Modernist Cuisine: The Big Picture

Considered as a body of knowledge rather than just as individual books, Modernist Cuisine succeeds primarily because it opens the reader's mind to a much broader array of tools and preparatory techniques than any other cookbook previously released, discussing everything from the nitty gritty of classical animal deboning and sausage making to the methods by which modern gels and foams can be made. The subject matter may initially appear to be purely upscale, but it's not, devoting pages to everything from optimized hamburgers, french fries, and regional barbecue sauces to cava foamed oysters, checkerboarded Hawaiian poke, and wine tasting tips. Aided by the sort of stunning cross-sectioned tool and food photography depicted in the first half of this review, Modernist Cuisine is designed to catalog a growing array of water cooking, smoking, spherifying, and flash freezing skills that a chef can use to subtle or dramatic effect. It truly offers broad postgraduate-quality instruction in the history and future of food preparation, and yet is sold for a lower price than a class at most degree-granting culinary institutions.

Apart from the books' insane physical size - handling a single volume is akin to carrying around an old phone book - Modernist Cuisine falls short of expectations primarily by occasionally weighing itself down with enough dense scientific discussion to put even college-educated readers to sleep. As previously noted, author Nathan Myhrvold has a hard science background backed by stints with Microsoft and legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, and there are stretches where Modernist Cuisine feels less like a set of cookbooks than textbooks. Books one and two were educational, photographically incredible, and only intermittently dotted with recipes - they laid the groundwork for what was to come in the other volumes. Yet anyone who actually read the first books in full before tackling book three, titled Animals and Plants, will likely find fatigue setting in, a good reason to skip ahead to book four's discussion of coffee to get a second wind. As with the first books, the third and fourth volumes' lecture-style discussions are frequently interrupted with half- and full-page asides on "fun" topics - the history of Pringles, for instance - which are welcome, but continue to feel less than ideally integrated into the rest of the materials. Truly everything in Modernist Cuisine is useful, but the manner in which it has been assembled and laid out could really benefit from reconsideration... and a much lighter, thinner iPad version.

Having re-aired some of the persisting criticisms from our prior review, it must be said that the information presented in Modernist Cuisine's second half is even more practically useful than in its first. Here is a broad look at the topics discussed in each of the books.

Book 3: Animals and Plants

Roughly half narrative and half recipes, this volume spends nearly 2/3 of its over 400 pages on meat prep, cooking, and bonding, then uses the latter third to look at fruits, vegetables, and pastas. In the meat section, Myhrvold exhaustively discusses everything from the chemical breakdown and aging of meats to the science behind various cooking strategies, mostly to acquaint readers with the best ways to achieve great textures, flavors, and looks using well-known traditional techniques and less well-known tools such as sous vide water baths. In addition to sections on smoking, sausage making, curing, and frying, this volume goes way beyond the classics by discussing modernist bonding agents - ways to disassemble meat from skin, separately cook them, and reassemble them - and frankenmeat magic, such as knots made from foie gras, grid-like blocks of two meats pasted together, and the making of sausages that would have been unsafe or impossible with classical cooking methods. Novices will leave this section better versed in muscles and fat than many past experts, and experts will walk away ready to achieve even higher levels of mastery by selecting superior sources, cuts, and aging strategies before even beginning to cook the meat.

As with everything else in Modernist Cuisine, the section on preparing fruits, vegetables, and pasta is both stunningly illustrated and illuminating. A two-page spread on the color changes achieved through different types of cooking and water acidity levels uses red cabbage and quinces to demonstrate, beautifully, how the juice of a single vegetable can shift from red to purple, blue, green, or yellow based on the acidity or alkalinity of the water it's mixed with, and how whole fruits can be color-shifted merely by peeling or pressure-cooking. Freeze-drying, sous vide cooking, and frying techniques are spotlighted, as are strategies for making and cooking pasta and risotto. On the rare occasion when something from one section - say, the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken - winds up in the wrong place, it's hard to complain because of the fascination factor of the material. Modernist Cuisine deftly balances an appreciation for the art of high cuisine and the flavor of low cuisine, repeatedly insisting that proper techniques can enable cooks achieve the best of both worlds.

What hooked us in book three was the continued discussion of sous vide vacuum packing and water bath cooking, which Myhrvold asserts - correctly, as we've confirmed through personal visits and additional research - is the semi-secret technique behind the amazingly perfect meats and vegetables served at leading restaurants around the world.

Sous vide relies upon accurate temperature-controlled heating to create a silent, stable cooking environment for meats, fruits, and vegetables, enabling them to be brought to precisely the right temperatures while soaking in natural juices. We were inspired enough by the promise of ultra-simple preparation with perfect results to invest in the equipment: a Sous Vide Supreme unit and a FoodSaver V2244 vacuum sealer.

