Review: Ideas in Food

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Although this blog is mostly about our book, Modernist Cuisine, I’d like to direct some attention toward another book that has come out recently: Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot. Aki and Alex have been friends of mine since we met online six years ago. Virtually nobody knows them from their restaurant cooking, because their main professional gig was at an obscure lodge in Colorado. The inn had only eight rooms and catered primarily to wealthy elk hunters, who sat down to dinner expecting ranch-style comfort food and instead got a state-of-the-art tasting menu. I once made the pilgrimage out to meet them and eat their food, and it wasn’t an easy journey. The nearest airport had no commercial flights and was more than an hour’s drive from the lodge.

Despite the obscurity of that restaurant, Alex and Aki have gained fame because they also run a website, Ideas in Food, which chronicles what they have learned from their many creative experiments with cuisine. Over the years, the two have written about many culinary innovations of their own and have also reported and explained techniques discovered by others. Ideas in Food has become a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of cooking techniques.

Ultimately, the reputation that Alex and Aki gained from the site grew substantial enough to launch their careers as cooking instructors, consultants, magazine columnists and now cookbook authors. It’s a story that could have happened only in this Internet-enabled meritocracy that allows talented people to reach wide audiences regardless of their location or financial resources.

Ideas in Food, the book, brings their cuisine to a new and wider audience. It makes an interesting complement and contrast to Modernist Cuisine. It’s a vastly smaller book (319 pages, each of which is a bit less than half the size of a page in MC), and as a result is vastly more affordable ($25 list price, versus $625 for MC). It contains no photos or diagrams, which is another big difference, because MC is an intensely visual book.

Ideas in Food is published by a traditional publisher (Clarkson Potter), and it seems clear that a lot of effort was made to ensure that it conforms to the normal expectations for cookbooks. This is part of the reason that the book is small and inexpensive and has no photos but that is only the tip of the iceberg. I find this fascinating, because in Modernist Cuisine, we basically broke all of these rules, whereas Aki and Alex had to live with them. It is entirely appropriate that we each took the paths we did, because we had totally different goals. Indeed, that is the fundamental reason that we at MC decided to start our own publishing company.

The first 237 pages of Ideas in Food are organized into a section called “Ideas for Everybody.” The recipes give both volumetric measures (cups, tablespoons, etc.) and weights (in grams only) for the ingredients. A lot of effort has been made to simplify the recipes. They bravely (and in my view, correctly) position sous vide as a technique for everybody, and also include mention of the CVap oven (a brand of low-temperature steam oven, which we cover at length in MC).

The last 67 pages of the book are set aside for a different section titled “Ideas for Professionals,” and the discussion here focuses on hydrocolloids, both starches and gums. In this section, the volumetric measurements go away; only grams are given in the recipes. Many of the basic techniques of hydrating and using hydrocolloids are covered here, including a basic discussion of spherification.

The separation of “everybody” from “professionals” is, on the one hand, a reasonable compromise. I am sure that this structure let them get away with including some fascinating material, while at the same time, letting their publisher feel good about the accessibility of the book.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think it ridiculous to imply that xanthan gum, tapioca flour, and some other common ingredients need to be quarantined off in a section for “professionals.” Xanthan gum is available in most supermarkets. (In Seattle at least, every Safeway carries Bob’s Red Mill brand ingredients, and xanthan gum is one of them.) Xanthan gum is super easy to use you just stir it into a liquid to thicken it. Unlike some other hydrocolloids, xanthan gum’s performance doesn’t depend on the temperature of the liquid or its ion content. Just stir!

The only thing even vaguely technical about xanthan gum is that you use it in small quantities. If you want to thicken a sauce with xanthan gum, you typically add about 0.1% to 0.2% xanthan gum by weight. To put that in perspective, the typical amount of salt you put in a savory cuisine sauce is about 1% so you use about one-tenth to one-fifth as much xanthan gum as salt. That just means you need a decent scale. One liter of sauce needs 1-2 grams of xanthan gum. Now, why is that hard?

Please don’t think that I’m dumping on Aki and Alex Ideas in Food is great. I’m not even dumping on the people at Clarkson Potter. After all, they have tons of experience selling cookbooks (a lot more than I have!), and I am sure that they made the decisions that they think are best. They very likely will sell Ideas in Food to many times the number of people who buy MC.

Another way in which the book differs from MC is in the kind of recipes it contains. Here too, I see the influence of the editing and selection process. A joke I have with Alex is that of the most interesting techniques that he and Aki have pioneered on their website, more of them appear in my book than in his! That probably isn’t literally true, because Ideas in Food (the book) often mentions the techniques in passing. But Modernist Cuisine certainly covers them in more detail.

