Restaurants, and therefore chefs, are usually rated in stars. MC is actually no different. If you have had the chance to plunge into all six volumes, please come tell us on Amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com, and give us your rating.
Five months and eight days after its release, Modernist Cuisine is fully in stock at Barnes & Noble and Amazon (as well as a growing number of independent bookstores and libraries–find one near you with our store locator).
Back orders, the bulk of the reason booksellers have been out of stock so long, have finally been fulfilled. We are still sending more and more copies from the printer in China each week, and we anticipate that we will continue seeing stores fully stocked through the holidays.
Both Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com are currently selling the book for less than $500. For the last several weeks, both retailers had listed it at the full price of $625. Many independent bookstores that have the book in stock are selling in the $525 price range.
Modernist Cuisine coauthor Maxime Bilet will be making an appearance at this year’s Epicurean Classic in Traverse City, Michigan. As is EC’s tradition, Maxime will be cooking up a storm at La Becasse on the evening of Friday, September 9. (For reservations, call 231.334.3944.) Max will also give a talk the following day on Modernist techniques for home cooking.
The Epicurean Classic runs September 8-11, 2011. For tickets, directions, and a complete schedule, visit epicureanclassic.com.
If you have registered with modernistcuisine.com and opted to receive recipes by email, this is already old news to you, but for everyone else, we’d like to announce the latest addition to our recipe library. We’ve taken an in-depth look at the recipe for Sous Vide Rare Beef Jus, including tips, plating ideas, and personal accounts from the Kitchen Team. There’s even a video with a centrifugal twist on the recipe from the book. Give it a try, and let us know how it turns out by posting in the Cooks Forum.
Got a question about vacuum sealers? Wondering about the best ways to brine? Have an insider tip on the best place to find citric acid? Found a way to improve on the Texas Barbecue Sauce recipe in Modernist Cuisine?
If you’d like to get answers to your questions about cooking with Modernist Cusine–or to share what you’ve learned and cooked from the book–please join us in the new Cooks Forum, which opens today on modernistcuisine.com.
The forum can be freely browsed and searched by all. To post a question or comment on the forum, you must first register with modernistcuisine.com (no purchase necessary!) and log in.
The culinary team here will be answering your trickiest questions during the week, and will be giving special attention to queries from members who are confirmed MC owners. And you can also draw, 24/7, on the expertise of your fellow readers. Hundreds have signed up in just the past couple weeks, so our community is growing fast.
On Monday evening, a couple dozen of us in the Seattle area who worked on Modernist Cuisine went out to dinner at Naan-n-Curry in Renton, Washington. It was a reunion of sorts, and great to see everyone who labored over the book.
The restaurant’s owner, Majid Janjua, invited Nathan back to the kitchen to try his hand at making the eponymous naan in a tan door. As always, Nathan was excited by the challenge, and ready to jump into action.
Majid’s son, Shan, demonstrated how to knead the dough and how to use the tan door. Nathan was so thrilled with the process that he said he wants to get a tan door for The Cooking Lab. Two, actually: one to use, and another to cut in half!
A busy restaurant kitchen waits for no man. When some shouted, “Naan for table four!” Nathan smoothly kept kneading his naan with his left hand and grabbed up a piping hot basket of naan with his right, giving it to me through the kitchen window for the server. “Naan for table four!” he echoed, barely even glancing up.
Even though I’ve worked with Nathan for three years, his tenacity continues to surprise me. When the naan was done, he reached right into the tan door without the slightest flinch to get it. Shan warned him that his arm hair would get singed, but something like that would never deter Nathan.
“It reminded me of taking pictures of volcanoes in Hawai’i,” Nathan said. “The tan door is kind of like a skylight, which is a hole in the cooled crust through which you can see a river of molten lava flowing underneath. You can go at it from the side, but you wouldn’t want to look directly down into it from right above.”
The naan was delicious, and the evening was a successful celebration of everyone’s great effort in making Modernist Cuisine. It was only appropriate that cooking and good food were at the heart of it all.
Nathan Myhrvold may be a scientist, but even he describes the cutaway photos found in Modernist Cuisine as magical. Take a look at some of the behind-the-scenes action as Nathan describes the thousandth of a second in which the photos were taken, and what ensued after that second had passed!
If you would prefer to watch the video on YouTube, you can view it here.
Modernist Cuisine is one of those extraordinary books that is hard to truly appreciate until you have actually laid your hands on a copy. Until recently, that’s been pretty hard to do.
Now we invite you to use our new MC Locator feature to find a physical copy of the book at a bookstore or library near you. Just type in your zip code: a set of the six-volume work is probably closer than you’d think.
If you don’t see a location near you, check back in a month or two. More stores and libraries are receiving their copies every week, and we’ll be updating the list periodically.
The first public exhibition of photography from Modernist Cuisine is open through 14 August in Hong Kong. Sixteen images from the book, printed in large format, are on display on Chater Bridge and East Bridge, Central. For a map and contact information, see the write-up at CNN Go.
Accompanying the exhibition is the “Taste Matters New Recipe” Competition. Create your own recipe featuring one of the ingredients on display in the exhibition. Chefs from several of Central’s restaurants will select winning dishes in each of the 10 ingredient categories. The chefs will then reinterpret the winning recipes and serve the resulting dishes in their restaurants for one month. All winners will also receive HK$10,000 worth of gift certificates. For more details on how to participate, see the competition website. 
We’ve been thrilled by the reception that Modernist Cuisine has received–not just in sales, which are a lot faster than we initially expected, but also in the rapid growth of a community of cooks who have joined us here on ModernistCuisine.com, on the MC-related threads at eGullet, on Facebook and Twitter, and elsewhere online. We’ve received lots of terrific suggestions from readers about ways in which we could enhance the website and better support them as they explore the recipes and techniques suggested by Modernist Cuisine and other Modernist cookbooks. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of a bunch of these new features, with even more to come soon.
Check out the freshly minted Cooking with MC area of the website for:
All of these new features are free. But to get the most out of them, and to gain access to the Cooks Forum and Reader Gallery that we’re currently constructing and expect to open soon, please register as a member of the site. Registered members can choose to receive new recipes by email before they appear on the website. If you have a copy of the book, be sure when you create your account to provide information about where and when you purchased your book, and then answer a validation question to gain Confirmed Owner status, which qualifies you for exclusive offers.
We hope you enjoy all of these new features, and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.