If you’ve read much about Modernist Cuisine in the press, you’ve probably seen our “levitating cheeseburger” photo, which opens the plated-dish recipe for our ultimate cheeseburger in Volume 5. The Wall Street Journal has created a fun interactive version of the photo. Check it out.
Modernist Cuisine is now shipping from booksellers
We are happy to announce that Modernist Cuisine has begun shipping to customers well ahead of its announced release date of March 14. The book is available for order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kitchen Arts & Letters, and other booksellers, who will send the first copies to those who preordered. Because of the unexpectedly high volume of preorders, stocks of the book will be very limited for a while. New shipments are on their way from the press and will arrive in March and April.
Houston, We Have Lift-Off!
After yesterday’s successful launch of Space Shuttle Discovery’s final mission, comparisons to the pending launch of Modernist Cuisine are irresistible (to us anyway).
Discovery began its final mission having already achieved unprecedented success. According to NASA, over Discovery’s 38 spaceflights, it has carried 246 crew members around Earth 5,628 times over a period of 351 days spent in orbit. First launched in 1984, Discovery has a total of 142,917,535 miles on the odometer.
Similarly, Modernist Cuisine approaches its March 14th launch window having already achieved several milestones. Modernist Cuisine has already been widely lauded by reviewers and will enter the Cookbook Hall of Fame at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards on March 3, 2011.
Pre-orders from all of the retailers who will carry the book have rocketed well past the 3,000 copy mark, more than half of the book’s total first print run. Last week, Modernist Cuisine entered the top 100-selling books on Amazon.com. [Update: On March 9, the book entered the ranks of the top 50.] As the following chart illustrates, the book’s pre-release sales pace has soared into the stratosphere.
Amazon sales rank chart; vertical axis is in powers of 10
(Note that the vertical axis of this chart is logarithmic, so each division in the vertical scale corresponds to a ten-fold improvement in the Amazon.com sales rank.)
Like Discovery, just getting Modernist Cuisine to the launchpad has been a huge undertaking. The six-volume, 2,438-page set weighs 39 pounds, contains 3,126 photos, and took five years and a team of more than 50 to create. Granted, what we did isn’t rocket science. But we’re proud of it nonetheless.
The first copies of Modernist Cuisine have now landed safely on U.S. shores and are making their way to bookstores and customers. We wish the crews of Discovery and the ISS a similarly successful journey and safe return.
A Preview of Our Chapter on Culinary History
The Winter 2011 edition of Gastronomica, a journal of food and culture, contains an article I wrote titled, The Art in Gastronomy: A Modernist Perspective. The 6,000 word, 10-page article is a much-expanded version of a section of Chapter 1 in Modernist Cuisine, in which I explain why the current revolution in cooking is appropriately called Modernist, as it is in many ways broadly similar to Modernist revolutions in painting, architecture, literature, and other arts.
The argument is rather involved (thats why it takes 6,000 words), but the gist of it can be explained relatively simply. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most aspects of culture and art were rocked by revolutions in which small groups of young artists joined avant-garde movements that were creating new aesthetics by breaking the old rules. The French Impressionists were perhaps the most famous example. These painters rebelled against the realistic style of painting that was in vogue in their day. Their paintings were initially ridiculed and mocked, but the works ultimately became some of the most widely loved art in the world. Similar revolutions occurred in almost every field of human cultural achievementwith the notable exception of cooking.
The revolution in cooking that began in the mid-1980s is just such a movement. Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, and a number of other chefs formed an avant-garde that refused to follow many of the old rules and in doing so, created food that challenges us as profoundly as any other kind of art does. They have embraced new cooking technologies, such as sous vide, and new ingredients, like xanthan gum, and their creative use of these tools has expanded the realm of what is possible in the kitchen. At the same time, Harold McGee and others started a trend in popular books of telling both restaurant and home chefs about the science of cooking. These threads collectively created a revolution that has clear links to Modernism and its ideals.
I mention this for two reasons. First, the article featured in Gastronomica is a bit longer and thus more complete than the treatment of the topic in Modernist Cuisine. So if you like Chapter 1 on Culinary History but want more detail, this article is one place to look.
Second, if you dont yet have a copy of Modernist Cuisine (and at this stage nobody does!), this article is a quick way to get at least this part of the book. That said, it is a rather abstract topicdont expect to see any recipes or techniques in the article.
Gastronomica is available by subscription and also by the copy at larger newsstands and bookstores.
