Behind The Scenes Archives - Modernist Cuisine

Introducing the Modernist Cuisine Gallery

Posted on March 1, 2017 at 7:00 am.

Written by Caren

We’ve always done things a little differently at Modernist Cuisine. We self-publish so that we can make books in our own, and undeniably huge, way. It’s an experiment that has allowed readers to see food as we do—as something that is endlessly fascinating, powerful, and beautiful.

Our first book, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science, broke many of the rules for cookbooks, including how they should be illustrated. Early on, we decided not to photograph food in traditional ways, opting instead to cut kitchen equipment in half, use high-speed video and laboratory microscopes, develop innovative digital tools, and turn ordinary ingredients like grapefruit or kernels of wheat into stunning monoliths with macro lenses. Four books later, the stunning, distinctive images we create are still an integral part of how we share our research and love of food.

The way in which critics and readers have embraced our photography is beyond what we could have imagined. We included small prints in Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home, and were amazed to discover that people were framing them and asking for large custom sizes. The acclaim inspired us to embark on another big experiment—the Photography of Modernist Cuisine: The Exhibition. We dramatically scaled up the size of our images and made larger prints; some are as big as a full-sized bed. In museum after museum, visitors have asked where they can purchase prints just like the ones hanging on the wall.

Unfortunately, for some time, we haven’t been able to give the answer fans were looking for. We know there are many people who, like us, love to see and take pictures of food. For some reason, however, photos of food have never really been considered fine art photography. Photographs of nature, fashion, celebrities, babies, cars, architecture, animals, and ordinary objects like locks and keys—even subjects that make some squeamishly uncomfortable—are considered fine art. Why not food?

The Modernist Cuisine Gallery, our next experiment, will challenge this issue head on. We are standing up for food as a subject matter because we believe it can be both beautiful and intriguing, and deserves a place on walls alongside other works of art.

We could have chosen to exhibit our pictures in established art galleries, but we decided to take the same approach we have always taken—doing things in our own way. Building our own retail gallery affords us the ability to lavish care on every aspect of discovering, owning, and displaying one of our pictures. When the Modernist Cuisine Gallery opens at The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in May 2017, it will be the first gallery in the world to focus only on food photography by a single artist – a mission that is unabashedly bold.

The gallery will include limited edition prints of photos by Nathan produced using the highest quality and most durable print methods available. The gallery’s opening collection will debut stunning new photos, plus a few iconic images that you may recognize from our books. The prints will be available in several frame, media, and size options—including large-scale options for big spaces – available for shipping worldwide.

Las Vegas has become an incredible food destination that draws people from around the globe. We look forward to sharing our photography with new audiences and giving people the opportunity to see the beauty of food on their own walls.

For now, we’re excited to reveal just a few of the images that will be available for the first time. This, however, is just the beginning. We will have more updates, information, and prints to share as the gallery prepares to open its doors.

We look forward to seeing you in Vegas!

We’re Still Baking: Modernist Bread Updates

Posted on February 24, 2017 at 8:30 am.

Written by Caren

Modernist Bread has come a long way since our last update in September. In the months since then, we’ve added another 200 pages—the total is now around 2,500 pages—in the process of finalizing chapters. We’re excited to share all that we’ve discovered while working on this book. You can hear a few insights in the podcast, The Eater Upsell, where Nathan discusses the book. Last week we reached another major milestone: finishing the covers of each volume. And we’re happy to reveal them today.

The Covers

Volume 1: History and Fundamentals

As in Modernist Cuisine, the first volume covers bread history, health, and the fundamentals of science for bakers: microbiology, heat and energy, and the physics of water.

Volume 2: INGREDIENTS

The chapters herein provide a detailed look at the ingredients of bread—from the grains that become flour, to yeast and other ingredients that have Modernist applications.

Volume 3: Techniques and Equipment

Your guidebook to the techniques of bread making. Chapters follow the process of making bread: fermentation, mixing, divide and shaping, proofing, scoring and finishing, ovens and baking, plus cooling and storage.

Volume 4 and 5: Recipes

Here’s where the recipes begin. With more than 1,500 recipes, each chapter is divided by types of breads. We begin with recipes for Lean breads, Enriched breads, Rye and Whole Grain breads, Flatbreads and Pizza, then move on to Bagels, Pretzels and Bao, Gluten-free breads, and Bread Machines.

Volume 6: Kitchen Manual

Our last volume is the wire-bound kitchen manual so that you can easily bring all of the recipes, plus reference tables, into the kitchen in one compact collection.

On-sale Update

This month we also made a difficult yet important decision that we want to share with you: we are pushing back the on-sale date of Modernist Bread to fall 2017. This was not an easy choice for us and we realize that this news might be disappointing for those of you who have already preordered the book.

