Recipes - Modernist Cuisine

Hanukkah Short Ribs

The holiday season is upon us and, above all, that means spending time with family, reflecting on the blessings of years past, and enduring the horrors of dry, tough, stringy meat. Although I am fortunate to have great cooks as parents, many of my childhood memories of holiday potlucks were punctuated by the disappointment of […]

Starch-Infused Fries

When Nathan, Chris, and I were writing Modernist Cuisine, we knew that two great techniques had recently been created for making French fries: one by Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in the U.K. and another by Dave Arnold and Nils Norén at the French Culinary Institute. So we decided to include in the book […]

Carbonated Cranberries

When I was nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I went to the library and checked out some books on cooking: Escoffier, Julia Child, all of the classics. Some people ask how my mother could let me do such a thing. Her response is that […]

Garlic Confit

I remember making lentils for the first time in my pressure cooker (this was before I went to culinary school). It blew up. My super-white kitchen was suddenly covered in yellow spots. The thing wouldn’t stop spewing lentils; I had to throw a towel over it. The problem, it turned out, was caused by a […]

Thanksgiving Stew

I joined the MC crew just after the book was published. While I consider myself to be at least an adequate home cook, I quickly had to learn many of the finer points of not just all 2,438 pages of Modernist Cuisine, but of the movement itself. Poring through the volumes, as well as looking […]

Olive Oil Gummy Worms

As our culinary team here at The Cooking Lab developed many different kinds of gels and candies for Modernist Cuisine, we tried shaping them into a variety of clever, fun, or surprising shapes. One approach we like is to use fishing-lure molds, which are sold at many sporting goods stores. For this recipe, we used […]

Pistachio Gelato

Everyone has, at some time, been served a sauce so overthickened with starch that it turned as gluey as wallpaper paste. The flavor is usually even worse than the texture because the gluey starch inhibits flavor release, which is how the flavor chemicals get to your taste buds. Cooks today have much better alternatives: modern […]

Caramelized Carrot Soup

One of the most important flavor-producing reactions in cooking is the Maillard reaction. In discussions of cooking, it is sometimes called “the browning reaction,” but that description is incomplete at best. Indeed, it really ought to be called “the flavor reaction,” not “the browning reaction.”

Striped Mushroom Omelet

This past March, we had to make about 360 omelets to serve during our weeklong launch of Modernist Cuisine in New York City. We made all of them ahead of time at The Cooking Lab, in a single 19-hour day. In six of those hours, we churned out more than 300 omelet “skins.” I’ve never […]

Mughal Curry Sauce

I still have the book of handwritten recipes that my friends and family made me when I moved to America from India. It’s funny, because I never cooked Indian food in India. I was interested in baking, but not cooking. I started cooking Indian food only after I moved to Arizona. And I would always […]

Sous Vide Rare Beef Jus

One day in a meeting, Nathan Myhrvold came up with an idea for a beef jus cooked rare. By cooking the meat sous vide at a low temperature, he reasoned, one ought to be able to create a jus that is just as tasty as traditional brown beef jus, but much brighter and more appetizing […]