All in all, I heartily recommend Ideas in Food. It is a great introduction to many important ideas and techniques in cooking.

Food Religion

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It’s amazing to me how political the food world can be. I don’t mean political in the sense of political parties and elected officials. By “political,” I mean the process by which strong opinion is driven by deeply entrenched ideology. An even more apt term is “religion”—a set of core beliefs that are based on faith rather than reproducible evidence.

In discussing Modernist Cuisine with others, I often run into those who have ideological views about a certain style of cuisine. Here is a verbatim exchange of this sort I recently had:

Me: “Chefs following what I call the Modernist Revolution are breaking the rules and conventions of cooking. This lets them create food you couldn’t make any other way. It also helps expose some of our ingrained assumptions about food and challenges them.”

Person: “But isn’t that all about highly processed foods? Why can’t a chef just be content to expose the natural goodness of great ingredients? Why can’t food look like what it is rather than these elaborate preparations?”

Me: “Give me an example of a meal you’d prefer.”

Person: “You know, simple food, like a plate of pasta with a great sauce, a glass of red wine, some bread and cheese.”

Me: “You’ve just named some of the most processed and artificial foods in all of cooking!”

At this point, I burst out laughing. This is not very polite, especially if you are trying to win someone over to your cause, but unfortunately, I just couldn’t help it. With great sincerity and without a trace of irony, this very well-meaning person had said something that from a factual perspective was totally ridiculous. In fact, their statement perfectly illustrated the point about how food conventions become implicit. The person wasn’t even aware of the assumptions that pasta, bread, wine, and cheese are simple and natural.

After regaining my composure, I continued with an explanation. Pasta is about as different from raw wheat kernels as you can possibly get. You must select the right wheat and grind it to a fine flour. Then you mix it with exactly the right ratio of water, plus possibly egg or another binder, and then either extrude the dough through a pasta die at very high pressure, or roll it extremely thin.

If the person had said bulgur rather than pasta, they might have had a point—but pasta is an utterly artificial food in the sense that it is made via a complicated process that transforms the original raw material into something that looks completely different. Pasta was invented; it is an entirely human creation. It doesn’t grow out of the ground and it isn’t harvested in the wild. Don’t get me wrong—pasta is a wonderful and delicious food. But it is hardly an example of serving a natural product in its original form.

Bread is, if anything, even less natural than pasta. In addition to milling the flour and being careful to knead it to develop the gluten proteins into a cohesive gel, one must also introduce a microorganism that ferments the dough and produces carbon dioxide, which causes the dough to rise and bubble into a foam. Bread is not a “natural” product that grows on trees. (Although, amusingly, there is something called breadfruit that does in fact grow on a tree. Try some, and it will only reinforce the fact that it isn’t bread.)

Bread is one of the most artificial foods human cooks have ever invented. It is also one of the most successful foods. So while I totally endorse bread-making and eating, let’s dispense with the notion that it is an example of a simple, unprocessed food that resembles its ingredients.

The story of wine is much the same. Making wine involves an incredibly complicated process that involves a tremendous amount of science. If you don’t believe me, read up a bit on malolactic fermentation—or any of a dozen other steps in the complex microbial and chemical processing that winemakers obsess over. The result of all of that transformation is utterly different from raw grape juice—thank God!

Finally, cheese, like wine, is the result of tremendously involved processes that generate myriad products that are nothing like the original milk—and that aren’t even much like each other, for that matter.

Historically speaking, the initial innovations that drove these foods happened many years ago. Pasta, interestingly, was the last of these to be developed. The ancient Romans had bread, cheese (of a sort) and wine, but no pasta. The most pasta-like foods in Roman larders were panfried fritters or pancakes made with a starch or bean batter. The panisse, a dish made in Provence from a panfried chickpea batter, is probably a surviving remnant of Roman protopastas.

True pasta was introduced to Italy from the East, most likely by Arabs who brought it first to Sicily, long after the Roman civilization was gone. Medieval Italian cooking included no pasta. In that era, Italian cuisine was virtually indistinguishable from cooking in England, France, or Germany. The earliest recipe for lasagna comes, ironically, from a British cookbook. The origin of pasta may well be China, but that is still a bit murky—and in any case, besides the point of this post.

I have no quarrel with someone who says that they like eating pasta with red wine, bread, and cheese. Good for them! I think it’s arrogant for anyone to tell people what they “should” prefer to eat. Preferences and taste are, by their nature, very personal. Plus, it so happens that I like all of those foods myself.