We’ve always done things a little differently at Modernist Cuisine. We self-publish so that we can make books in our own, and undeniably huge, way. Which means that we don’t compromise on the quality of our books, even if it means moving the schedule out. In the case of Modernist Bread, we made some new discoveries in the 11th hour that just need to be included.

To prevent any future confusion, we will release the new on-sale date, right here, in the coming months. Those of you who have preordered the book through Amazon or Barnes & Noble will automatically receive e-mail notifications with the new estimated ship date once it has been updated. Preorder policies vary between independently owned local bookstores, so please contact them for more information.

Thank you for your continued support, enthusiasm, and patience as we complete Modernist Bread. We look forward to sharing more news with you very soon.

Modernist Bread preorders begin today!

Posted on September 27, 2016 at 8:10 am.

Written by Caren

Last spring we revealed news about the scope and size of our upcoming book, Modernist Bread. With five full volumes and a kitchen manual, this enormous tome will be almost the exact size (and weight) of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. We were thrilled by the tremendous response we received. We heard from many of you, and the top question was “When can I order the book?” The answer is: now.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science Book Trailer from Modernist Cuisine on Vimeo.

Beginning today, you can preorder Modernist Bread on through Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Phaidon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Bol.com, and Booktopia.com.au. You can also order the book through local bookstores that work with Ingram Content Group.

Like our first book, Modernist Bread retails for $625.00 USD and spans more than 2,300 pages. It’s time to clear space on your bookshelves, stock up on flour, and practice team-lifting the delivery box with a friend or loved one—we anticipate that Modernist Bread will arrive in May 2017 with our first foreign language editions in the queue for 2018.

We know that some of you have been following the progress of this project for some time, so we wanted to celebrate the countdown with a taste of what you will discover this May. To mark the arrival of the next bread revolution, we have created a companion 2017 wall calendar that features 14 of Modernist Bread’s most intriguing photos, which, we hope, will inspire you with the hidden beauty of bread. And now when you preorder Modernist Bread on Amazon.com US, you will receive the calendar for free while supplies last—it’s a tongue-in-cheek way to thank you for waiting so patiently.

While the Modernist Bread calendar offers a sneak peek of our newest photographs, we’re celebrating the outset of our photographic journey with the 2017 Modernist Cuisine calendar, a collection of the bold images that started it all. A snapshot of our readers’ favorite photos, it takes the book’s most captivating images off the pages, placing them onto your wall. In addition, when you purchase the Modernist Cuisine tome, you will receive the companion calendar for free, while supplies last.

Both 12-month calendars include the story behind each photo, as well as listing holidays and foodie celebrations in the United States and Canada. Retailing for $14.95, the calendars will ship in October so that you’ll have them before the winter holidays.

This isn’t the only news we have to share—read on for more details about Modernist Bread including a preview of the volumes, the new publication date and website, and what our team has been up to since our last post.

More pages, recipes, and answers to discover

Initially we thought that Modernist Bread was going to be a smaller book . . .

The process of transforming wheat into flour and then flour into bread is scientific, technological, artistic, and fairly magical. The appearance of a steak changes when you grill it, but it still resembles its raw form. Bread, however, looks nothing like the raw ingredients that went into it. Naturally, we had a lot of questions when we started this book. As we learned more, our discoveries inspired new questions, techniques, and recipes. Bread is even more complex and intriguing than we could have imagined—and so our book has grown. Thankfully, we aren’t known for making small books.

For Modernist Bread, that means telling the complete story of bread in a way that has never been done before. Since our last post in April, we have performed more than 100 additional experiments, created more than 200 recipes, and taken hundreds of photos. In all, we’ve added over 300 pages to the book. We continue to find more historical texts and freshly published studies by scientists who study bread, grains, and nutrition. We don’t want to leave out these incredible insights or the ideas that they have inspired, so we gave ourselves more time to make the book we want to make.

Although Modernist Bread will now be arriving on shelves in May 2017—later than we originally anticipated—it will be gorgeously illustrated, including modern scientific research and rigorously tested techniques and recipes. We have collaborated and consulted with 75 industry leaders around the world, including historians Jim Chevallier and Steven Kaplan, grain experts Steven Jones and Maria Speck, and bakers Ken Forkish, Richard Miscovich, Peter Reinhart, and Didier Rosada. During book production we continue to seek new answers, updating and improving the manuscript until the files need to fly off to the printer.

