Modernist Cuisine and Nathan Myhrvold were featured guests on last night’s episode of The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert, a noted ice cream critic, sampled our dairy-free pistachio gelato and pronounced it yummy. “You’ve achieved ice cream that tastes like ice cream, that’s a true breakthrough!” he said.
Our dairy-free, egg-free pistachio gelato
Colbert also enjoyed the transformative experience that is MC pastrami, which is made from short rib and cooked sous vide at low temperature for 72 hours. “Oh my God…oh my God,” Colbert said with his mouth still full of melting meat. “I don’t need teeth. This is fantastic!”
Our melt-in-your mouth pastrami below Colbert’s mind
In a funny bit that didn’t make it into the segment that aired, Nathan poured liquid nitrogen into a bowl on the table at which he and Colbert sat. “You should absolutely never do this,” Nathan said as he repeatedly dipped his fingers into the ?321 °F liquid (and this is the important part: quickly removed them!) “Actually I haven’t had any feeling in these hands for years,” Nathan quipped.
At the end of the interview, Nathan immersed a rose in the furiously boiling nitrogen, then lifted it out and whacked it on the table. It smashed into hundreds of confetti-size bits. “You’d make a lousy valentine,” Colbert said.
During today’s graduation ceremony at the Culinary Institute of America, Nathan became the third person to be awarded an honorary degree from the institution. He delivered the commencement address at graduation ceremonies for the CIA’s Hyde Park campus, and later in the day delivered a presentation about Modernist Cuisine to more than 1,000 students.
Nathan and CIA President, Dr. L. Timothy Ryan
During Nathan’s address, he admitted that (despite having earned several advanced degrees) this was the first commencement he had ever attended. Following Nathan’s remarks, Dr. L. Timothy Ryan, the president of the CIA, rejoined him on stage and issued a proclamation making Nathan an honorary alumnus. For more details and photos, see the coverage on the CIA website.
Nathan Addressing Graduates
Dr. Kathy Merten gave the Invocation, which was followed by a speech given by student Jack Stoessel. Some in the audience were visibly moved by Stoessel’s remarks, which included the following quote from the song “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann: “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.”
Nathan and the Modernist Cuisine team are in the middle of a whirlwind tour of New York showcasing the book and the recipes therein. From small samples prepared on live television to large multi-course meals served to 350 renowned chefs and food critics, the Modernist meals on wheels tour has been a massive logistical undertaking with no margin for error.
Of all the people and perishables that had to arrive at each venue on time and in top form, it was one of the least delicate dishes that almost fell victim to the inevitable complication.
Pistachio ice cream isn’t really ice cream at all. Rather, it is a constructed cream made from pistachios and emulsifiers. It contains no egg or dairy products and thus can be made well in advance, stored, and shipped at room temperature. It does, however, need to be churned and chilled before serving, which turned out to be a big, last minute problem.
Back in Seattle, the team made 12 liters of pistachio ice cream well ahead of the New York events. After a series of plane, train, and automobile rides, the pistachio ice cream mixture arrived at the venue a few hours before it was to be served to 350 people.
As planned, the team loaded the mixture into the ice cream machines where it was to be churned and chilled into what can only be described as an intense yet pure tasting pistachio gelato. After a few hours of slow churning in the machine, it develops a texture that is indistinguishable from the soft serve ice cream that usually comes out of an ice cream machine. In this case, however, one of the machines refused to cooperate, breaking down before the first batch could be made.
Fortunately, the facility had two ice cream machines and the team calculated that they could still serve all 350 guests cold pistachio ice cream on time using a single machine. They set out to do just that until the second machine failed.
Panic ensued.
Guests would be arriving in a few hours expecting their meals to conclude with the pistachio ice cream, which has become one of the most iconic recipes in the book. The team quickly hatched a new plan: One of them would rent a car to take the warm mixture and a cooler of dry ice to the nearest ice cream machine.
Rental car? Check. Cooler of dry ice? Check. A working but currently idle ice cream machine owned by someone willing to let us use it? Not so fast! In a city where you can supposedly get anything you want in a hurry, an ice cream machine turned out to be remarkably hard to find.
Ultimately though, New York and the culinary community came through. Across town, legendary chef Johny Iuzzini was just finishing his desert service at Jean Georges. He graciously agreed to let the Modernist Cuisine team use his ice cream machine.
After being whisked across Manhattan and chilled, one liter at a time, in the kitchen at Jean Georges, the pistachio ice cream hit the tables at just the right time and temperature. It was such a big hit that some of the guests formed a mob and cornered Nathan, demanding the recipe.
The day’s crisis averted, the team packed up and got ready for another challenging day of blowing their culinary colleagues’ minds with Modernist masterpieces. For the Modernist Cuisine team, it was just another day at the Cooking Lab.
Esteemed guests from the culinary world were treated to an evening Q&A with Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten followed by a Modernist dinner at New York’s legendary Core Club last night.