When one discusses how food is prepared, however, it seems reasonable to insist that English words mean more or less what the dictionary says. In the conversation I quoted above, what the person I was talking to really meant to say is that, in their personal food religion, “natural”, “simple,” and “unprocessed” are all synonyms for “good.” So a familiar food that they like must, by that equation, be “natural,” “simple,” and “unprocessed.” Never mind that the actual processes for making these foods makes them more unlike their raw materials than the wildest creations prepared by a Modernist chef. Conversely, in the same food religion, “artificial” and “processed” are bad words—things you say about food you don’t like or approve of.

This particular food religion is quite widespread. People who adhere to it have a deep-rooted bias against anything new, because the ill-meaning words “artificial” or “processed” can be easily applied to any new technique. So they tend to attack Modernist cuisine because it offends the sensibilities of their food religion. Yet the same people love food that, under any unbiased definition, is completely artificial and processed. Their religion isn’t based on the real meaning of the words “artificial” or “processed” (or their opposites). Those words are used as code or slogans rather than for their literal definitions.

When people dislike artificial or processed food, what they usually mean to say is that they don’t like cheap, low-quality, industrially produced packaged foods—the kind of crap that fills the aisles of most American supermarkets. The fact that many of these foods don’t taste very good (e.g. cheap artificial vanilla), are stale by the time they are bought (because much of the processing is done to increase shelf life), or are filled with lots of salt and sugar (because most people prefer them that way!)—those are the real complaints.

These complaints have merit. There is really something bad about that sort of food. The trouble is that at some point, people started turning complaints about industrially produced crap into broader, abstract principles that any “processing” at all by human means is the evil part.

Modernist food isn’t the same thing as the ready-to-eat stuff that clutters supermarkets. Skilled chefs are not factories. They are guided by acutely sensitive palates and highly trained aesthetics, not the mission of shaving pennies off the cost of each package. The process by which Modernist chefs create their refined and sophisticated dishes must, by its nature, transform the food from its original form into something new. Once upon a time, those culinary innovations included pasta, bread, wine, and cheese. These days, it means all sorts of novel dishes and approaches. The fact that it takes great skill, technique, and inventiveness to come up with new techniques isn’t a reason to hate culinary innovation.

The Leidenfrost Effect

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In a previous post, we asked what high-speed kitchen event you would like to see slowed down to human eye speed. Among your responses was a request to see droplets of water sizzling in a pan. Thus, the resulting video reveals just how much is going on during that split second when a drop of water contacts a hot surface.

Most of you have sprinkled water on a very hot griddle or pan and watched in amazement as the water broke into small spheres, skating and gliding around on the surface like tiny ball bearings or droplets of mercury. Instead of flattening out and instantly boiling away as one might expect, the water droplets appear to stay round and behave as though they are somehow hovering over the surface. As it turns out, this is indeed almost exactly what happens.

When a drop of liquid first contacts a surface that is much hotter than water’s boiling point, an extremely thin layer of vapor forms under the drop. This layer of vapor suspends the drop slightly above the surface, creating the hovering effect. The vapor also acts as an insulation layer between the surface and liquid, keeping the liquid from rapidly boiling away. This fascinating occurrence is known as the Leidenfrost effect, named for the 18th-century German doctor and theologian who first described the phenomenon.

Most of you have seen the Leidenfrost effect in real time at home, but the Modernist Cuisine team wanted to take you much closer to the action by slowing things down a bit. For this video compilation, we used a Nikon 200 mm 1:1 lens with a 2x teleconverter. The clip was shot at 3,000 frames per second. Playing it back at the conventional speed of 30 fps has the effect of slowing down the video by a factor of 100. We used liquid nitrogen (which has a boiling point of around -321°F)poured onto a room temperature surface, this creates the same effect as water on a very hot pan. The result is stunning. Please enjoy and keep those suggestions coming!

The Leidenfrost effect slowed down by 100x.

Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team: Trials and Variables

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In Parts One and Two of this three-part series, I described the processes by which we developed the recipes and captured the images for Modernist Cuisine. In this final post, I will explain how one of the most tedious aspects of our job turned out to be among the most useful.

With most cookbooks, a chef must usually spend a lot of time deciphering a particular recipe in order to break down its components to the essentials. Modernist Cuisine is different in that we furnish the chef with parametric recipes and tables that provide the crucial components of a dish, and then we offer some suggested variables.

For example, a typical sausage recipe will contain meat, fat, binders, and spices calculated to specific measurements. In contrast, Modernist Cuisine provides a table that shows a ratio of meat to fat to binder, plus any other components, for different styles of sausage. Providing a ratio allows the chef to introduce his or her own preferences and tastes to create their own distinctive dish without having to reverse-engineer it from a static recipe.