A Close Look at Eight Pages from the Book
The Modernist Cuisine team worked with the eGullet Society for Culinary Art and Letters to produce an extensive Q&A feature that includes eight previously unreleased pages excerpted from three different volumes of the book. The feature was published today at egullet.org. We’ll continue answering reader questions on that forum thread throughout this week.
Torch Tastes
In response to my recent post on “doneness,” reader Rusty Shackleford posted the following question: “When using my blow torch, sometimes I notice unpleasant propane tastes. Anything you can tell me about general blow torch cooking?”
This brought to mind a similar question that I was recently asked about the use of other flammable gases in cooking. As is often the case at The Cooking Lab, one question leads to another and before I knew it, my short answer had grown beyond the scope of the original question. We cover the topic more extensively in the book, but here is a brief description of how the use of a blow torch and the type of gas therein can affect the flavor.
Natural gas (methane) is a common fuel for ranges and stovetops, but most torches used for cooking are fueled by propane or butane. Fuels like oxyacetylene and MAPP gas, however, typically burn hotter and thus can impart a larger amount of heat to the food for a faster sear.
The type of gas that you choose isn’t as important as the completeness of its combustion. Propane, butane, MAPP, and acetylene are all great so long as you adjust the flame of the torch so that it is a fully oxidizing flame. This is a flame that is produced with an excess of oxygen, either from the surrounding air or supplemented with compressed oxygen. You can tell that you have an oxidizing flame when the torch is burning dark blue, is relatively short in length, and hisses and roars. Frequently, people have too large of a flame that is burning yellow at the tip. This is a reducing flame, also referred to as a carburizing flame because there are uncombusted hydrocarbons from the fuel in the flame that will end up in the food, imparting an unpleasant taste. In my experience, butane torches are especially prone to this, but it can happen with any torch that hasn’t been properly adjusted before aiming it at the food.
Too often, people aim the blow torch at the food before they have it appropriately adjusted. Not only do they often end up torching the food with a dirty flame, but there is also some raw fuel being blown onto the food before it ignites. Like an old, carbureted car (and for the same reason), it is best to light the torch and adjust the fuel-to-oxidizer ratio before getting underway.
Long story short, always light your torch facing away from the food. Then adjust the torch to produce a short, hissing dark blue flame and you won’t have a problem.
Demand for Modernist Cuisine Will Temporarily Outstrip Supply
In my previous post, I explained how I arrived at the decision to print 6,000 copies of Modernist Cuisine in the first press run. Initially, the plan was for all 6,000 copies to arrive at about the same time. They would be printed and assembled in China and then loaded into containers for the long trip across the Pacific. Then trucks would pick them up at ports of arrival in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, and finally, the books would fan out to warehouses, both those of individual booksellers, like Amazon.com, and distributors, like Ingram.
Unfortunately, the printer ran into some delays in the binding part of the process. Although all of the books are now printed, binding is not yet complete on all of them. Chinese New Year has been another source of delay, like most businesses in China, our printer shuts down for two weeks surrounding this major holiday. A similar delay occurred last fall.
The good news is that the first shipment of books has left China and is now steaming its way across the Pacific. It is due to arrive at the port of Seattle on February 19. As soon as the books clear customs, they will be trucked to the nearest distribution centers. If you have pre-purchased a book, depending on the bookseller and how long ago you put in your order, your set might be on its way to you in the last week of February or the first week of March. This is actually ahead of schedule!
The bad news is that this first shipment contains only 500 books. The next shipment, which should be larger, is due to arrive on March 17. After that, books are due to arrive every week or two through early May.
As of this morning, 2,721 copies have been pre-ordered through various booksellers, so unfortunately, the first shipment will fulfill only some of those pre-orders. Please bear with us; we will catch up as the books come in.
The old-school publishing way to handle this matter would be to hold all of the books until enough have arrived to fulfill every order placed to date. I actually had people suggest that to me! I was horrified. Some people put in their order way back in August. They were first in line, so it only seems fair that they should get their books first.
Apparently, holding books is the conventional wisdom in publishing because publishers consider the bookstore, not the reader, to be the customer. Publishers take great pains to avoid looking like they are giving advantage to one store over another. So if a shortage develops, the publisher typically delays release until it can give every store its allocation of books on the same day.
That strikes me as just plain silly. It is a simple fact that some stores (both the online variety as well as those made of bricks and mortar) have been accepting pre-orders for Modernist Cuisine for months now. Why shouldn’t they get precedence?
