The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Part 2

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Climbing the Learning Curve

[See part one of this series for recollections by photographer Ryan Matthew Smith about how he came to join the MC team.]

After editing photos for a couple of months, we realized that we would need quite a few more images to flesh out the layouts of the first few chapters of Modernist Cuisine. Nathan, however, was increasingly busy with both his day job and author duties, so much so that he had almost no time to generate new photos. I was asked to do more shooting; it wasn’t seen at the time as a shift in the lead photography role, just a temporary necessity.

A shot from my first day of work on the book
A shot from my first day of work on the book

To make it easier to shoot freshly prepared dishes, we decided to set up a photo studio around the corner from the newly constructed research kitchen at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory. Our head chef, Maxime Bilet, served as lead food stylist and schedule master for the photo shoots.

Another first-day shot
Another first-day shot

The first months were quite the learning process for Max and me. I had just earned my photography degree from the Art Institute of Seattle, but still I had very little studio experience, and zero experience shooting food. Max had an art background and experience plating food, but only for diners, never for the camera.

The best photo from my first shoot
The best photo from my first shoot

Back then, I didn’t know much about Max or even chefs in general. During one early photo shoot, I saw a fly buzz around and land on the cutting board we were about to photograph. I quickly grabbed the chef’s knife from Max and chopped down on the cutting board as if wielding an axe. Whack!

I cleaved the fly clean in half. Amazed at my feat of dexterity, I grinned over at Max, expecting validation of my daunting skill. Instead, I was met with a stern glare that said “don’t ever do anything like that again.” It turns out chefs’ knives are finely crafted tools and are not meant to be whacked like axes on cutting boards.

Who knew?

The *right* way to use a chef's knife
The right way to use a chef’s knife

Those first few months were like a crash course in cooking, fine dining, and what is (and is not) acceptable in a kitchen. Every day I learned new lessons about the details of gourmet and modernist techniques; knowledge that turned out to be absolutely necessary for both shooting and selecting the photos we used to illustrate step-by-step procedures in the book.

After a month, our style starts to click in place
After a month, our style starts to click in place

Although I started with the cooking skills of a typical American college student, knowing little more than what I had read on boxes of dried pasta, I had to learn quickly what a PID controller is, the difference between braising and pot-roasting, the names of exotic foods such as Buddha’s hand (a citron fruit), and myriad other bits of specialized information.

Buddha's hand citron
Buddha’s hand citron

Luckily, I was working side by side with a team of talented chefs who were happy to share such knowledge and correct me when I missed some important point.

Today I am much smarter about food than I was. I still might not be able to reproduce in my own kitchen all the amazing dishes created by the chefs on the Modernist Cuisine culinary team, but three years of working with them has given me much greater appreciation of their incredible skills and understanding of their techniques. And I’ve also learned how to stay out of their way and respect their equipment!

Maxime has a talent for making food look stunning
Maxime has a talent for making food, such as this cocoa tajarin, look stunning

See Maxime Bilet and Ryan Matthew Smith at Maker Faire

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Modernist Cuisine head chef and coauthor Maxime Bilet will join lead photographer Ryan Matthew Smith at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 this weekend in the Bay Area. Hear them talk about the making of the book and taste one of the Modernist Cuisine dishes for yourself. Ryan and Max will be presenting on the center stage on Sunday, May 22, from 3:30 p.m to 4:30 p.m. For directions and tickets, see the Maker Faire website.

MakerFaire

Vote on the Prints You’d Like to See Included with MC

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[UPDATE May 19: The votes are in and tallied, and the winners are:

  1. Pectin falling from orange
  2. Levitating cheeseburger
  3. Pot roast cutaway
  4. Frying egg

We’ll be including prints of these stunners with every copy of Modernist Cuisine in a future printing. Thanks for participating!]

We’re plan­ning to include two or three 8 x10 prints of some of our most iconic pho­tos along with the books in a future print­ing of Modernist Cuisine. We invite your help in decid­ing which pho­tos to bun­dle with the book. Check the boxes next to your favorite three images from the selec­tion below, and then click the “Vote” button to submit your choices. We’ll select from among those that get the most votes. The poll closes on May 18 at 5:00 p.m. PDT.

[poll id=”1″]

The Culinary Team Answers Questions from Readers

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On eGullet, an online forum for cooking enthusiasts that played an important role in inspiring Nathan to undertake Modernist Cuisine, a lively discussion has emerged among people who are trying their hand at various recipes and techniques in the book. They have been sharing questions that have emerged naturally as they experiment with the dishes and share their hits and misses.

Coauthor Maxime Bilet and the rest of the Modernist Cuisine culinary team posted some answers today to a number of those questions on eGullet’s “Cooking with Modernist Cuisine” thread. The authors are excited about engaging the growing community of MC readers, and we’re working to build a simple forum here on ModernistCuisine.com to support that discussion. (If you’re interested in volunteering as a forum moderator, please email us.) In the meantime, check out the insights the team offers at eGullet.

Tips from Modernist Cuisine You Can Use at Home

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In a lengthy article in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, food writer Sophie Brickman describes making breakfast with author Nathan Myhrvold. The Chronicle story also lists many tips from the books that will be useful to home cooks, including strategies for extending the shelf life of fruits, frying herbs, and making tender burgers and perfect scrambled eggs. Modernist Cuisine offers full explanations of how these tips work and why.

The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Part 1

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.