Pizza Trial and Error

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When I set my sights on a topic, I tend to get a little obsessed. This summer, that topic was pizza, and my obsession was in full force. My interest in homemade pizza started with a chapter of the book The Kitchen as Laboratory in which culinary inventor Thomas M. Tongue, Jr. describes a method of leavening pizza dough without yeast by using an encapsulated leavening agent. I was intrigued, so I promptly hunted down a sample of this ingredient and began making pizzas in my home kitchen. As the summer months passed, I logged over 75 pizzas between my oven and my grill, each one a little better than the last. The key breakthrough for me, though, was the discovery that I could substitute flavorful liquids in lieu of water in my pizza dough. After rigorous testing and at least one pizza that self-flambéed (tip: 80-proof rum doesn’t make good pizza dough), I was enamored with champagne pizza dough. In the video from last week, I walk you through the process, which can take as little as 25 minutes from start to finish.

I was also inspired by the many recipes in our new book, Modernist Cuisine at Home, which contains several recipes for pizza dough, sauces, and toppings. We hope they’ll inspire you to experiment on your own as I did.

Watch Nathan’s Modernist Cuisine Story on NOVA scienceNOW

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Last night, NOVA scienceNOW aired “Can I Eat That?,” a show on the science of food and cooking, which profiled Nathan Myhrvold in the final segment. Host David Pogue narrates a behind-the-scenes look at Nathan’s inspiration for creating Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home. For those of you interested in seeing The Cooking Lab’s equipment, how the cutaway photos were made, or what Nathan looked like as a kid, we think you’ll enjoy this. It is a great illustration of the story of Modernist Cuisine.

Get Gourmet Pizza in Your Home Oven

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Have you ever waited six hours for pizza dough to rise, only to have the pizza burn in the oven while the crust remains stubbornly uncooked? This week on MDRN KTCHN, Scott Heimendinger, our Director of Applied Research, and CHOW.com bring you tips for saving time and circumventing just such disasters. Scott explains one of our favorite tricks: baking on a steel sheet. He also shares his own recipe for pizza dough using an encapsulated leavening agent. In Modernist Cuisine at Home, we include many recipes for pizza dough, sauces, and ideas for toppings. With all the different combinations, you could eat pizza for a month and never eat the same thing twice!

Interested in trying out Scott’s technique? Click here for information on using encapsulated leavening agents.

Modernist Treats Are a Fun Trick!

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A few Modernist tricks can heighten any Halloween treat. In the video above, Modernist Cuisine at Home coauthor Maxime Bilet demonstrates one of our favorite chocolate-related techniques for CHOW.com: adding Pop Rocks. Pop Rocks, or, generically, pastry rocks, add crisp and crunch to your favorite chocolate. You can buy pastry rocks on Chef Rubber or Pop Rocks on Amazon. We’ve found some combinations of Pop Rocks flavors work better than others, but pastry rocks are neutral in flavor. For the full recipe, click here.

In the video below, Developmental Chef Johnny Zhu enlists help from his son, Jerry, to make gummy worms in fake dirt. The recipe utilizes fishing-lure molds, which create very realistic gummy worms. For an extra-spooky twist, you can substitute tonic water, which will cause the worms to glow under a black light due to the presence of quinine. For the full gummy worm recipe, visit the recipe page in our library.

Modernist Cuisine – Recipe – Olive Oil Gummy Worms from Modernist Cuisine on Vimeo.

What to Expect from Modernist Cuisine at Home and the Modernist Cuisine Team

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It has been an exciting two weeks since the debut of Modernist Cuisine at Home. We have been happily overwhelmed with the photos and first reactions that readers have shared on eGullet, Twitter, Facebook, and our own site. Whether you are a proud new owner of the book or interested in learning more about it, we want you to know that we’re here to help.

The fundamental idea behind Modernist Cuisine at Home is the same as that in Modernist Cuisine : The Art and Science of Cooking, we believe that to achieve the best tasting food, it really helps to understand what happens to food as it cooks and what kitchen equipment provides the most precise results. In the book, we walk you through a wide range of modern equipment, ingredients, and techniques. You’ll find over 400 recipes, including all-new approaches to culinary standards, such as crispy Korean-style chicken wings and microwaved beef jerky. You’ll also find in the new book a few of the greatest hits from Modernist Cuisine that we adapted to be simpler for home cooks. If you haven’t yet tried our caramelized carrot soup or pistachio gelato recipes, you’re in for a treat. Every recipe in the book passed our stringent taste tests.

