuisine in a home kitchen is much easier than lifting it. Nathan taught Melissa how to cook salmon sous vide using tap water, cook steak in the oven, infuse celery with apple juice, caramelize delicata squash in a pressure cooker, and make balsamic panna cotta. For the results of Melissa’s dinner party, plus the recipes and videos, read the article here.

Nathan Talks with Danish Food Critic

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While in Copenhagen a few months ago, Nathan Myhrvold chatted with noted Danish food and wine critic and Gastronomiredaktør (gastronomy editor) of Børsen TV, Ole Troelsø. During their 20-minute talk, they discussed how temperature control is like fine-tuning a piano, whether or not all great food must be delicious, working with TASCHEN on foreign editions, and, of course, Nathan’s recent visit to Noma. You can watch the whole video here, on Børsen’s online TV station, which is in Danish. The video starts with Ole speaking in Danish, but he soon switches to English.

Nathan Myhrvold on Top Chef Tonight!

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Tonight’s episode of Top Chef will feature Modernist Cuisine author Nathan Myhrvold as a guest judge. What will they make for him? We can’t say (though the videos above are a pretty good tease!); you’ll have to tune in to find out! It’s a pretty safe bet that it will feature barbecue, one of Nathan’s passions, and probably won’t be quite as strange as the foods Nathan told Padma Lakshmi about the last time they met at the New York Academy of Science’s “Science and the City” program.

The episode will run 75 minutes and airs at 10 PM (9 Central) on Bravo.

Coffee: Because, Damn It, We’re from Seattle

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Nathan Myhrvold on coffee at Seattle Town Hall from Modernist Cuisine on Vimeo.

When Nathan Myhrvold recently spoke at Seattle’s Town Hall, he made sure to dedicate at least a few minutes of his speech to the topic of coffee. This was for the same reason there’s a whole chapter of MC dedicated to the subject: “Because, damn it, we’re from Seattle!” he exclaimed. Watch the video, and you might learn a thing or two…even if you’re a Seattleite, born and raised.

Nathan on Slate.com

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In the fourth installment of Nathan Myhrvold’s interview with Slate.com‘s Jacob Weisberg, the subject veered away from Intellectual Ventures (Nathan’s company), climate change, Steve Jobs, and nuclear power to something we can all get behind: food! Watch Nathan discuss both the necessity and art of food.