Hosted and prepared by the Modernist Cuisine team, the dinner featured a variety of Modernist dishes from the book:
Goat Milk Ricotta and Peas
fresh ricotta, centrifuged pea puree layers, essential oil
Geoduck Vongole centrifuged broth
Caramelized Carrot Soup pressure-cooked with baking soda
Mushroom Omelet constructed egg stripes, steamed in a combi oven
Pastrami, Sauerkraut, Cognac Mustard cooked sous vide for 72 h, precisely cured, brined, and fermented
While most people in both New York and Seattle were still asleep, Nathan, Max, Johnny, Anjana, and Shelby were at the Today Show studio getting ready for a live segment on Modernist Cuisine. The team prepped for three live demos: striped mushroom omelet, pistachio ice cream, and centrifuged pea butter on toast.
Nathan and Al RokerMax and Nathan on the Today Show setChef’s view of the Today Show Kitchen set
The segment aired live at around 8:45 this morning and lasted a little more than four minutes (which felt like a lifetime in the studio). Nathan did his best to fit it all in, which — as you can see for yourself below — made for a lively and engaging segment!
The team’s whirlwind New York tour continues today with a luncheon presentation at Hearst this afternoon, and a dinner presentation at the Core Club tonight. Wednesday’s itinerary includes an in-studio interview on Martha Stewart Radio in the morning, and the Colbert Report tomorrow night. Wish the team luck and stay tuned!
The New York Academy of Science’s “Science and the City” program this week featured Nathan Myhrvold and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, who discussed his new book Modernist Cuisine and presented some of the images and ultra slow-motion videos created at his company’s lab in Bellevue, Wash.
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“This is the largest event of this kind we’ve ever had,” said Adrienne Burke, who organizes the “Science and the City” program. Everyone in the crowd got a flavor for the book in more ways than oneas Myhrvold and Lakshmi answered questions from the audience, servers passed out samples of dairy-free pistachio gelato, made from a recipe in the book that homogenizes water with pistachio fats and puree to yield a silky-smooth texture and intense nut flavor without the need for cream. (Myhrvold demonstrated this recipe and technique to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today Show” this morning.)
Among the more entertaining questions of the evening posed to Myhrvold, who is known for his willingness to try most any food, was: What is the most disgusting food you have ever eaten? His answer: Icelandic rotten shark is a close second to Sardinian maggot cheese. But the descriptions of how these local delicacies are made are actually quite fascinating.
Tim and Nina Zagat, founders of the famed Zagat line of restaurant guides, teamed up with chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten to throw a breakfast launch party for Modernist Cuisine this morning at Jean-Georges’s renowned New York restaurant. The guests at the sold-out function included many of the most recognizable names in the culinary world, from pioneering chefs like Ferran Adrià of elBulli, Wylie Dufresne of wd~50, and Dave Arnold of the French Culinary Institute to esteemed food and culture writers like Corby Kummer and Calvin Trillin, to trendsetter celebrities like Martha Stewart and Padma Lakshmi.
The Modernist Cuisine culinary team was on hand in the kitchen to work alongside Jean-Georges staff to prepare the meal, which included:
corn bread with bacon jam, made with centrifuged corn juice;
a mushroom omelet, featuring precisely constructed egg stripes, steamed in a combi oven and accompanied by mushroom marmalade;
short-rib pastrami, cooked sous vide for 72 h and flavored in a high-tech smoker; accompanied by hash potatoes cavitated in an ultrasonic bath and an egg yolk cooked sous vide;
pots de crème made with cold-infused coffee and topped with maple crumble, accompanied by an Earl Grey posset, served with Meyer lemon curd and praline granola.
The presses will soon be humming again with the second printing of Modernist Cuisine. Printing, binding, and packaging a 2,438-page, six-volume set with the highest production quality is quite an involved process. Some parts of the manufacturingincluding assembly of the volumes into their slipcases, rounding of the backs, and glue-up of the endpages, ribbon bookmarks, and backsare still best done by hand. Although these manual steps slow production somewhat, they are needed to ensure that the books look great, lie flat when open, and retain their integrity over many years of use.
For a view inside the plant, check out these video highlights from the first print run.
Just a few days after the first shipment of Modernist Cuisine passed through the Port of Seattle, author Nathan Myhrvold sat down with UWTV’s Media Space to discuss the book’s mission, its impact, and why he created a striped omelet. You can find a detailed account of the event on UWTV’s website or watch the video of the interview below:
Nathan said Modernist Cuisine was driven by a confluence of need, opportunity, and available talent. He explained how the need for a comprehensive book covering recent innovations in cooking led him to build The Cooking Lab and assemble the team that made the project possible. At 1.1 million words and 2,438 pages, Modernist Cuisine makes advanced Modernist cooking techniques and information accessible to the average person.