For now, we’re excited to share how the book will be organized. Like Modernist Cuisine, the first volume covers bread history, health, and the fundamentals of science. But that’s where the similarities end. The chapters in volume two provide a detailed look at the components of bread—from the grains that become flour to ingredients that have Modernist applications—followed by the third volume, a guidebook to the techniques of bread making. The final volumes are devoted to our recipes (as we said, we’ve developed quite a collection). These chapters span classic breads and Modernist interpretations, as well as recipes for pretzels, bao, flatbreads, and avant-garde loaves. And, of course, a book about bread would not be complete without all the wonderful condiments we love to smear and pile on bread. You can expect a new look for the casing of Modernist Bread too—the set will be housed in a sleek stainless steel case instead of clear acrylic. We’re looking forward to revealing the final design of the case and all of our potential covers in the coming year.

New challenges and surprises— our photographic journey continues

Photography is an incredibly important element for all our titles. It shows the story of food. With Modernist Cuisine, our photography team faced the challenge of showing ingredients and the science of cooking from a new, intriguing perspective. Taking inspiration from the Modernist culinary movement, we developed and adapted techniques not normally used in food photography—the result is a distinctive visual style that celebrates the power of food.

For Modernist Bread, our photography team has faced a new set of challenges. With a single-subject book of this magnitude, we’re figuring out how to show bread making from different perspectives—our illustrations need to be fresh and engaging through the very last page. As a result, our photographic style has evolved. We’ve improved many of our original techniques thanks to modern technologies and better tools, and our team has discovered creative ways to illustrate the story of bread. With more than 3,000 photos, you will be able to peer inside of a toaster to understand how it works, and you’ll also see the history and science of bread come alive in ways that will surprise you.

In addition to creating a striking book, we also want our illustrations to provide practical value. We recognize that one of the barriers to learning about bread is a lack of useful photography. Bakers, for example, rely on visual and tactile cues throughout the bread-making process, but these cues can be difficult to summarize in words alone or to accurately depict in pictures. Each week, our photography, editorial, and culinary teams work together to make sure those important details are captured in our step-by-step photos.

Ultimately, we hope that our photography allows readers to see food as we do—as a beautiful source of inspiration, wonder, and imagination. That’s exactly why we decided to create our 2017 Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Bread calendars. Each month features striking images that bring complex phenomena to life, illuminating the hidden beauty of simple ingredients and capturing a magical view of cooking or baking.

Learn how to redeem our special bundle offer

We don’t want you to miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of the special bundles we’ve created for Modernist Bread and Modernist Cuisine on Amazon.com, which is why we want to make sure you have all of the details before you order either of the books.

Each Amazon coupon is good for a $15 savings—the value of the calendars—on the price of either book. Although this is a bundled offer, each item ships separately, when it is available. This means that you don’t have to wait until May to receive your Modernist Bread calendar—it will ship as soon as they are in stock in October. When you are ready to preorder Modernist Bread or purchase Modernist Cuisine, visit the Amazon product pages for the companion calendars first. The coupon is linked to the calendars—it will become available for you to use towards the book after you purchase your calendar.

Redeeming the Amazon coupons takes a few steps, so we’ve put together instructions to help walk you through the process. You can watch the video below or read through the steps just below it to find out how the special Amazon.com coupon works.

Purchase your Modernist Bread or Modernist Cuisine wall calendar.
The coupon for a $15 savings will become available after the transaction is complete. You won’t immediately see the coupon– it will be waiting for you when you’re ready to order your book.
Go to the Modernist Bread or Modernist Cuisine landing page.
Add the book to your cart. The coupon will automatically appear under the price of the book when you view your shopping cart or on your Amazon coupon homepage.
Click or tap on the “Clip Coupon” button. This will apply the coupon discount to the book.
Proceed to checkout. The coupon savings will appear on the final order page under the ‘Place your Order’ button.

If you have any questions about Amazon coupons or experience any technical issues as you go through this process, please reach out to the Amazon team here or via phone at 1-888-280-3321 or 1-206-266-2992 for international customers. They will be more than happy to help.

A book (and new website) for any baker

Our goals for Modernist Bread may seem audacious, but in the end, they all come down to a single objective. This book is a call to arms for any baker to embrace the possibilities of invention and follow inspiration to make breads in your own way.

The future of bread is already under way on our new site, modernistbread.com. Starting today, you can visit us there to preview content from our book. Over time, we’ll populate the site with sneak peeks of the photographs, facts, techniques, and recipes in Modernist Bread.

Project developments are never-ending. Join our mailing list, check our blog, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for news and announcements.

Good Things are on the Rise for Modernist Bread

Posted on April 4, 2016 at 7:30 am.

Written by Caren

A title, publication date, plus more. Discover what we’ve been up to over the last year.