Our allocation strategy is to send each store or distributor a prorated share of the shipments based on the number of orders they have taken. That seems fair to both customers and stores. This allocation scheme means that if you order Modernist Cuisine today, you’ll get it at roughly the same time no matter whom you order from. But if you ordered it months ago, you’ll get it before people who order it now.
This isn’t an exact science, of course. Some distributors have longer delays than others in moving new books through their system. Some distribution centers are farther than others from Seattle, and not all vendors use the same delivery services. I can’t control those variables, so the scheme is as fair as I know how to make it.
There is one small loophole to “roughly the same time” that requires a bit of an explanation. Most books are basically sold on consignment, meaning that stores retain the right to retain any books they stock that do not sell. Books that come back from retail outlets are usually remaindered because they become worn from being handled while on display.
For this very reason, expensive art books are almost invariably sold to bookstores on a non-returnable basis. As a result, most bookstores can’t afford to stock them, the cost of carrying the inventory is just too high. Instead, the store takes one copy to put out for display rather than sale; then it takes orders from customers. This is the way that most brick-and-mortar bookstores are handling Modernist Cuisine. I suspect, however, that a few stores have taken the plunge and bought some copies on spec. They will likely have bought through our distributors, so I can’t say whether they bought copies to fulfill customer orders or to place for sale on on their shelves.
So it may be possible to find a copy of Modernist Cuisine for sale in a bookstore, even if it is back ordered online. Then again, it may not. We’ll just have to find out.
The reason I bother to mention all of this is that the possibility of a shortage of Modernist Cuisine looms in our future. Normally speaking, pre-orders don’t add up to much; people tend to wait for reviews and hear the buzz via word of mouth before they decide to buy a book. In our case, pre-orders are already approaching half of our initial print run. They are running well ahead of my expectations and those of the publishing experts that I have consulted.
Frankly, we have no idea how to extrapolate from our amazing pre-order rate to total sales of the book. It seems likely, however, that in the months ahead, people will continue to order the book at least at the current rate that they have been ordering, and possibly at a much quicker pace. If the latter occurs (there is, of course, no guarantee), then we may find ourselves sold out of the first print run before we can fulfill the last pre-orders. Customers ordering at the tail end of the pre-order period could then see a delay of a few weeks to perhaps a few months before their books arrive.
We’re trying to figure out ways around this issue. We’re now working on ordering a second print run, and talking to our printer about accelerating their shipping schedule. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.
As the First Books Arrive by Air, We Ponder: Did We Print Enough?
We were so excited to see the first bound copies of Modernist Cuisine in their beautiful acrylic cases that we couldn’t wait for them to cross the Pacific by boat. So we had a small number shipped to us by air, despite the eye-popping delivery cost involved when you ship a 49 lb / 22 kg package halfway around the world in an airplane.
It was worth it. Several of us gathered in my office as we opened the outer carton, then opened the inner carton, then removed the kitchen manual and elaborate padding, and then, at last, lifted out the case with the five major volumes inside. A chorus of “oooooh” went up in the room, and at that moment, the weight of what we have made really sank in. I don’t mean that just figurativelyModernist Cuisine is so massive you can almost feel its gravitational attraction. You don’t want to drop it on your toe!
Those of us in the room had seen the photos in these volumes and read the text over a hundred times during the past several years, as we developed the material from rough concept to final, proofread form. But it really does look different, and so much better, when finally printed on a state-of-the-art press and bound, largely by hand, into a high-quality book. Subtle details like the rounding of the spine (so that the books open flat), the extra-wide gamut of the photography, the exquisite sharpness of the text, and the silky feel of the varnished Japanese art paper all really add to the experience.
Since then, a few others have laid hands on the books, and many of them seem to have similar experiences. The very positive reception raises the question of whether our first printing will be large enough to satisfy the initial demand.
I’ve been asked many times how many copies we ordered for the first printing. My first impulse was to decline to answer; was this something that one talked about? Would it help or hurt sales of the book?
So I asked one of my publishing consultants what is normally done. “What do real’ publishers say about details like that?” He said, “Oh, that’s easy to answer. They lie!”
Apparently, it is a time-honored tradition among publishers to exaggerate any statistics associated with their books. In fact, it happens so frequently that there is a common phrase in the business: the “announced first printing,” which is the number that the publisher wants you to know. It may or may not be the actual number of first-run books.