In short, our results have been almost completely satisfying, producing meals well beyond our prior capabilities - photos of our achievements with the hardware have been appearing on our Twitter account for the past month. With only minimal human involvement, the Sous Vide Supreme has produced some of the most incredible ribs we've ever eaten, transformed mediocre cuts of beef and pork into tender delights, and even perfectly cooked moist - yes, moist - chicken breasts from edge to edge, all silently on a kitchen counter at home.

Meats come out of the vacuum bags looking dreary, get finished for a minute or three in a pan or oven, and then arrive looking and tasting restaurant-class on common home plates. There are good reasons that sous vide is being called as important to the 21st century cook as microwaves were in the 20th century; they operate entirely differently, and produce completely dissimilar results, but each will have its place in home kitchens.

Sous vide is only one of the many tools Modernist Cuisine illuminates, but for many chefs, it and the numerous sous vide-dependent recipes the books offer will be amongst the most important revelations Myhrvold brings to the kitchen. Unlike recipes that are floating around on the Internet, some of which we've tried, the books' tables and cooking "best bets" are based upon fairly extensive scientific testing, in some cases enabling you to cook at lower temperatures for longer periods of time, and thus increase the succulence of your meals without compromising their safety. The results are breathtaking, and explain why the kitchens of restaurants such as Washington, D.C.'s Oyamel are reputably packed with sous vide machines. With an entry price of $300, Sous Vide Supreme machines can be owned by everyone, and in the future, perhaps they will be.

Book 4: Ingredients and Preparations

By the middle of book three, Modernist Cuisine increased the ratio of actual recipes relative to the science and history lessons, techniques and photographs; this pace is maintained and perhaps increased in Ingredients and Preparations. Predominantly focused on liquids in various states of viscosity and flavor intensity, book four begins with discussions of thickening agents and techniques, moves on to gels, eggs, and spherification, continues with emulsions and cheeses, spotlights foams, and then ends with looks at wines and coffee. For a sense of how amazing spherification can be, check out the smoky oyster and apple/red wine dishes here; the liquid spheres are as gentle as fish roe, only much larger and man made.

Much of the content in Ingredients and Preparations will blow away readers who haven't dined in a modernist restaurant such as é by José Andrés or WD-50; recipes for noodles that are squeezed by diners from a plastic dispenser sit alongside instructions for making carbonated mojito spheres, brightly colored cubes of fruit gel, and temperature-controlled soft-boiled eggs that are as delicate as custard. Some of the recipes call for Xanthan gum, sodium alginate, and other foreign-sounding but increasingly common ingredients that turn seemingly impossible textures and consistencies into reality. It's part of Modernist Cuisine's mission to demystify these elements, presenting them as necessary tools in a quest to make culinary magic. The photos help: once you've seen an image of halibut served in a block of verbena, it's hard to argue against the tricks used to bring it to life.

What really grabbed us in Ingredients and Preparations was the discussion of coffee - an extended session drawing on the expertise of Seattle's famed Espresso Vivace, discussing the keys to producing repeatedly excellent espresso shots, paint-thick steamed milk, and latte art, all hallmarks of the world's great coffee shops.

We used Modernist Cuisine as a guide to online coffee resources, hunted for a high-quality home espresso machine, and followed its suggestions to achieve consistent temperatures, timing, and foaming.

The results were amazing: within days - and without any formal training - our drinks were surpassing the quality of what Starbucks baristas were producing, and soon thereafter were rivaling cappuccinos we were buying from Spot Coffee. While we're nowhere near Espresso Vivace levels, we were helped immeasurably by the knowledge we gleaned from just this single section of fewer than 50 pages.

Book 5: Plated Dish Recipes

For most cookbooks, the content in the fifth book - Plated Dish Recipes - would have been the entire affair; in Modernist Cuisine, it's merely the culmination of all of the volumes that preceded it. Here, Myhrvold's team provides two or three recipes per page to assemble more complex dishes using techniques discussed in the first four books, bringing the same sort of spectacular photographs to bear for over 285 pages. Narrative here is kept to a minimum, and recipe instructions remain clean and relatively straightforward. Glossaries and conversion tables then follow, concluding at long last with a nearly 60-page index, using text that's even smaller than the body font found elsewhere in the books.