These tables require a large, sometimes exhaustive, amount of data. For example, just to fill out the additives portion of the sausage table, we set up and tasted 56 variations of additives, binders, and emulsifiers, all in at least three different concentrations! For the 14 temperature grades in our egg chart, we tested the entire range of 55-80 °C / 130-176 °F, degree by individual degree. The sheer number of variables became mind-numbing at times, but the utility of this raw data is invaluable.

The hot fruit and vegetable gels table.

This series has encompassed in a nutshell what the kitchen team behind Modernist Cuisine does all day. While our work can be wearing, we think it is definitely worth the results, and we hope that you do as well. We look forward to the forthcoming release of the book and to finding new ways of pushing the boundaries of cuisine. As we discover more new and exciting things, we will post the results right here, so check back again soon.

Review: Keys to Good Cooking

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Harold McGee is one of the pioneers of the idea that science informs us about how cooking works. His master work is On Food and Cooking, first published in 1984 and then reissued in revised form in 2004. Food writer Michael Ruhlman has written that “On Food and Cooking is, in my opinion, hands down the most important book about food and cooking ever written.” It’s hard to disagree because the idea that science has utility for a chef is a theme that has driven a lot of modern cuisine.

Harold McGee

That said, On Food and Cooking isn’t a cookbook; it doesn’t cover tips or techniques. The book focuses instead on the science (primarily chemistry) that drives many aspects of cooking. Although the book contains implicit lessons for the chef, and for anyone who has curiosity about how things work, it doesn’t offer much in the way of explicit guidelines.

McGee remedies this omission with his most recent book, Keys to Good Cooking, published in October 2010 by Penguin Press. This new work focuses exclusively on the tips and tricks that can transform an ordinary dish into something extraordinary.

Keys to Good Cooking

Keys to Good Cooking

Previous books on culinary tricks have tended to suffer from what I call the “always or never” phenomenon. Chef A’s book says “in order to have a good result, you must always do X.” Meanwhile, Chef B is equally insistent that “one should never do X”, sometimes even as it discusses the very same dish. Who should you believe?

In other cases, the chefs agree on the proper technique and proclaim that “you should always do X, because of reason Y”, yet the reason given is easily seen to be false. Does that mean that you should or shouldn’t do technique X? Again, it is unclear what to believe.

The great thing about Keys to Good Cooking is that McGee is exactly the sort of person that you’d want to sort out these sticky issues and get to the real truth. He does this for trick after trick, creating an engaging work that will be useful to any serious home cook or chef.

Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team: Food Styling

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In Part One of this three-part series, I described how we developed the recipes for Modernist Cuisine. In this second installment, I will shed some light on how we captured the high-quality, amazingly vivid photographs found in the book.

Most of the credit for the imagery in Modernist Cuisine goes to Ryan Matthew Smith, our photographer, who seems to make every frame explode with detail and vibrancy. But for every photo that causes a reader to say, “That’s crazy; how did they do that?” a member of the kitchen team likely did something risky to get that shot.

One photo in particular has attained near-legendary status due to its level of danger: the Pad Thai cutaway. The picture is already impressive because of the use of the cutaway technique, a method frequently employed throughout the book. (We have the luxury of working near a machine shop, so anything that a chef might want cut in half, such as an appliance, can usually be sliced within a day or two.)

The famous Pad Thai Cutaway photo features a cutaway wok with all of the ingredients for pad thai suspended above it in mid-flight, including the noodles. To capture the realism of noodles being wok-fried, Max and Ryan had to toss all of the components, in smoking-hot oil, as high as possible into the air. This is a feat that turns out to be akin to juggling napalm.

The Pad Thai Cutaway features a halved wok containing sizzling hot oil, noodles, and the dish’s other components.

While no chefs were harmed (much) in capturing images for the book, it is important to note that for every remarkable shot that graces the pages of Modernist Cuisine, someone on the kitchen team spent hours making it work, often by doing something many people would consider crazy.

Check back again soon for the final installment of this three-part series, in which I’ll explain how the kitchen team developed the parametric recipes and tables found in Modernist Cuisine.

A Modernist Christmas Feast

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Modernist Cuisine culinary team!