The economics of printing reflect the fact that there is a lot of work up front getting the presses set up, making the plates for each color of ink, and so forth. For a small print run, those up-front costs can dominate the overall cost. The per-copy cost often drops dramatically as the number of books printed rises. As a result, a publisher commonly orders just 5,000 copies of a new hardcover book initially. That is enough to achieve a substantial economy of scale while hedging against the risk that customers won’t want that many. That said, some books are published with a first run of only 1,000 books or even fewer.
Also for most books, the first run is also the last run; that’s all of that given title that will ever be created. Books are sent back to press for second and subsequent print runs only if sales warrant. One commonly hears in publishing that about 40% of all books that are printed are pulped because nobody buys them. This partly reflects the economics of printing, but there are other business and marketing factors that often induce publishers to print too many books, as an industry insider explains here.
After thinking it over, I decided that the best thing for Modernist Cuisine is to be transparent and tell everybody what our print run really is. We ordered 6,000 copies of Modernist Cuisine.
We had a lot of internal debate about that number. About a year before the book came out, I took a bunch of printed pages to New York City and made the rounds of publishers. At that point, I hadn’t yet come to the decision 
to publish the book myself. One question that I asked about was print run. The answers that I received between 2,000 and 3,000 copies were one of the principal reasons that I eventually decided not to work with those publishers. If they thought that they could sell only that many books, then they probably would; the estimate would likely be self-fulfilling. I didn’t want to work with companies that had that little faith in the book.
Of course, I also realized that they might be right! Even so, a tentative approach to printing seemed like a bad idea, given the even bigger plunge I had already taken on writing the book. So my initial plan was to print 10,000 books in the first print run.
We ended up with a number in between, in part because every new book inevitably contains a number of typos. Despite our extensive proofreading, this is bound 
to be true for Modernist Cuisine as well. Given that it contains well over a million words, even a 99.999% accurate proofreading process will miss something like a dozen errors. Once the first copies are out, we and others will catch those mistakes. We might as well fix them on the second printing; otherwise there are that many more copies out there with the error.
Plus, warehousing the book costs money. We did a lot of spreadsheet analysis into how much it costs to warehouse various quantities of books for up to two years. Initial demand is now looking so strong that perhaps we didn’t need to worry about storing books (more on that in my next post), but it’s always important to ask the “what if” question before you leap, rather than after.
Does this mean that the first edition is 6,000 copies? Well, that depends on your definition, because 
there are no strict standards. Publishers use the term to mean the first typesetting of the book that includes the content. There can be multiple print runs within a single edition, including the first edition. Book collectors often do use the term “first edition” to mean “first print run.” Others, especially in the textbook business, reserve “edition” to mean a substantial revision to the content, as distinct from simply a reprinting with the typos fixed.
Our goal with Modernist Cuisine is to reach as many people as we can, so rest assured that we will continue to print the book by ordering new print runs as often as we need to.
Photos by Ryan Matthew Smith. Copyright 2011 Modernist Cuisine, LLC
Doneness and Article in Men’s Health
During the writing of Modernist Cuisine, our editor-in-chief Wayt Gibbs pointed out to me that, according to the Websters Third New International unabridged dictionary, doneness is officially not a word. My response was that it ought to be, and unless there was another word that communicated my meaning just as clearly, then I would insist that we make doneness a word. [Editors note: We later discovered that the word is indeed included in the 2002 addenda to Web3.]
Doneness now officially a word, and no longer in need of being separated from other words with a pair of quotation markssuccinctly captures a rather complex notion. For me, doneness means cooking a piece of food to the ideal texture, temperature, taste, and flavor to match the personal preference of whoever will be eating it.
Steak is a great example of a food that elicits strong personal preferences for specific doneness. Some of us are enthusiastic carnivores and want a steak to have a flavorful charred crust, but a center that is raw and meaty. Others, for reasons hard for me to fathom, insist that their steak be well done.
Traditional techniques for cooking steak, like grilling, require that the meats time over the heat must be just right. Cook a steak sous vide, on the other hand, and it becomes simple to nail the perfect degree of doneness every time. This is because you set the water bath in which the steak cooks to the final temperature that you want the steak to reach. Once it achieves that temperature, it just doesnt get any hotter. This difference is one of the most compelling arguments for cooking sous vide, whether youre a restaurant chef or a home cook.