Over four years ago, the Modernist Cuisine team began to sleep, eat, and breathe bread—with an emphasis on the eating part. Of course we love all food, but one could say that we’ve become enthusiastic carbivores. We still have much to learn about bread, but we have reached a significant mile marker of our journey: an official book title and a tentative publication date. And we’re excited to share those with you—we anticipate that you will be able to find Modernist Bread: The Art and Science on bookshelves in March 2017.

Our passion for bread goes beyond appreciation for a really good loaf. Since this project began, we have fully immersed ourselves in the world of bread, both baking and researching it, all in the pursuit of understanding everything we possibly can about the science of bread and baking. As we’ve learned more about bread, our team has come across a rather interesting phenomenon: every new answer that we discover leads to a new question. The ingredient list can be simple, but baking bread is deceptively complex. There are still many puzzles to solve for the scientific community that studies it. Our team has performed over 1,500 experiments to date, and we’re still experimenting.

Countless loaves later, we’ve amassed (and are still generating) an incredible amount of content, so much so that it will fill five volumes, just like our first passion project, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The culinary team has developed more than 1,200 recipes from around the world that are both traditional and avant-garde. At over a million words so far, Modernist Bread will total over 2,000 pages and feature more than 3,000 new photos.

What is Modernist Bread?

Bread has been around for a long time, and it’s one of the most technologically sophisticated foods you can make. Yet, throughout the last century, the general perception of bread has changed. It has become a good that is purchased and not made at home. For many people without access to wonderful local bakeries, bread is an afterthought at the store, and at restaurants, it’s typically served merely as an accompaniment to satiate diners as they wait for their meal to arrive. Unfortunately, it has also suffered another fate far worse—avoidance. Bread has become public enemy number one, deemed unhealthy for one reason or another, usually thanks to an abundance of bad information and poorly made bread.

Nevertheless, a new movement is taking form in bakeries and kitchens across the globe. The next generation of bakers and chefs are positioning bread and grain back at the center of the table, infusing a 6,000-year-old tradition with a renewed spirit of creativity and innovation. As they begin to experiment, there’s a new thirst for knowledge about bread. It’s flowing out of the professional environment and into homes where people want to know how to bake bread again and how to bake it well. In many ways, Modernist Bread is a celebration of this shifting paradigm and the exciting conversations that people are having about bread.

A new home

There have been other big developments for our team, specifically over the last year. Namely, Modernist Cuisine has a new home.

Our old kitchen was housed in a building that was a Harley-Davidson showroom during its previous incarnation. That space took shape organically as we worked on Modernist Cuisine. The long rectangular layout evolved as the scope of the book expanded and necessitated new equipment, the placement of which was dictated by where we could find available outlets instead of kitchen ergonomics. Our photo studio was located away from the kitchen in a different part of the building, which made some shoots challenging. Large dishes and projects, such as our Gaudí Gingerbread House, needed to be slowly (and tediously) wheeled through a maze of narrow corridors.

Our old kitchen will always be special to us because it was our first home, but our new space is already home. It’s larger and more functional. Our photo studio and kitchen are side by side, a change that has enhanced the collaboration between the culinary and photography teams. The square kitchen now makes it much easier to navigate and reduces the number of steps the culinary team takes throughout the day. It makes tasks like lifting heavy tubs of dough and carrying 50-pound sacks of flour that much easier. Baking bread all day is an incredibly labor-intensive craft.

Moving a culinary wonderland took about a year of planning and a month to relocate. All of our equipment is here, including the centrifuge, roto-stator homogenizer, and CVap, for which we’ve found new applications in baking. There are also a few new additions to the space. Being in a bigger space has allowed us to use new research tools, expanding what we’re able to do in-house.

We use a 3D scanner to create three-dimensional models of our test loaves in order to compare their volumes and densities. To better understand how different flours and doughs behave during mixing and baking, we use a Chopin Mixolab. This machine measures the resistance to mixing, and the integrated software converts the data into six qualitative indices that describe important properties of dough.

Another new tool is the Calibre C-Cell, used in the commercial baking industry, which allows us to test the quality of flour, assess gas cell structure of the crumb and quality surface features, and measure the height and width of different types of breads.

We’re now able to take all of our microscopy photos in-house. A scanning electron microscope helps us to look at ingredients at the molecular level. We’re able to see an incredible new view of bread, from the gluten structure to mold and yeast. We’ve discovered that the science of baking also happens to be fantastically beautiful—it’s just one of the many discoveries we’re thrilled to share in Modernist Bread.

