The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Part 1

Getting the Pot Boiling

About three-and-half years ago, I was fresh out of my fourth run at a college education. This time, however, I actually managed to finish a two-year program and earned a degree in photography from the Art Institute of Seattle. I set out to get a job with little more than a couple of portfolios filled with nature and architecture photography; I had no real-world work experience to speak of. After four months just scraping by, I saw an ad on Craigslist seeking a photo editor with excellent compositing skills and three years of work experience. It made no mention of a book.

The position seemed intriguing, so I sent in a link to my website and a very long email pumping myself up (it probably read like I was trying to fight off assignments, clients were blowing up my phone, and I had been an established photographer for 10 years). Wayt Gibbs, the editor in chief of Modernist Cuisine, wrote back. I was in for an interview!

I’m terrible in interviews: I get nervous, avoid eye contact, clip my answers short, talk extremely quietly, answer “I don’t know,” and sweat profusely. I confess I was a bit starstruck at first: I had heard of Nathan during a photography lecture at school, but it had never occurred to me that I might one day meet the man, let alone interview to work for him!

Luckily, Wayt and Nathan looked past that and focused on my photography. Most of the meetings were spent by Wayt and Nathan explaining the project to make sure I knew what I was getting into. I didn’t have to say much other than YES THAT SOUNDS AMAZING while trying not to come off as unprofessionally enthusiastic.

The basic rundown was that Nathan, Wayt, and a couple others had begun work on a cookbook, and I would act as both Nathan’s photo assistant and lead photo editor on the project. Nathan is an award-winning photographer, and he was planning to shoot the entire book himself (on top of doing most of the writing and running Intellectual Ventures). Long before this, he had come up with the concept of making “cutaway” shots to illustrate what goes on inside food as it cooks. In fact, he had already shot some test images for the first cutaways and had made a bunch of amazing photo micrographs in his home microscopy lab. My job would be to do the Photoshop work, keep all the photos organized, and handle rights and permissions for any stock photography we used in the book.

An early photomicrograph Nathan shot of trichinella in pig muscle.

In my first two days on the job, I went to Nathan’s house in a Seattle suburb to assist him and Chris Young with the first photo shoot. We started in the kitchen, shooting images for step-by-step illustrations of combi oven techniques. Then we moved to a studio set up in the garage to take photos of two pans that the Intellectual Ventures machine shop had cut in half. These images eventually became part of the very first three cutaways.

A test shot made in December 2007 to work out ideas for cutaway photographs.

The broccoli cutaway that appears both inside volume 2 and on its cover was the highlight of that first shoot. Chris and Nathan worked away, slicing blanched broccoli in half and pinning the florets in place with toothpicks, while I moved lights and cards for Nathan before he snapped the shot. At the end of the day, we had a very iconic photo that would heavily influence the direction and style of photography for the book.

We used toothpicks to hold broccoli florets in place during shooting. The handle of the lid was later removed digitally.
First lay­out sketch for the steam­ing broc­coli cut­away. Note the graph con­cept that shows steam­ing cook­ing faster than boil­ing. When we con­ducted exper­i­ments in the lab to gather data for the real chart, how­ever, we found to our sur­prise that the reverse is true: boil­ing is slightly faster, as shown (and explained) in the final ver­sion in the book.

Nathan set many goals for us during that first week, and we accomplished most of them. But one remains unfulfilled. After shooting a rib eye steak in Nathan’s combi oven, he, Chris, and I were standing around the kitchen polishing off the perfectly cooked rare meat when Nathan shouted out, “Let Ryan have more; he’s way too skinny!” A moment later he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll fatten you up by the end of this project.” Although I ate very well during the course of the project, I’m still stuck at 155 pounds!

The final broccoli cutaway image

To Err Is Human

The second printing of Modernist Cuisine started rolling off the presses at the end of March. Customers will start receiving the first books from that new print run in July. Our current order is 25,000 copies. We hope that satisfies demand, but we were wrong once before, and we may be wrong again. We are monitoring the situation and will order more books if it seems warranted.

In our original plan, we thought that the 6,000 copies of the first printing would give us some time and extra eyes to find any typographical errors. We had many copy editors and proofreaders to help us pore over the book, but after the nth reading, you become blind to any further errors. Ultimately, the way that remaining errors in a book are found is by readers.

Unfortunately, the enormous demand for MC and the unexpected delays in shipping the books to customers meant that we had very little time, with very few readers, to find errors. By the time we had to send our final files to press for the second print run, fewer than 2,000 copies were in customers’ hands.

I posted on eGullet that I was interested in finding errors. We received several responses from Chris Amirault, Chris Hennes, and others in the thread, “Cooking with Modernist Cuisine.” These responses were very helpful.