Once you start cooking, be sure to come back to modernistcuisine.com to share your results, get tips, and post any questions you have to our forum in the Cooks portion of the site. You can see modernist techniques in action on our MDRN KTCHN video series on CHOW.com. Our blog and e-mail newsletters will address common challenges and provide peeks behind the scenes in our cooking lab. We’ll also inspire you on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

We hope our books continue to bring the benefits of modern cooking into more homes and restaurants all over the world. Even though Modernist Cuisine at Home has only been on sale for two weeks, it is already in more than 8,000 kitchens, so the word is clearly spreading about the delicious results you can get from Modernist cooking. In fact, with more than a quarter of our print run sold, we are starting to wonder whether we underestimated how many others share our passion. We hope, but cannot promise, the book will be available through the holidays. What do you think?

The Amazing Pressure Cooker

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In the third installment of MDRN KTCHN, our very own Scott Heimendinger and CHOW.com team up to bring you a video all about pressure cooking. Discover how it works, when it was invented, and how baking soda caramelizes root vegetables in 20 minutes.

Now that you can’t wait to dust off your pressure cooker, get the Caramelized Carrot Soup recipe and watch a demonstration by Scott here. Other pressure cooker recipes in our recipe library include Garlic Confit and Vegetable Risotto. For even more recipes using pressure cookers to make everything from stocks to carnitas to marinara sauce, check out our new book, Modernist Cuisine at Home!

Watch Nathan’s New York Times Talk

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In case you couldn’t make it in person or stream it live last Saturday, here’s your chance to watch Nathan’s New York Times Talk with Jeff Gordinier. In the video above, Nathan tells Jeff about his favorite way to decant wine, when a chef’s own two hands are the best kitchen tools, how syringes are essential to roasting the best chicken, and more. Nathan also does a mean duck-in-a-feeding-frenzy impression!

Sous Vide Run Down on MDRN KTCHN

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In the second installation of MDRN KTCHN on CHOW.com, our Director of Applied Research, Scott Heimendinger, focuses on sous vide cooking. Watch the video above to see Scott demonstrate the process and explain the science behind this technique. Want to try it out yourself? We have many sous vide recipes in Modernist Cuisine as well as Modernist Cuisine at Home. We also have a few recipes in our online Recipe Library, including ones for short ribs, rare beef jus, and light and dark turkey meat.

Bloomberg Pursuits

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Take a tour through The Cooking Lab with Bloomberg Pursuits, tonight at 9 p.m. (EDT). Nathan Myhrvold will be taking Pursuit’s host Trish Regan through cryofrying steak with liquid nitrogen, making fries with an ultrasonic machine, centrifuging peas to separate them into three layers, and more! Watch the video above for a sneak peek.

Tune in to the Bloomberg Channel (check your cable provider for listings), or watch it live here.

Our Favorite Recipes: I Can’t Pick, But the Pie Crust Is Great!

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Modernist Cuisine at Home author Nathan Myhrvold

All week the kitchen team has been taking turns describing their favorite recipes from our new book, Modernist Cuisine at Home. But for me, picking a favorite recipe is like picking a favorite child. I love them all.

So instead, I’ll introduce Larissa Zhou, our newest addition to the team, and our first professional food scientist. Larissa joined us after the new book went to press, so her opinion is a little bit different than everyone else’s. Instead of testing the recipes inside the Cooking Lab, she took her new copy home and started making recipes there. Here’s what she has to say:

“The pie crust would be a great addition to anyone’s kitchen repertoire. I recently moved and made this pie crust in my bare-bones kitchen. I baked it with blackberries picked just along the running trails here in Seattle and took it to a potluck. It was the first to go. The right amount of almond flour and butter make the crust incredibly flaky and irresistible.”

Food Scientist Larissa Zhou

I have to say, the pie crust is pretty damn good.

All week we’ve been telling you about our chefs’ favorite recipes from Modernist Cuisine at Home! Visit our blog for more photos, stories, and tips.

– The Modernist Cuisine Team