Kitchen Tech and Progress

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The link between humanity’s development and the evolution of cooking techniques is well-documented and perhaps even obvious. Less apparent, however, is that along the way, many “traditional” chefs and cooks turned up their noses at new and emerging gastronomic tools and techniques of their time.

Some new products, such as the pressure cooker, initially seemed destined for mass-market adoption, but have never become commonplace. Other, much more outlandish-sounding contraptions, perhaps most notably the microwave oven, eventually became so widespread that a backlash occurred and people waxed nostalgic for the way food used to be prepared. But somewhere between the Kyocera hand-honed ceramic knife and the Slap Chop are the inventions that simplified difficult, time-consuming, or previously unfeasible kitchen tasks enough to become essential tools in their own right.

There are Luddites and technophiles in every realm and every generation. Despite its title, Modernist Cuisine doesn’t take a strong position on old versus new. Rather, the book was created to explore the boundaries between the conventional and the avant-garde, and to push the envelope of modern cooking. Modernist Cuisine employs science to discover and explain how things work, why they don’t, and how to achieve culinary feats formerly considered impossible.

Does water boiled in a microwave oven or on an induction burner taste or behave any differently than water boiled over a gas flame or on a wood stove? Does anyone miss the prolonged stirring, beating, whipping, and kneading that is now handled by the ubiquitous electric mixer? Is a pinch or a dash somehow better than a gram or a microgram as measured by an electronic scale? Who’s to say that the ultrasonic pressure cooker won’t someday soar in popularity like the microwave oven or that the rotary homogenizer won’t ultimately be as common as today’s electric blender? Stranger things have happened.

History’s culinary scientists, inventors, and pioneers had to create every recipe, implement, and technique in use today. The team behind Modernist Cuisine is aware that not everyone wants to be on the bleeding edge of food science. But someone has to do it. Otherwise, sharp rocks and pointed sticks would be the only tools of the culinary trade.

Not Your Average Carrot Soup

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At August’s International Food Bloggers Convention (IFBC) in Seattle, the Modernist Cuisine team prepared a dish they (rather modestly) described as carrot soup for the kickoff reception. Before heading downtown with the team, I caught Maxime “Max” Bilet and Anjana Shanker at The Cooking Lab and asked them to describe the dish they were preparing for the reception.

Max and Anjana describe their carrot soup.

The process to which Max alludes is one of many in the book that involve the use of a pressure cooker to achieve unique tastes and textures. Anjana explained that the carrot soup presented at the reception would have a better and more complex flavor than its more familiar, ungarnished form. To demonstrate, she walked me through the plating process and described the various roles played by the additional ingredients.

Anjana plates the carrot soup.

The final product was indeed a bit hit at the IFBC kickoff reception. The turnout at the Modernist Cuisine table was fantastic. The team received many compliments on both the carrot soup and the BLAD (sample pages from Modernist Cuisine) they handed out.

IFBC Kickoff Reception

But as the reception wound down, one thing stood out for me and perhaps the other fortunate tasters at the event: Calling it carrot soup just didn’t do it justice!