Allow me introduce myself. My name is Maxime Bilet, and I am the head chef of research and development in the culinary lab and one of the co-authors of Modernist Cuisine. It has been a very intense three-year journey of creative endeavors and accomplishments here in the kitchen. The entire Modernist Cuisine team has shared an amazing learning experience that we are excited to soon share with you. Every dish, recipe, and photo in our book tells a story of our inspirations, the seasonal bounty of the Pacific Northwest, the very unique processes that we learned to refine, and most importantly, a culinary collaboration that we hope will inspire other chefs and bring clarity and awareness to the great insights of Modernist cooking.

For me, Christmas is both a period of sharing and introspection. It can be an observance of gratitude, a celebration of life, and also a time to share with those whom we care deeply for. As chefs, our greatest gift is to create a feast of abundance. Each year, the flavors or the inspiration may change, but the intention is always to express our love for family and friends by feeding them as best we know how.

As a Frenchman, the Yuletide meal for me means goose, foie gras, chestnuts, farce, gratin d’Auphinois, roasted pears, and Bûche de Noël. Since I grew up in New York, most of my holiday meals have been a wonderful combination of American tradition and French flair. This has meant a little herb butter with the turkey, some mustard jus with the baked ham, a gratin d’Auphinois made with yams (c’est sacrilège!), or even having a praline-flavored Bûche de Noël share the table with apple pie and pecan ice cream. I have come to love baked sweet potatoes, sage-scented bread stuffing, and cranberry jelly from a can as much as any other Christmas dish.

A few weeks ago, Anjana, Grant, Johnny, Sam, and I got together and discussed what might be a way to share our Modernist interpretation of a Christmas feast, something that would exemplify our experiences together working on the book, as well as our varied cultural and life experiences. One iconic Christmas image that we all shared was the honey-glazed ham with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. Thus, we decided that we would provide our Modernist take on this cherished dish.

For our version of honey-glazed ham, we cure and slowly cook a pork shank. Then we serve it with bright cherry gelée orbs and shaved fresh pineapple. Johnny’s simple glaze of fresh pineapple juice and honey not only brings balance to the rich and salty pork, but also unifies it with the other components.

As for the rest of the feast, we decided that a cabbage component, a sweet potato dish, and a pumpkin pie would round out our version of a Modernist Christmas meal. So, first, nothing is better than deep-fried Brussels sprouts, period. (Thank you, David Chang!) You can make anyone who hates vegetables eat Brussels sprouts simply by deep-frying them until deeply golden. They will have an incredibly complex and nutty flavor.

Our sweet potato dish consists of confit in butter cooked sous vide and topped with a delicate version of “whipped marshmallow” made by aerating a fried sage infusion. Finally, Grant worked on an elegant rendition of pumpkin pie that turned out beautifully. I’d like to think that it turned out as “Frenchie” as pumpkin pie has ever been, but since Grant is a native of the Pacific Northwest, I’ll have to settle for Modernist.

We really hope you enjoy these recipes. Happy holidays to you and yours.

Maxime.

Deep-Fried Brussels Sprouts

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Brussels sprouts 500 g 100% Peel away outer green leaves off from Brussels sprouts and reserve.
Frying oil as needed Cut sprouts in half lengthwise and deep-fry in 190 °C / 375 °F oil for approximately 3-4 min, until deeply caramelized.Drain on paper towels.
Salt to taste Season fried Brussels sprouts to taste and reserve warm.
Brussels sprout leaves, from above as needed Blanch reserved outer leaves in boiling water for 2 min and then shock in ice water.
Unsalted butter 50 g 10% Melt butter in pot and warm blanched leaves.
Salt to taste Season leaves.
Lime juice to taste Garnish the fried sprouts with the sautéed leaves.Season with lime juice.

Christmas Ham Hock with Pineapple and Cherries

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Ham hock, fresh, with skin on and bone in 900 g 100% Set hock aside, combine all other components for liquid cure and dissolve.
Water 2 kg 222% Submerge hock with cure and vacuum seal.
Salt 200 g 22% Cure hock refrigerated for 3 d.
Brown sugar 80 g 8.8% Remove hock from brine, rinse and vacuum seal.
Sodium nitrate, optional (for color) 20 g 2.2% Refrigerate vacuum-sealed hock for 24 h.
Black peppercorns 10 g 1.1% Cook sous vide at 65 °C / 149 °F for 48 h.
Coriander seeds 10 g 1.1% Remove hock from bag and clean away any excess gelatin.
Cloves 4 g 0.4% Pat dry and reserve.
Pineapple juice, fresh 320 g 35% Combine juice and honey in pot.
Clear liquid honey 80 g 8.8% Reduce over medium high heat until syrupy, about 10 min.Reserve warm.

Deep-fry cooked pork shank in 200 °C / 390 °F oil until golden brown and slightly puffed, about 3 min.