What’s to come

From time-tested traditions to brand-new discoveries, Modernist Bread will capture the science, history, and techniques that will transform foodies into bread experts. Whether you are a strict traditionalist, avid modernist, home baker, restaurant chef, or an artisanal baker, we hope that this book will open your eyes to possibilities of invention and different ways of thinking.

Project developments are never-ending. Join our mailing list, check our blog, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for news and announcements.

Soup and a Side of General Relativity

Posted on February 17, 2016 at 9:35 am.

Written by Caren

As a chef, Nathan’s passion for creating new dishes is twofold—he creates dishes and the dishes they’re served on. When thinking about a new bowl to create for a 2014 dinner, he found inspiration from a source not often associated with food: the general theory of relativity. The vessel, which is designed to hold two vibrantly colored soups, has a unique shape. Until recently, the bowl might have appeared to be an intricate spiral, but now, the inspiration for its shape—gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes—has been receiving international attention.

Last week, news broke that on September 14, 2015, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a network of scientists from 15 countries, detected gravitational waves for the first time ever. Naturally, the Modernist Cuisine team was excited by this monumental discovery. In honor of Nathan’s cosmic muse, it seemed like a fitting time to share the story of his “gravitational waves” bowl.

In 1915, Albert Einstein came up with the general theory of relativity—in short, it theorizes that gravity is due to the warping of space–time. It was a radical idea for the era, but in 1916 he proposed yet another radical idea with the prediction of gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of space–time that propagate from their source at the speed of light. He expanded his theory by positing that gravity is made of waves, just as radio signals are made of waves of electromagnetic radiation.

About 1.3 billion years ago, a system of two black holes orbited each other and emitted gravitational waves along the way. They eventually coalesced into a supermassive, spinning black hole, and for decades scientists have looked for evidence of its gravitational waves, but to no avail. Amazingly, the LIGO team figured out a way to not only detect gravitational waves but to also prove it was two black holes that produced them—a momentous discovery that helps confirm Einstein’s theory.

Well before Nathan began working on Modernist Cuisine, he spent his days researching general relativity and quantum theories of gravitation. Although his career took him down another pathway, his interest in those subjects remained and would continue to influence his work in new ways. The book Gravitation, for example, influenced the design and approach of Modernist Cuisine. Coauthored by Kip Thorne, one of the founders of the LIGO project, it’s a landmark in the study of gravity.

It’s no wonder Nathan found inspiration in the cosmos yet again. When he thought about colliding black holes in the spring of 2014, he didn’t just see gravitational waves—he also saw an otherworldly bowl that would make two soups spiral around one another.

To design the bowl, Nathan used Wolfram’s Mathematica to create a mathematical model that mimicked the gravitational waves of orbiting black holes just before they merge. Next, the Modernist Cuisine team turned Nathan’s Mathematica surface into a 3-D model using the machine shop’s five-axis CNC mill to carve the prototype out of solid aluminum.

From there, the aluminum 3-D model was used to make a negative mold out of plaster.

Local Seattle potter Wally Bivins then made porcelain bowls from the plaster mold by using a technique called “hump molding.” The clay is rolled into a sheet and tamped down over the mold so that the top surface of the plaster mold becomes the soup-side of the bowl. The soft clay bowl is fired in a kiln and glazed, which transforms it into a bright white porcelain dish.

Even before the announcement last week, we liked the story behind the gravitational wave bowl because it illustrated that the source of culinary creativity can come from anywhere—even outer space. Before, we were able to tell guests about a bowl inspired by Einstein’s theories. Now we look forward to telling Cooking Lab visitors that we serve soup from what will surely be one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time.

So, remember: if you’re ever at The Cooking Lab, those aren’t noodles in your soup—they’re ripples in the fabric of space–time.

Top Chef Seattle Visits Modernist Cuisine

Posted on January 2, 2013 at 9:09 pm.

Written by Caren

When we found out that Top Chef would be filming season 10 in Seattle, we couldn’t let them leave town without stopping by the Modernist Cuisine lab. About midway through the season, we hosted Padma Lakshmi and the remaining contestants for a 22-course tasting to give them firsthand experience of some of the iconic dishes from Modernist Cuisine.

The 22-course meal (menu reprinted below) was prepared by our five full-time development chefs, including our previous head chef, Maxime Bilet, plus three stagiaires. The feast contained hundreds of individual components, so the team began its prep work weeks in advance. The entire dinner service lasted two and a half hours, which may sound lengthy but works out to an average duration of just six minutes and 48 seconds per course. Our original menu boasted more than 30 courses but had to be trimmed to meet time constraints.

The Top Chef production crew outnumbered the contestants by a wide margin, so we weren’t able to feed the entire crew. But, whenever possible, we sneaked samples of each dish to the crew members perched on the mezzanine above our kitchen and around the corner in our conference room, which had been annexed as “video village”, a space for the producers to watch video feeds from each camera.

