[HN Gopher] Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
___________________________________________________________________
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Author : tyleo
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-02-24 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (modernistcuisine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (modernistcuisine.com)
| skyyler wrote:
| It's sold as a reference material, but the photography inside is
| beautiful.
|
| Even if you think the techniques are outside of your reach, it's
| a really lovely "cookbook" to look through.
| josephmosby wrote:
| I have used Modernist Cuisine at Home for years. The techniques
| are a little more approachable for the home chef, and the results
| are A+.
|
| And if science-infused cooking is your jam, Kenji Lopez-Alt is
| another great read. https://www.kenjilopezalt.com
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| same. it got me to sous vide a lot more
| fumoto wrote:
| At $625 for the volume, beauty is a prerequisite.
| M4R5H4LL wrote:
| Is this an advertisement for a 5-cookbook set at $625? If I were
| a beginner, I would spend that money on a carbon steel pan, one
| Staub pot, a good kitchen and paring knife, one peeler, and I'd
| have some left for high-quality ingredients to experiment with
| myself. If I were more advanced, I would look into professional
| culinary institutes' books. Everything in between is easily
| accessible on YouTube. An expensive book as beautiful as it is
| will never make a good cook; only good tools, ingredients, and
| practice will do.
| jofer wrote:
| I'd hesitate to call this a "cookbook". It's closer to a
| coffee-table photography book. It's somewhat more art than
| instruction, though it is both. It's inspiring, for sure, but
| is very different than most.
|
| I also thought it had been out of print for years, but it seems
| I'm wrong... Perhaps this is news because it's no longer out of
| print? Or was I just misremembering?
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I was given a "copy" about ten years ago. It came in a lucite
| box. I brought it home on the subway, and when I took off my
| pants later that night I found a horizontal line of bruises
| across my thighs.
|
| As of a couple years ago there's a gallery around Seattle's
| Pike Place market that displays various photographs from the
| series.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| maybe check out the content first...
| skyyler wrote:
| > If I were a beginner
|
| This book is not for beginners. It's not even for home cooks.
|
| Also, hilariously, there's a list of equipment provided in the
| version for home cooks. It's quite different from what you're
| suggesting to a beginner, because even the version of this book
| that is for home cooks is not for beginners.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional
| cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an
| escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents &
| standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a
| huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of
| restaurants in the preceding two decades.
|
| In terms of _food_ like that you sit down and eat with other
| people, it was narrowly focused and dated almost immediately. But
| some of the techniques and "moves" became genuinely mainstream
| and it's fairly reliable as a reference to them. And some of the
| others _didn 't_, but could have and are useful, and unless you
| were cooking at one of a couple dozen restaurants from 2002-2008
| you're unlikely to find another detailed guide to how to do them.
|
| That said, for a lot of the detailed technical stuff, they
| generally chose to authoritatively select one specific approach
| to a technique, eliding details that can definitely be a big deal
| at this level of precision. Sometimes the "recipe" is really more
| of a demo, silently depending on details like a neutral pH,
| making it prone to failure if modified but too basic to be usable
| in its presented state.
|
| Also some of the techniques simply don't work as written.
| Specifically the ones that are presented as novel simplifications
| for complex molecular gastronomy operations are really hit or
| miss. I suspect these are just really bad cases of the previous
| point, where there is a hidden variable they didn't document,
| that didn't come up in testing. But there is a replication crisis
| in cookbooks too, this is not out of the norm though it is
| frustrating.
|
| It also raises the annoying question that's been in my head for
| 15 years now: wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?
| dluan wrote:
| i hated the era of foam, gel, and sous vide everything. as a
| home cook, i want the randomness that comes with hand
| technique, but if im paying for a 2/3 star meal i still also
| want the randomness and authenticity that comes with hand
| technique, not to be bored out of my mind or trying to show me
| some impressive lab grade "consistency".
|
| in another 20 years, we'll look back on this like we did
| mayonnaise and meat aspics from the 1950s.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I mean the things you mentioned are deeply out of style in
| restaurant cooking right now. So we already do look back on
| this in a similar way. And they were never _that_ common
| either. This trend had a short peak and the training,
| staffing, equipment, r &d costs were all sky high. The
| backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind
| of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless
| you were specifically seeking it out.
|
| Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical
| technique with good results for certain protein preparations,
| and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through
| the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear
| from american cooking.
| mcphage wrote:
| > The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never
| my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into
| it unless you were specifically seeking it out.
|
| I'm not sure what the backlash was (I'm nowhere near that
| scene), but as a tactic, it could be that the reason for
| the disproportionate backlash was to _prevent_ this style
| of cooking from becoming more widespread, rather than in
| _reaction_ to its presence.
| skyyler wrote:
| >wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?
|
| He covers this in the first 5 pages or so, doesn't he?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I know what you're talking about and it's been a while but I
| remember it being kind of a headscratcher. He says some stuff
| about innovation and then mentions bauhaus but (in my memory
| at least) failed to connect the book or his approach to
| cooking to the modernist movement in a compelling way. And
| also failed to convince me that he knew anything about
| modernism except the name and a vague association with
| mid-20th-century aesthetics.
| flower-giraffe wrote:
| For those that don't know the primary author is Nathan Myhrvold
| who was the first CTO at Microsoft.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold
| dluan wrote:
| and founder of the largest patent troll "Intellectual
| Ventures". both efforts now feel dated and cringey.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I don't hear about it anymore. What happened to it?
| tyleo wrote:
| I'm surprised to see this on the front page! I posted this on a
| whim after buying Modernist Cuisine at Home last week. It's
| essentially, "cooking for scientists and engineers" and has a
| great breakdown of ingredients, cooking tools, and why things are
| the way they are. It's surprisingly written by Microsoft's former
| CTO.
|
| I shared the full version but haven't read it. I'd highly
| recommend the home version if you are interested in cooking
| though.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Does it show how to stay free, and/or reduce modernist
| contaminations, or is that intellectual venture part of the
| 'molecular kitchen'?
| fnordlord wrote:
| I've always wanted to check out these cookbooks but they are
| beyond my price threshold for cookbooks. For baking fans though,
| they did a great little podcast series to promote their Bread
| book a while back.
|
| https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/modernist-breadcrumb...
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I dont understand the hate for this book. A very smart and
| wealthy man spent a lot of coin geeking out on a passion. Doesnt
| seem very different from Jay Leno and his garage or Tom Hanks and
| his typewriters.
|
| Compared to the ketamine and influence that our current
| billionaires spend their money on, it seems pretty harmless.
| fmajid wrote:
| Because Myhrvold is the single most notorious patent troll, bar
| none.
| balfirevic wrote:
| One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos
| onename wrote:
| It seems Nathan Myhrvold also made a TED talk about it.
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cooking_as_never_s...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-24 23:00 UTC)