For the most part, the recipes are nowhere near as daunting as some of the most extreme techniques suggested in the earlier books - you needn't have access to $10,000 tools in order to produce all or even most of the dishes here. The biggest challenge in producing tamarind paste, for instance, is to hold the pulp in a constant 170-degree sous vide bath for 30 minutes before running it through a sieve. By contrast, producing the completely edible "Astronaut Ramen" recipe - complete with edible 'styrofoam' containers and dried proteins, requires 22 hours, gelatin and Xanthan gum, and access to a freeze-drying machine; it's safe to assume that there will be no Julie & Julia-style one-person quest to produce all of these recipes any time soon. But regardless of the recipes you hope to try, you may stumble early upon two requirements: a digital scale and a working knowledge of gram-based measurements. All of the recipes are based upon precision weighing and grams, providing ratios only as a secondary backup, which means that you won't generally find references to cups, tablespoons, or other American-favored measures in here.

This recipe decision is disclosed early in the books, but it carries a consequence for American cooks: unless you're familiar with scales and measuring out every ingredient using grams, you may well find that it's unnecessarily difficult to assemble something as simple as a Kansas City barbecue rub using the books' instructions. (Note: there are gram conversion tables at the end of book six. Should they be necessary?) As much as we would love to see Modernist Cuisine quickly released as a simple iPad-formatted book, this one element begs for the five volumes to be restructured as apps, complete with automatic conversion tools - or for readers to take the author's suggestion, and just make an abrupt change to their previous units of measurement. On a related note of potential inconvenience, while the aforementioned index is welcome, it's frankly ill-suited to being located at the tail end of a fifth volume; given its length and the scope of the rest of the collection, it could have been a standalone book, or included within the Kitchen Manual. That the Modernistcuisine.com web site now includes a full-text search feature for the books - as well as an index for book six - suggests just how much better suited the digital medium is to the books' contents. At a time when national book stores are closing down, printing and shipping prices are at all-time highs, and tablet sales are surging, it's a shame that Myhrvold's team has been completely noncommittal about selling Modernist Cuisine in digital form any time soon.

Book 6: Kitchen Manual

This spiral-bound volume offers a repetition of the roughly 1,500 recipes found in the other books, minus the photography and surrounding text. Printed on waterproof paper, the Kitchen Manual is the only book in the set that does not fit in the acrylic box included with the Modernist Cuisine collection, and is designed to be used as a kitchen-safe reference when cooking.

On a positive note, the manual's smaller, lighter, and easier to move through than the collection of other volumes, with a seven-page table of contents that's fairly easy to scan through in search of specific tips or recipes. But the pages are exceptionally thin, and in addition to lacking an index of its own, the Kitchen Manual's table of contents is only broadly organized. This leads to a lot of searching around when you're looking for something such as sirloin sous vide tips, and little to no coverage of topics such as coffee, which eschewed simple recipes in favor of broader conceptual instructions in the books.

Obsessive as we are about preserving our books in close to perfect condition, we never felt comfortable using the delicate-feeling Kitchen Manual in our own kitchens - it was easier to snap photos with a camera phone and rely upon them, instead. Sometimes, that worked; at other times, such as when we tried the Manual's excerpted volume three recipe for Pork Ribs and discovered that a dry rub recipe was to be found "above" - without other guidance - we found ourselves having to search through the other books anyway. So while the sixth volume can be used apart from the other five, it's best to keep the complete set within grasp, just in case.

Conclusions

It would be as easy to praise Modernist Cuisine for its incredible scope and daring approach as to damn it for delivering 2011-vintage information in a 2001-styled format, and there's no doubt in our minds that it deserves both of those characterizations. We learned so much on our first pass through the books that we were forgetting some of the lessons by the middle of the read; it's quite possible, even, to hover upon even two pages for days at a time, trying to recreate just one beautiful and unusual recipe inspired by some of the world's most creative cooks. It goes without saying that merely reading the words and seeing the pictures isn't enough; unlike a cake mix or pot roast, the recipes here are in many cases designed to be less than intuitive and at least a little challenging. Stripped of instructions, Modernist Cuisine would have made for a beautiful series of food photography books, and for some readers, they may never amount to more than that.

But the critical thing we took away from these books was bigger than whether we could replicate sea urchin and grapefruit atop cocoa noodles, or one of a number of curried lamb shanks with pickles and okra; rather, it was the understanding that modern cooking is rooted in a desire to improve upon and supplement the best elements of traditional cooking rather than to displace them, and that a great cook can now draw upon an incredible collection of tricks to surprise and delight her patrons. To the extent that your budget, schedule, and mind are capable of handling the sort of expensive commitments Modernist Cuisine will lead you to make, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend that you find a set of the books and begin to devour them now. Otherwise, you have two clear options: wait for what will hopefully be a less expensive and considerably lighter tablet edition, or find a practitioner capable of cooking a few of the recipes for you. If you've read this far, you really should personally experience what's in these books, somehow. We have, and we've been forever changed by what we've learned. Our hope is that Myhrvold and his team come up with equally compelling and enlightening volumes on desserts, the only topic left largely uncovered by this incredible series of books.