While he didn’t have time to answer questions from Twitter during the interview, Nathan’s answers to some of those questions are presented below:
Amyrolph: What’s your favorite recipe [from the book]? Nathan: Given the number of recipes and variations in the book, it is impossible for me to pick just one. I am, however, a well-known barbecue lover, so those recipes will always rank high in my book!
Ryanositis: Great photography for your new book! How did you get some of those cutaway shots? Nathan: At The Cooking Lab, we have access to nifty toys like high-speed video equipment and a full machine shop. The cutaway shots you see in the book are actual cutaways: that is, we actually did cut things in half to take the pictures! As I’m fond of saying, we now have two halves of the best stocked kitchen in the world!
Larry_B: Is there a subset of equipment or supplies that are reasonable for home cooks? Nathan: Yes. Chapter 10 on The Modernist Kitchen includes three tables that list, in rank order of usefulness, cooking equipment we recommend that is beyond the ordinary gear that pretty much all home cooks have. The first table details “Must-Have Tools for the Modernist Kitchen,” the second table is “Inexpensive but Invaluable Modernist Tools,” and the third lists “Classic Tools for Modernist Cooks.” Perhaps more important, the book explains what we looked for in the equipment and why, so the reader can make better choices when deciding if and what to buy.
Amyrainey: How have you managed the online movement that’s formed around Modernist Cuisine? How do you plan to leverage this enthusiasm? Nathan: I’m not sure we’re managing it so much as participating in it and nurturing it. Modernist Cuisine came about largely as a result of my involvement in online forums, so we made a commitment to remain engaged online throughout the project and beyond. We are very active and engaged on our blog at modernistcuisine.com and on Facebook and Twitter, where we invite your comments!
SunaG: Is molecular gastronomy just fancy processed food? Nathan: This is a topic I have covered extensively on the blog, but the short answer is that it depends on your definition of processed and fancy. All food is processed in one way or another: from picking it off the vine or digging it out of the ground to butchering and cooking. Contrary to popular belief, making even the simplest bread is a highly complex process. Everyone is free to assign arbitrary values to the type and amount of processing they prefer. I would simply suggest that these values are, in fact, arbitrary.
Autumnlerner: What are your thoughts on the raw food movement and Modernist cuisine? Compatible? Nathan: Again, this depends largely on your definition of raw. The book covers everything from foods that are prepared and served cold to dishes that undergo multiple cooking stages to achieve a range of doneness within a single food. But to address your question, the Modernist and raw food movements are entirely compatible as long as people can eat what they want. And at various points in the book we do explain a variety of techniques, such as marination, that can achieve cooked textures without the application of heat.
Dakini_3: Can Modernist cuisine be vegetarian and sustainable? Nathan: Sure. Modernist techniques can be used to create foods with so many flavors and textures that any single ingredient can be completely avoided without sacrificing taste. In fact one of the advantages of using modern ingredients is the new paths it provides to familiar culinary destinations. For example we have recipes in the book for a vegan pistachio gelato and for “meat” made of watermelon, as well as fantastic recipes for homemade tofus.
The issue of sustainability has more to do with how and where the ingredients you select are produced than with how they are prepared. We encourage cooks to make sustainable decisions before they even enter the kitchen.
Mrsmoy: How can Modernist cooking be applied to hunger relief (if at all)? Nathan: This is an interesting question to which I don’t have a ready answer. There does seem to be some potential for improving the safety, nutrition, and storage life of the available food, but this aspect would benefit from the attention of expert chefs who are familiar with Modernist techniques and ingredients.
Joepavey: What’s the biggest science cooking disaster you’ve had? Nathan: Well, it wasn’t a big disaster for me personally because I wasn’t the victim, but getting the shot of food being flung above the wok was a painful experience for Max! Let’s just say a fire extinguisher was involved.
Larry_B: What about food safety and typical sous vide temperatures? Nathan: This is another issue that we cover at length in the book and on the blog, in part because some of our findings conflict with conventional wisdom and even some FDA recommendations. The short answer is that sous vide cooking is completely safe if done properly. For the (much) longer answer, you’ll have to buy the book. Scientific American recently published a lengthy excerpt from our chapter on Food Safety Rules that explains some of the reasons we find certain FDA and USDA recommendations to be problematic.
Scientific American magazine has published a lengthy excerpt of from the Food Safety Rules chapter of Modernist Cuisine. Ever wonder where all those official guidelines for cooking pork, chicken, and other foods came from? Do they reflect rigorous scientific research, or just the codification of cultural preferences? Get the full scoop here, and learn why you really don’t need to cook your chicken breasts and pork chops to oblivion in order to make them safe to eat.
Scientific American also has created a fascinating slideshow of some of the more amazing photos in the book. It’s titled “A New View of Food and Cooking.”
Chicken breasts cooked(left to right) to 52 C / 126 F, 55 C / 131 F, 60 C / 140 F,
and 80 C / 176 F. Notice how the meat shrinks and dries out at higher cooking temperatures.
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