Brush with glaze and slice to desired thickness off of bone.
Fresh pineapple, peeled 50 g 5.5% Slice 3 mm / ? in thick and punch out coins with 4 cm / 1½ in diameter ring mold.
Black cherry juice (from bottled) 100 g 100% Season cherry juice as desired. It will be a seasoning for the pork, so be generous about acidity and sweetness.
Fructose to taste Blend in calcium gluconolactate and xanthan gum to fully disperse.
Malic acid to taste
Calcium gluconolactate 1 g 1% Vacuum seal and refrigerate for 1 h to hydrate.
Xanthan gum 0.15 g 0.15% Pour into silicone hemisphere molds and freeze.
Water 500 g 100% Combine and heat to dissolve to make setting bath for cherry spheres.
Sodium alginate 2.5 g 0.5% Heat bath to a simmer and remove from heat.Drop frozen cherry spheres into hot sodium alginate bath.

Allow spheres to set in bath until the center of each sphere is no longer frozen, about 3 min.

Rinse spheres in hot water three times and reserve in fresh warm water until ready to serve.

Arrange thinly sliced pork with cherry spheres and pineapple. Serve with Brussels sprouts and sweet potato confit on side.

Garnet Yam Fondant with Sage Foam

Yields: 4-8 portions

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Red garnet yam, peeled 175 g 175% Peel and use ring cutter to cut out tubes measuring 4 cm / 1½ in. in diameter and 6 cm / 2¼ in thick.
Water 125 g 125% Combine all and vacuum seal.
Unsalted clarified butter 27.5 g 27.5% Cook sous vide at 90 °C / 194 °F for 1 h 20 min.
Salt 4.5 g 4.5% Drain and remove from bag. Cool or serve immediately.
For yam chip:
Red garnet yam as needed Slice into 1 mm / 1?16 in sheets on mandolin.
Punch out disks that are 3 cm / 1¼ in. in diameter and reserve.
Isomalt 100 g 100% Combine all and bring to a boil to make syrup.
Sugar 100 g 100% Blanch yam disks in the syrup for about 15 s.
Water 100 g 100% Lay on nonstick tray and dehydrate at 62 °C / 145 °F for 12 h.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 40 g 40%
For sage foam:
Frying oil as needed Fry sage in 190 °C / 375 °F oil for about 10 s.
Sage 40 g 40% Drain on absorbent paper towels.
Water 300 g 300% Combine with fried sage leaves and vacuum seal.Cook sous vide at 90 °C / 194 °F for 30 min.

Strain and cool sage infusion.
Sugar 100 g 100% Add and dissolve into sage infusion.
Versawhip 3 g 3% Whip with electric whisk to form stiff peaks.
Xanthan gum 0.45 g 0.45% Spoon over sweet potatoes and garnish with yam chips.

Pumpkin Pie: Butternut Squash Custard

Yields: 600 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Butternut squash, peeled and cubed 550 g 110% Place all ingredients in pressure cooker and cook at full pressure (15 psi) for 20 min.
Unsalted butter 110 g 22% Remove lid and reduce until the bottom of the pan is barely wet. Remove spices.
Water 100 g 20% Puree squash mixture, and pass through fine sieve.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 50 g 10% Measure 500 g of puree for recipe.
Salt 2 g 0.40%
Cinnamon stick 0.8 g 0.16%
Clove 0.25 g 0.05%
Mace 0.25 g 0.05%
Squash puree, from above 500 g 100% Place all in Thermomix and blend for 1 min.
Heavy cream 90 g 18% Turn on heat and continue blending until 90 °C / 194 °F is reached.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 40 g 8% Cast onto pastry table with bars at a thickness of 1.5 cm / ½ in until firmly set.
Salt 2 g 0.4% Refrigerate until use.
Toasted walnut oil 10 g 2%
Iota carregeenan 1.48 g 0.3%
Kappa carregeenan 1.48 g 0.3%

Pumpkin Pie: Ginger Cream

Yields: 250 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Heavy cream 200 g 100% Whip all to medium peaks.
Sugar 40 g 20% Pipe 1 cm / ? in tip into cylinders with sides touching to make sheets.
Ginger juice, raw and fresh 15 g 7.5% Freeze completely.
Toasted walnut oil 7 g 3.5%
Xanthan gum 0.25 g 0.125%

Pumpkin Pie: Caramelized Crust

Yields: 600 g

Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Pastry flour 350 g 140% Blend in food processor and reserve.
Unsalted butter 250 g 100%
Ice water 105 g 42% Dissolve sugar and salt into water.
Sugar 15 g 6% In large bowl, pour flour and butter mixture over the liquid mixture.
Salt 10 g 4% Mix until just incorporated.Place on silicone mat and press into layer about 2.5 cm / 1 in thick.