Hardcore fans of Top Chef may recall that Nathan Myhrvold was a guest judge on last year’s“BBQ Pit Wars” episode. It was a pleasure to host the Top Chef team on our home turf and to give them a taste of our version of Seattle cooking.

SNACKS

Salt and Vinegar Pommes Soufflées

pregelatinized starch, spray-dried vinegar

Bread and Butter

centrifuged pea “butter”

Elote

freeze-dried corn, brown butter, cilantro blossoms

Steak Frites

ultrasonic fries, pressure-rendered beef mousseline

Caprese

savory constructed cream, cherries

?????

SHELLFISH

Squid Salad

crispy squid jerky, MAPP flame, Thai flavors

Spaghetti alle Vongole

Taylor’s geoduck, vacuum-molded and centrifuged broth

?????

LIQUID LOVE

Summer Vegetable Broth

centrifuged peas, pickled Meyer lemon, sheep’s milk ricotta

Rare Beef Stew

sous vide rare beef jus, garden vegetables and cured beef marrow

Caramelized Carrot Soup

pressure caramelization, carotene butter, young coconut noodles

Brassicas

Gruyère velouté, flash-pickled grapes, lots of brassicas

JUST IN CASE THE APPETITE BECKONS

Raw Quail Egg

a touch of protein from our rooftop farm

Polenta Marinara

pressure-cooked with corn juice

Mushroom Omelet

constructed egg stripes, combi oven, Porcini

Chinook King, Hazelnut, and Sorrel

aromatic nuts and seeds, lemon butter, wild greens

“Le Ski” Apple Snowball

vacuum-aerated sorbet, frozen fluid-gel powder

Roast Chicken

Mamie France‘s cream sauce, morels, vin jaune

Pastrami

72 h sous vide, Taki’s sweet onion sauerkraut, fresh Oregon wasabi

?????

FRUITS AND CREAMS

Milk Shake

goat milk, vacuum reduction

Summer Minestrone

vacuum-infused fruits and vegetables, candied white beans

Pistachio Gelato

pistachio cream, strawberries, violet and pistachio crumble

?????

SWEETS

Gummy Worms

peanut butter and jelly, fish-lure molds

Watch Nathan’s Modernist Cuisine Story on NOVA scienceNOW

Posted on November 2, 2012 at 3:45 pm.

Written by Caren

Last night, NOVA scienceNOW aired “Can I Eat That?,” a show on the science of food and cooking, which profiled Nathan Myhrvold in the final segment. Host David Pogue narrates a behind-the-scenes look at Nathan’s inspiration for creating Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home. For those of you interested in seeing The Cooking Lab’s equipment, how the cutaway photos were made, or what Nathan looked like as a kid, we think you’ll enjoy this. It is a great illustration of the story of Modernist Cuisine.

Tested.com Visits The Cooking Lab

Posted on July 31, 2012 at 5:03 pm.

Written by Caren

As you may recall, we first met up with the guys from Myth Busters’s tested.com at our event at The Exploratorium in San Francisco. More recently they came up to The Cooking Lab to grill us (no pun intended) on everything from vacuum-concentrated bourbon to cutaway photos.

First up, Max takes Will on a tour of the lab (above). Then, a bit hungry after the tour, Max and Will compose freeze-dried elote and pea stew.

Ready for the main course! Sam, Johnny, and Max create a lunch of cryofried steak, ultrasonic fries, and cherry salad.

Only at The Cooking Lab would we serve quail eggs for dessert. And boy is Will in for a surprise!

Meanwhile, Scott explains the magic behind our cutaway photos to Norman.

BONUS:

Scott kidnaps the Tested team and feeds them pizza!

Behind the Scenes at a Lab Dinner, Part 4

Posted on January 13, 2012 at 3:06 pm.

Written by Caren

Maxime Bilet, Jeffry Steingarten, Oswaldo Oliva, and Charles Znaty Just as Nathan Myhrvold set out to write a 600-page book on cooking sous vide and wound up with the 2,438-page Modernist Cuisine, I started out with the simple idea of writing a blog post about what it takes to put on one of our dinner events at The Cooking Lab. I realized early on that one post would never do and adjusted my plan to allow for three separate posts, detailing shopping at the farmers’ market, prepping, and finally, the dinner. All went according to plan until I started writing about the dinner itself. It turns out that 33 courses is not only a lot to make and eat, but also a lot to write about. So here is, at last, the fourth (and final) installment in my three-part series chronicling the lab dinner we held last November.

