We are going back to print! That’s exciting in and of itself, but it also means we get to choose four new 8″ x 10″ prints to accompany the volumes in boxed copies of Modernist Cuisine.
Help us select by choosing your four favorite photos from among those below. Polls will close Thursday, September 15, 2011. After all, we have deadlines to meet!
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Five months and eight days after its release, Modernist Cuisine is fully in stock at Barnes & Noble and Amazon (as well as a growing number of independent bookstores and libraries–find one near you with our store locator).
Back orders, the bulk of the reason booksellers have been out of stock so long, have finally been fulfilled. We are still sending more and more copies from the printer in China each week, and we anticipate that we will continue seeing stores fully stocked through the holidays.
Both Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com are currently selling the book for less than $500. For the last several weeks, both retailers had listed it at the full price of $625. Many independent bookstores that have the book in stock are selling in the $525 price range.
If you have registered with modernistcuisine.com and opted to receive recipes by email, this is already old news to you, but for everyone else, we’d like to announce the latest addition to our recipe library. We’ve taken an in-depth look at the recipe for Sous Vide Rare Beef Jus, including tips, plating ideas, and personal accounts from the Kitchen Team. There’s even a video with a centrifugal twist on the recipe from the book. Give it a try, and let us know how it turns out by posting in the Cooks Forum.
Got a question about vacuum sealers? Wondering about the best ways to brine? Have an insider tip on the best place to find citric acid? Found a way to improve on the Texas Barbecue Sauce recipe in Modernist Cuisine?
If you’d like to get answers to your questions about cooking with Modernist Cusine–or to share what you’ve learned and cooked from the book–please join us in the new Cooks Forum, which opens today on modernistcuisine.com.
The forum can be freely browsed and searched by all. To post a question or comment on the forum, you must first register with modernistcuisine.com (no purchase necessary!) and log in.
The culinary team here will be answering your trickiest questions during the week, and will be giving special attention to queries from members who are confirmed MC owners. And you can also draw, 24/7, on the expertise of your fellow readers. Hundreds have signed up in just the past couple weeks, so our community is growing fast.
Modernist Cuisine is one of those extraordinary books that is hard to truly appreciate until you have actually laid your hands on a copy. Until recently, that’s been pretty hard to do.
Now we invite you to use our new MC Locator feature to find a physical copy of the book at a bookstore or library near you. Just type in your zip code: a set of the six-volume work is probably closer than you’d think.
If you don’t see a location near you, check back in a month or two. More stores and libraries are receiving their copies every week, and we’ll be updating the list periodically.
The first public exhibition of photography from Modernist Cuisine is open through 14 August in Hong Kong. Sixteen images from the book, printed in large format, are on display on Chater Bridge and East Bridge, Central. For a map and contact information, see the write-up at CNN Go.
Accompanying the exhibition is the “Taste Matters New Recipe” Competition. Create your own recipe featuring one of the ingredients on display in the exhibition. Chefs from several of Central’s restaurants will select winning dishes in each of the 10 ingredient categories. The chefs will then reinterpret the winning recipes and serve the resulting dishes in their restaurants for one month. All winners will also receive HK$10,000 worth of gift certificates. For more details on how to participate, see the competition website. 
We’ve been thrilled by the reception that Modernist Cuisine has received–not just in sales, which are a lot faster than we initially expected, but also in the rapid growth of a community of cooks who have joined us here on ModernistCuisine.com, on the MC-related threads at eGullet, on Facebook and Twitter, and elsewhere online. We’ve received lots of terrific suggestions from readers about ways in which we could enhance the website and better support them as they explore the recipes and techniques suggested by Modernist Cuisine and other Modernist cookbooks. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of a bunch of these new features, with even more to come soon.
Check out the freshly minted Cooking with MC area of the website for:
All of these new features are free. But to get the most out of them, and to gain access to the Cooks Forum and Reader Gallery that we’re currently constructing and expect to open soon, please register as a member of the site. Registered members can choose to receive new recipes by email before they appear on the website. If you have a copy of the book, be sure when you create your account to provide information about where and when you purchased your book, and then answer a validation question to gain Confirmed Owner status, which qualifies you for exclusive offers.
We hope you enjoy all of these new features, and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Modernist Cuisine author Nathan Myhrvold and his wife, longtime benefactors of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, donated a copy of the book, signed by all three of its authors, for the zoo’s annual fund-raising auction. To sweeten the deal, they also threw in a private guided tour of the culinary research laboratory in which the book was developed. The winner may bring up to five guests on the tour.
After active bidding, Drew Carey, the renowned actor, comedian, and host of “The Price Is Right,” won the prize with a bid of $7,000, all of which goes to support the zoo and its programs. The whole team at The Cooking Lab is looking forward to Mr. Carey’s visit.
Last week, several readers who had back-ordered Modernist Cuisine sent us word that they had finally received their copies from the second printing. Most of these readers placed their orders with Amazon back in March.
So, where is your copy, you ask? Depending on when you ordered, it is probably on a truck or boat headed your way, and if not, it will be among the 1,000+ copies sailing weekly from our printer in China. We expect that everyone who has ordered to date will receive their copies by mid-August. And we anticipate that by the first week of September, retailers will be fully stocked and able to process new orders. Perhaps a few will even put copies out on shelves!
Last month, Modernist Cuisine author Nathan Myhrvold gave an hour-long presentation and Q&A session at Microsoft Research in Bellevue, Wash. In the presentation, he gives a quick tour of the massive book, talks a bit about how it was made, and focuses on some of the more technical aspects of this kind of cooking. To see the talk, use the embedded Silverlight player below, or visit the page at the Microsoft Research site for a rich-interface version.