Place in refrigerator and let rest for 1 h.

Remove and roll out 3 mm / ? in thick.

Rest in refrigerator for 1 h.

Bake in 160 °C / 320 °F oven until golden, about 18 min.
Maple syrup (Grade B) 100 g 40% Heat in pot until just melted and whisk to emulsify.
Unsalted butter 50 g 20% Brush all over the pastry crust and bake in 190 °C / 375 °F oven until dry, about 10 min.
Salt 2 g 0.8%
Pumpkin Pie: AssemblyYields: 4 portions
Ingredient Quantity Scaling Procedure
Butternut squash custard square 4 squares Cut crusts to desired dimensions.Cut custard to fit on top of crust, with crust evenly exposed on edges.

Cut frozen ginger cream into the same dimensions as the custard. Be sure to place cream on top while still frozen.

Transfer to serving dish.

Garnish with orange zest, grated walnut, and walnut oil.
Ginger cream 4 pieces
Caramelized crust 4 crusts
Orange zest, finely grated 4 shavings
Toasted walnuts, finely grated 16 walnuts
Walnut oil as needed

Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team

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During promotional events for Modernist Cuisine, we are often asked what exactly we do all day. While one might imagine that our days are filled with whimsical experimentation coupled with high-tech gadgets and mysterious powders, the reality of this project is that a book needs to be written — and that book needs data.

So, the short answer to what we do all day is that we provide data for the 1,000+ recipes and step-by-step procedures contained in the book. This information includes the numbers, percentages, ratios, and recipes for the plethora of formulations and tables that supplement the body text of Modernist Cuisine.

In this three-part article series, I will describe the process by which we developed our recipes, staged the photographs, and tirelessly captured the parametric data for the book. This first installment will discuss our recipe development process.

Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team: Recipe Development

Over the last three years, we have developed hundreds of recipes in our test kitchen. Most of these recipes have been either adapted from or inspired by various chefs and styles of food. But beyond inspiration, our goal with these recipes has always been to put our own unique Modernist take on them. Whether we improved upon the methods used or completely restructured the dish, we always sought to provide something novel in our approach to every recipe.

The recipe selection and development process evolved over time. Initially, Chris and Max worked together closely with Nathan to assemble an initial plan of recipes that dovetail with the body text to illustrate all the various cooking techniques and ingredients discussed in the book, and that also fit together to form highly appealing plated dishes.

That recipe plan was refined and elaborated extensively as the research kitchen staff grew. In 2009, the recipe development and testing process evolved into its final form. That process usually begins when Maxime, after hours of research and consultation with Nathan, presents the rest of the kitchen team with a dish that inspired us. We are then collectively given the assignment of finding a way to redefine and refine the technique(s) in which the inspired dish is approached.

For example, several months ago, we were asked to make a Modernist ham and cheese omelet. We already knew there were certain components that we wanted treated a certain way. For instance, the omelet’s filling would consist of finely diced ham and cheese, but it would also contain a siphoned scrambled egg with a silky smooth consistency.

After many trials, we finally found the perfect temperature and time for cooking the eggs sous vide, in such a way that the finished eggs were still fluid, but not sticky. From there, we moved on to the omelet’s skin, which we found to be ideally tender when baked in a steam oven at around 82 °C / 179 °F.

In short, we began with a vision of the model traditional omelet (specifically, a fluffy un-caramelized skin with a moist filling) and methodically worked our way towards its Modernist extreme, creating, in our opinion, a remarkable result.

The Modernist kitchen team whiteboard.

Stay tuned for the second installment of this three-part series, in which I will describe our preparations for capturing the images used in the book.

Sneak Peek – First Image of the Modernist Cuisine Set

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As described in a recent post, quite a lot of effort went into making Modernist Cuisine a long-lasting and high-quality experience for the reader. From the paper stock and type of binding, to the inks and printing method, the team researched and scrutinized every detail before making final selections for the project.

We are excited to share with you the first image of Modernist Cuisine, which will also include a kitchen manual (not shown).

First image of the Modernist Cuisine set.

Modernist Cuisine’s Printing Process & Quality

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A number of people have asked about the kitchen manual, printing quality, paper, and binding of the forthcoming Modernist Cuisine. From the very beginning of this project, the book was to be of the highest possible quality. From the depth of the information and accuracy of the data, to the resolution of the images and the durability of the paper, the Modernist Cuisine team went to great lengths to ensure that the finished product would be of the highest quality. Here are a few examples of what went into the process.


