Nathan Myhrvold's bible of molecular gastronomy

Foooood

Smithsonian profiles Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the new multi-volume bible of molecular gastronomy (although they don't like that term):

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Myhrvold, (famed modernist chef Ferran) Adrià and other chefs reject that label as inaccurate. Besides, as a phrase to lure restaurant customers it's not exactly up there with Steak Frites. But I think it captures Adrià's unique perspective, his ability to transcend the inherent attributes of vegetables and cuts of meat. For most of human history, cooks took their raw ingredients as they came. A carrot was always and forever a carrot, whether it was cooked in a pan with butter or in the oven with olive oil or in a pot with beef and gravy. Modernist cooking, to use Myhrvold's term, deconstructs the carrot, as well as the butter, olive oil and beef, into their essential qualities–of flavor, texture, color, shape, even the temperature of the prepared dish–and reassembles them in ways never before tasted, or imagined. It creates, says Myhrvold, "a world where your intuition fails you completely," where food doesn't look like what it is, or necessarily like food at all. One of its proudest achievements is Hot and Cold Tea–a cup of Earl Grey that by some chemical magic is hot on one side and cold on the other. "It's a very odd feeling," says one of Myhrvold's two co-authors, a chef named Chris Young. "Kind of makes the hairs stand up on the back of your head…"

It may have occurred to you that this kind of cooking runs exactly counter to the other dominant trend in dining, the quest for authenticity, traditional preparations and local ingredients that sometimes goes by the name "slow food." Among its most eloquent advocates is the author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), whose motto is "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Yet even Pollan was won over by his lunch at the Food Lab, pronouncing the sous-vide short-rib pastrami, a signature dish, "pretty incredible. It's a realm of experimentation, of avant-garde art. There's art I find incredibly stimulating, but I wouldn't necessarily want it on my living-room wall." For his part, Myhrvold regards Pollan with mild condescension, implying that he has failed to think through his own philosophy. "If everyone had followed his rule about great-grandmothers, recursively back into history, nobody would ever have tried anything new," Myhrvold says. "Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato."


Food Like You've Never Seen Before
(Smithsonian)

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (Amazon)