The guests’ enjoyment is always the best part

The tasting menu paired the 33 courses with six wines from the Pacific Northwest (click the menu at right to enlarge it),
not counting the champagne that started off the evening during Nathan’s presentation. Needless to say, with the wine flowing and the food seeming to go on forever, guests were in good spirits. The look of utter shock on Johnny Iuzzini’s face when he ate the Raw Quail Egg–described on the menu as simply “a touch of protein to invigorate the appetite”–was a highlight. He was the last at his table to try it, so the other guests already knew that it was not actually an egg, but a trompe l’oeil made from passion fruit. Johnny laughed so hard, his head sank to the table.

Yet another surprise followed. The Polenta Marinara is a recipe found in Modernist Cuisine, but it’s titled in the book a little more descriptively as Strawberry Marinara. Another recipe straight from MC was the Mushroom Omelet, which was a great hit, as always. If you have a whipping siphon, it’s worth trying at least the siphoned egg foam that is used to fill the omelet. It is wonderfully creamy in texture but still intensely eggy in flavor. Nathan took a break from his work in the kitchen to explain to the guests the method we use to create perfectly even stripes in the omelet.

By this point in the dinner, some of the courses the team was plating up were filling enough to serve as entrees all by themselves. The Roast Chicken was delicious, but many guests had to put down their forks before they had polished off all of it. The pastrami was also challenging in its size and richness, but even the New Yorkers in the group said they hadn’t had pastrami this good; most of the guests gave it their all.

A we neared the end, the courses took a turn from savory to sweet. The Citrus Minestrone happily combined the two by pairing a quenelle of cucumber sorbet with vacuum-infused vegetables, all surrounded by a citrus consommé. I’ve never been a fan of cucumbers, but I enjoyed this immensely! And of course, I also enjoyed the pistachio gelato (as I mentioned in my last post, I never pass up a chance to eat it), which was served with macadamia and strawberry flavors. Max explained that they were serving far more desserts than they had at past events–part of the reason that this tasting dinner was the widest in scope yet attempted by our team. Pastry extraordinaires Pierre Hermé and Johnny Iuzzini were attending, and we wanted to show them that the Modernist Cuisine team can hold its own when it comes down to sweets.

It was around this time–10:30 PM, and the guests had been eating for about four hours–that MC coauthor Chris Young walked in, like a prospective father showing up at the end of a baby shower. Wearing jeans and a hoodie, he had come straight from the airport, hoping to catch the tail end of the dinner and greet the guests. As Max later explained to me, it was actually a treat for the team to watch people eat. It’s not something we get to do a lot. He said, “Because most of our food is communicated through language and imagery, it’s a very unique–and I think important–moment in our process for us to share the message of Modernist Cuisine through taste.”

The dinners also offer us a great opportunity to see people who, owing to busy schedules and geographic separation, we don’t get to see often enough. Oddly enough, Max and Nathan had just met with Pierre Hermé in Europe the week before, but due to projects of his own, Chris wasn’t able to make the trip.

The dinner ended with delicate snowflakes of violet sugar cut with a laser, Gruyère caramels, and olive oil gummy worms.

All 16 guests stood to give the culinary team an ovation after the meal. This was especially considerate considering that the act of standing probably required real effort at this point. Nathan thanked them for the applause and introduced each member of the team, from the chefs to Amy, our PR guru, to our photographers Melissa and Tyson, and even me, the blogger. It takes a lot of people to deliver a 33-course MC dinner.

After the dinner had ended, I asked Nathan and Max to sign my menu. Max asked me which dish was my favorite. After a moment’s thought, I said “France in a Bowl.” At the time, in the beginning of November, the team was developing my crazy idea of a Thanksgiving Stew, which Nathan had referred to as “Modernist cuisine in a bowl.” So, it was my hope that perhaps the “in a bowl” concept was catching on. There are, I thought, endless possibilities. But I also liked it because the base of the dish was a foie gras custard with hoisin sauce. The historical ties between France and Vietnam, and therefore the inclusion of hoisin along with the quintessentially French snails, frog legs, and chanterelle mushrooms, proved in my mind that cuisine is indeed always changing–even French cuisine. The outside influences from other ethnicities, the discovery of new ingredients, the development of new technology, and scientific breakthroughs all propel food forward, just as they affect so much else in human culture. Cuisine evolves, and it is exciting to witness the transformations that are underway.

I then turned the table on Max and asked him what he would point to as a highlight of the evening. He said, “It was amazing to share our food with some of our favorite chefs in the world, and to try to give back to them as much as they have given us through their inspiration and contribution to Modernist cuisine.”