Nathan describes the printing process at IFBC 2010.

The Kitchen Manual

For starters, we realized that it would not be prudent to actually take the volumes into the kitchen with you. The volumes are incapable of withstanding splashes of flour, olive oil, liquid nitrogen, or water, all of which would ruin the stunning photography. The book, however, felt incomplete without something durable enough for the kitchen. Our solution is a highly practical, spiral-bound Kitchen Manual. It is printed on waterproof, tear-resistant synthetic paper. The Manual features easy-to-use, condensed versions of many of the parametric, example, and plated-dish recipes contained in the five volumes.

The Printing Quality

We are fortunate to partner with iocolor (Seattle, WA) and the Shenzhen Artron Color Printing Company (Shenzhen, China), which are both known for their high standards of quality control, innovative printing procedures, and track record for producing high-quality printing for museums, artists, and photographers. Since the photography is such a key aspect of Modernist Cuisine, it was understood right from the beginning that only the highest resolution and widest gamut available for reproducing the spectacular photographs would be acceptable.

Stochastic screening is a difficult printing process that reproduces images in much the way that traditional film grain does. In standard book printing, a halftone dot is used to simulate changes in tone. (A printing press can only print or not.) This trompe l’oeil uses dots that range from small in the highlights to large in the shadows; they are lined up in rows with 175-200 dots per linear inch. This technique was first attributed to William Fox Talbot in the 1850s and by the turn of the century, it was in regular use. Because the surface areas of individual dots control the spread of the ink, the process tends to vary around the middle tones, causing issues with color balance.

For Modernist Cuisine, it was decided that stochastic screening would be used, a process that has become feasible on a commercial scale with the advent of computer-to-plate (CTP) systems that image printing plates directly, skipping the step of creating film. In stochastic screening, all of the dots are the same size, and the frequency of the dots creates the variation in tone. It was determined that a dot of 15 microns in size would be used to maximize the subtle detail in Modernist Cuisine. This FM (Frequency Modulated) approach is more stable on press, but even so, every Komori LS40 press utilizes scanning spectrophotometers to ensure consistent quality across the entire book.

The efforts at creating superfine details are also supplanted by the use of ChromaCentric inks. This new ink set has much less color contamination in the cyan, magenta, and yellow scheme, resulting in purer hues with which to work. This trait is especially noticeable in the ink’s ability to convert the full range of color from the RGB files captured by the digital camera used in the photography. The results are truer, more lifelike colors that traditional printing inks would leave dull and out of gamut.

The Paper

Once the printing process was determined, the next task was finding the absolute best paper available for Modernist Cuisine. It’s one thing to look at paper samples in a book and pick one that you think will work, but for Modernist Cuisine, we submitted all of the likely candidates to actual printing tests. In order to achieve exact color reproduction on the tested papers, we first churned out test forms on the presses with each of the candidate papers to determine optimum printing conditions and gathered colormetric data on each contender.

Once the test sheets were analyzed, profiles for RGB to CMYK conversion were created, plate setter curves were set, and ink tolerances were entered into the on-press spectrophotometers. It was now time to convert the digital camera files for the printing conditions of each paper and then print the test papers with a sampling of pages to be used in the book. Papers were judged by how well the ink sat on the coated surface, the amount of show-through between neighboring pages, overall look and feel, and finally, resistance to scuffing. The matte-coated paper actually has a surface that is quite rough, so it was determined early on that a protective varnish would be applied, not just to make the images “pop,” but to ensure that the massive nature of these tomes would be able to withstand use for many years.

Once the 128 gsm weight of paper was chosen — it was a tough choice because anything heavier would have resulted in books that would require an assistant to read — OJI paper from Japan was chosen over all of the samples, and our testing proceeded to figuring out the type of varnish that would be applied to the paper. We produced samples that ranged from dead matte to super glossy; a mix of varnishes was chosen to showcase the fantastic images.

The Binding

First-stage dummy books on the chosen paper were created, while we knew full well that the later additions of ink and varnish would add weight and thickness (about 8-10 mm) to the volumes. Producing the dummy books also allowed us to determine what kind of reinforcement would be needed for the special round-backed binding used on these volumes.

Second-stage bindings are now being created from actual printed and vanished sheets to obtain accurate measurements for the finished products before actual production continues. Even with the special round-backed binding, we recommend that you remove a book from the case by grabbing the middle of its spine, and not pulling on the top of the spine.

The result of this fanatical focus on quality will be a beautifully detailed set of volumes that should remain stunning for a lifetime or more.