For the March issue of Mens Health magazine, I worked with the journalist Paul Kita on an article he was writing on how to prepare the perfect steak at home by using a MacGyver-like sous vide setup. If you pick up a copy of that issue, which is on newsstands now, youll see that Paul did a great job of distilling the essential details of how to select the perfect cut, age the meat for great tenderness and flavor, and then cook the steak with nothing more than a zip-closure bag, a pot of water, and an accurate digital thermometer.
One important detail that didnt make it into the article, however, is the cooking temperature that will yield your preferred degree of doneness. If you happen to like rib-eye steak cooked medium, then the bath temperature of 5860 °C / 136140 °F suggested in the article is right on. But if, like me, you prefer your steak done medium rare, a sous vide bath temperature of about 56 °C / 133 °F will give you that juicy pink doneness.
In Modernist Cuisine, we recognize that everyone is entitled to their own preferences for how they like their meat or seafood cooked. With this idea in mind, we developed dozens of best bets tables for cooking various cuts of meat and seafood. In each table, we offer suggested temperatures and cooking times that span the gamut from rare to well done.
You may have seen other tables with temperatures corresponding to different degrees of doneness. But notice that those conventional tables rarely include cooking times, which is a crucial component for food safety. Unfortunately, these older tables are usually based on misunderstandings about U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. In Modernist Cuisine, youll find an entire chapter devoted to all of the superstitions around food safety and government regulations. When it comes to cooking meat and seafood, commonly prescribed cooking temperatures almost always result in over-doneness!
It is often claimed, for example, that you must cook beef, veal, or lamb to an internal cooking temperature of 63 °C / 145 °F to prevent foodborne illness. This statement is totally false. The FDA requires NO specific internal temperature for steak. Put simply, even the FDA balks at the idea of telling millions of meat-eating Americans that they cannot have their steaks pink and juicy.
If you study the microbiology at work, as we have, you learn that there is very little need to prescribe a specific internal temperature because the inside of a healthy muscle is sterile. The immune system of the animal took care of eliminating any pathogens in the muscle. (If it hadnt, the animal wouldnt be healthy.) So unless the meat has been cut or punctured, the interior will remain sterile even after being butchered into cuts of meat.
Its the surface of the meat that you need to worry about, because handling it can spread bacteria from the outside of the cut and make you ill. (A word of caution: some cuts of meat are sold blade tenderized, which involves puncturing the meat with a large number of small blades. This process can carry bacteria inside the cut, contaminating the meat throughout.)
When you pan-roast or grill a steak, the searing hot temperatures quickly kill any bacteria that have taken up residence on the surface. So it is virtually impossible to cook an intact steak this way and not sterilize the exterior.
The situation is different, however, when cooking steak sous vide. If the temperature is low enough and the cooking time is too brief, some of the bacteria on the surface may survive and remain infectious. If youre worried about this possibility, you can eliminate the risk by blanching your vacuum-sealed meat in water hotter than 70 °C / 158 °F for a couple of seconds prior to cooking. Alternatively (and this is the approach we prefer), use a wickedly hot blowtorch to give it a quick sear, which also causes a delicious brown crust to form.
Modernist Cuisine to Enter the Cookbook Hall of Fame at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards
Modernist Cuisine will be inducted into the Gourmand Hall of Fame of Cookbooks during the Paris Cookbook Fair on March 3, 2011. The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, a unique international competition for the book sector that this year drew the participation of publishers in 154 countries, has named Modernist Cuisine the most important cookbook of the first ten years of the 21st century.
“If Leonardo da Vinci was alive today, he would write a cookbook called The Codex of Cooking,” said Edouard Cointreau, the President of the Gourmand Awards. “This cookbook exists at last. It is Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.”
The book was written by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, all respected scientists, prolific inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own rights. Bilet will receive the award in Paris on behalf of the team.
“Nathan, Chris, and I are thrilled that Modernist Cuisine is being hailed as such a significant culinary publication,” says Bilet. “We are very proud of the book and are honored to be recognized among the world’s leading culinary authors.” The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards adds only one book every year to its Hall of Fame, and Modernist Cuisine is just the tenth book to receive this high honor.
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is a six-volume, 2,438-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, and centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes. Modernist Cuisine is a work destined to reinvent cooking.
The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards were founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau to honor those who “cook with words,” and to help readers and retailers find the best food and wine books published worldwide.
For more information, visit https://modernistcuisine.com/contact.