While exciting, that aspect was also a bit daunting. Max had been especially thrilled to serve Andoni Luis Anduriz, a ground-breaking chef who flew all the way from San Sebastian, Spain. He also felt a little trepidation about cooking for old friends like Johnny Iuzzini, Jeffrey Steingarten, and Scott Boswell. But he needn’t have feared; everything went wonderfully. “I am extremely proud of the team,” Max said. “They came together after weeks of testing and prepping, and the effort they invested into each detail was apparent in all of the dishes we served tonight.”

Of course, just because the meal was done did not mean the night was yet over. Johnny Iuzzuni rounded up many of the chefs and guests to hit the town. I, however, helped clean up, matched coats with guests, and went home to a welcoming bed after a very long day.

Behind the Scenes at a Lab Dinner, Part 3

Posted on December 28, 2011 at 8:00 am.

Written by Caren

In the third part of this series, we finally delve into what it’s like to both serve and eat 33 courses at a Cooking Lab dinner. Part 1 chronicled the shopping trip to the Farmers’ Market, and part 2 detailed the amount of prep work such a dinner takes.

Small Portions Add Up

This dinner cannot be fully appreciated without first looking at the epic size of its menu (click each page to enlarge):

This menu could very well be an entire restaurant’s menu, but each guest would be served each course as a small “tasting.” While the prospect was daunting, our guests were excited to begin.

I actually think I went about this the right way. I didn’t sample everything and stood most of the time, which burns more calories than sitting does. With the exception of the pistachio gelato (which I will eat whenever presented to me), I stayed away from dishes I had already tried, such as the eloté, the Modernist version of the classic Mexican street food. It begins with a dab of spicy mayo and is layered with butter powder, made from mixing melted butter with N-Zorbit, which swells the butter with so much starch that it becomes powdery, and topped with freeze-dried corn kernels and ash. It’s like a Pixy Stix for grown-ups, and, just like with the candy, it is important not to inhale as you put the spoon in your mouth.

I was most looking forward to finally trying the famous pea butter, which is made from centrifuging frozen peas so that they separate into three distinct layers: juice, starch, and a rich, creamy substance that can only be likened to butter. This, as I had imagined, and as many guests have written, was what the Platonic ideal of peas might be. Served along with corn butter (which, sadly, I didn’t get to try) and ham butter, Nathan took the opportunity to show off the centrifuge to our guests. Rather than asking them to get up and look at what really does look like a washing machine, he’d taken the rotor out, along with a few bottles of layered peas and corn, and brought them tableside.

Serving the ultrasonic fries as one fry atop a cup of bone marrow mousseline, was, in my opinion, a bad move. The pairing was terrific, the fry is a must-have for anyone visiting the Lab, but who can eat just one French fry, especially when it’s the best French fry anyone has ever had? Yet, there were 29 courses to go, so one fry it was.

Each of these dishes was assembled at rapid speed, since as much prep work as possible had already been done. Yet the chefs used pairs of long tweezers to carefully place each piece of food on the plate. Because the MC team has a lot of pride in their presentation, when a mound of geoduck noodles fell over (not on the floor, mind you, but just sliding over into the bowl) on the way from the counter to the table, it was brought back. Shouts of “Refire! Refire! Refire!” exploded from the kitchen as the chefs scrambled to concoct a new plate-up, and I happily snagged the flubbed shellfish for myself. A few extra seconds were not remiss during this course, as Nathan once again visited his guests, this time bringing out a whole geoduck (pronounced “gooey” duck). Most guests had never seen one, even though they are so common in the Pacific Northwest that they have actually become over-fished. Nathan explained that we get ours from “Oyster Bill,” as he’s known in the Seattle restaurant community, who represents local fish farms. This particular geoduck was grown on a sustainable farm called Taylor Shellfish.

Taki, whom I’d met the day before at the farmers’ market, would have been proud of the beautiful arrangement of vegetables in the Spring in Autumn Stew, which started off a series of soup courses. When I say “soup courses,” I use that term loosely. The Noble Root course served root vegetables on a plate with an espresso cup filled with our Caramelized Carrot Soup on the side. I had been absent the day they’d shot the photos for our Rare Beef Jus recipe, so I grabbed a spoonful when the stew was served. It was saltier than I’d imagined, despite the fact that no salt had been added to it. When I saw the little cups of what looked like Guinness (a dark liquid with a large dose of creamy white foam) come back only half eaten, I wondered aloud if the Mushroom Cappuccino had not gone over well. No, one of our veteran servers told me. This was the time in the dinner when people started to get full and took only tastes of each small portion.

This is also about the time in writing this post when I realize that to do it justice, I must stop and pick it up again next week. There are just too many good courses, too many interesting details, and too many fun guests to write about.