But then we started getting emails from Larry Lofthouse. Like so many people I’ve met on eGullet, I don’t know much about him personally. What I do know is that Larry is an error-finding machine—he started sending me an email almost every hour with mistakes he had found. Some weren’t really errors, but just appeared so. Others were cosmetic issues or wording changes that are a judgment call, but some were real, honest-to-goodness goofs. Frankly, I’m embarrassed by some of them, but I’m glad they were found.

Finding errors caused a dilemma. The second printing was just about to start; we had a couple days at most to make the final changes. So I emailed Larry to let him know about our situation. He went into high gear, as did the whole MC team. We worked night and day and wound up scrubbing the entirety of MC. Then we corrected and reproofed everything Larry and the others had found and (just barely) made our press deadline.

Larry did all of this work because it seemed to him like the right thing to do. He never asked for anything in return, but we are so grateful that we’re giving him a copy of the second printing, and we have invited him and a guest over for dinner at the lab later in April. Thousands of people will have a better experience with MC due to Larry’s efforts.

That’s not to say that we have now corrected every last error, however. Indeed, in the days since the presses started running again, we, Larry, and other readers have identified a few more mistakes. If and when we undertake a third printing, we’ll correct those, too.

In the meantime, we are making available here a list of corrections and clarifications for the first printing. We’ll update this list whenever new goofs are spotted. It’s available in PDF format as well, in case you want to print it out or have a handy searchable version on your computer. If you spot a mistake in your copy that isn’t already mentioned here, please send it in.

See Our Culinary Team in Action at ICE

The Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) had a camera crew roving around during our event there last month, and has just released a nice video showing how the Modernist Cuisine culinary team pulled together with a terrific bunch of students to wow the guests with their amazing food.

There is a minor text error in the video, so we should clarify for the record that Kyle Connaughton was the head chef of the development kitchen at The Fat Duck restaurant while Maxime was staging there. Maxime was later the head chef at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, and is the head chef of our research kitchen at The Cooking Lab as well as a coauthor of the book.

http://youtu.be/niZu5_adUgQ?hd=1

Where Will You Put Your Copy?

Readers who preordered early have been so excited to finally receive their copies of Modernist Cuisine that they have been emailing us photos of the books in their kitchen, libraries, or living rooms. As the 6,000 sets from the first printing make their way to customers—more than 4,500 have already been delivered, and the rest are in various stages of distribution—the proud owners have a decision to make. Where do you put such a lovely and large five-volume set? (It’s clear where the sixth volume, the waterproof Kitchen Manual, belongs: in the kitchen!) The snapshots below show a few owners’ answers to that question, including a video from Seattle Food Geek. Send us your photo and we’ll add it to the slideshow.

If you preordered but are still waiting patiently for your copy to arrive, know that it is coming. We’ve received a handful of emails from customers who were told by Barnes & Noble that their order had been cancelled. Rest assured that we’re in touch with Barnes & Noble and other retailers who are selling the book so that they have the latest information about when the next shipments will arrive at their warehouses. B&N assures us that all who have ordered Modernist Cuisine so far will receive copies, and they are getting in touch directly with customers who received incorrect information. Most of the back ordered books will be shipped this month.

The remaining 2,000 or so orders that exceeded the first printing will be filled when copies arrive from the second printing, starting in July and continuing through the summer. As much as we’d love to tell you exactly when your book will arrive, we don’t have access to that information. All we can say is that, based on what we’re hearing from customers who now have the book, you’ll find it was worth the wait.

VIDEO: Seattle Food Geek Unboxes His Copy

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Little-Known Facts About Modernist Cuisine

The Seattle Food Geek, in a very entertaining post on April 1st, hypothesized about why certain things in Modernist Cuisine are the way they are. Among his insights:

The iconic “cutaway” photos in the book were actually created using a prototype device that resembles a light saber. Intellectual Ventures has several working “light sabers” which it uses for testing defenses against (according to a research assistant) “pests significantly larger than a mosquito.”

For the rest, check out Scott’s post.

Modernist Cuisine Around the World

Taschen press releaseOur first priority in writing Modernist Cuisine was to complete the book in English. That’s my native tongue, and it also happens to be the world’s favorite second language. We planned from the start, however, on having MC translated into multiple languages. The effort involved in creating this book was too big to just leave it in one language, and the techniques in MC can be applied to any cuisine.

So I’m thrilled to announce that we now have a deal with Taschen, the international publisher of many strikingly beautiful and unique books, to create translated editions of Modernist Cuisine in many languages. Initially they intend to produce French, German, and Spanish editions, but we hope to see the book eventually appear in six or more languages. For more details, see the Taschen press release. Stay tuned for details on the release dates.

We are very excited about this development. Taschen is an incredible company that is driven by an incredible man. Benedikt Taschen immediately grasped the significance of Modernist Cuisine. It’s the first time that his company has taken on a cookbook.

The Cooking Lab (my company) will continue to publish the English edition. Learning about the publishing business has been fun, and we are very committed to continuing to publish our book in English. I think that Taschen will do a much better job in producing the translated editions than we would, given their long and successful experience in the book business.