Nathan Myhrvold’ six-volume Modernist Cooking, published in 2010, may be the cookbook to end all cookbooks. Chronicle food reporter Sophie Brickman, armed with her own training from the French Culinary Institute, takes it out for a test drive.
This is how Nathan Myhrvold scrambles his morning eggs:
He starts by putting an immersion circulator in a water bath and sets the temperature to 164 degrees; the machine will regulate the temperature to a fraction of a degree.
As the water is heating up, he cuts a square of Gruyere into small dice, then takes another square and shaves it against a Microplane grater, to ensure melted cheese nuggets and fluffy melted wisps throughout the eggs.
He then whisks the cheese with two whole eggs and one egg yolk—what he’s found to be the perfect ratio of fat to protein to achieve ultimate creaminess—pours the mess into a Ziploc bag and places the bag in the water bath. Then he takes a leisurely 15-minute shower as the eggs cook.
I ate those eggs. Without getting into details, they’re the platonic ideal of cheesy scrambled eggs. Put a slice of Myhrvold’s 72-hour short-rib pastrami next to them and serve it to a young Plato, and we might never have had his ideal, Academy, Dialogues, Republic ... only a fat Greek man.
Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine—the new six-volume, 2,400-page, 46-pound, spectacularly photographed book that retails for $625 and covers the history, science and technology of modern savory cooking—stopped by The Chronicle’s test kitchen recently to cook breakfast and talk about his newest contribution to the world. He sported a beard, short-sleeved chef’s jacket and boyish grin.
People call Myhrvold, the 51-year-old former Microsoft executive, a polymath—someone well versed in a wide range of subjects. But people also call James Franco a polymath.
We are dealing with an entirely different order of magnitude here. By the age of 23, Myhrvold had received a master’s degree in mathematical economics and a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton, after which he studied quantum field theory with renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. He was Microsoft’s first chief technology officer, dabbles in paleontology and reducing global climate change, is an award-winning wildlife photographer, helped a team win the 1991 World Barbecue Championship and is currently the CEO of Intellectual Ventures, a privately held company that develops patents.
For the past five years, he has channeled part of his epic nerdiness into the culinary realm, writing—with chefs Chris Young and Maxime Billet, along with a team that totaled 48—what is being hailed by chefs as perhaps the most important culinary book in our lifetime.
Modernist Cuisine touts the benefits of contemporary techniques that allow the precise regulation of temperature. These include sous-vide cooking—the process of vacuum-sealing food in a plastic bag, immersing it in water and, with the help of an immersion circulator, cooking it at exceedingly low temperatures to ultimate deliciousness. Other Modernist Cuisine-approved appliances include CVap and combi ovens that can steam, roast, poach, bake and broil all at once.
Consider the rib eye steak. Let’s say you want it perfectly medium rare inside—129 degrees—but crusty on the outside. Myhrvold’s recipe calls for cooking the steak for an hour at 131 degrees in steam mode in the combi oven until the core temperature reaches 129. Then the steak is dried without humidity at three different temperatures for 25 minutes to prepare for the sear.
This sounds nuts to traditionalists on many levels, not least of which is cooking a steak at 131 degrees. Compare this to broiling it in the oven at temperatures closer to 500 degrees.
“The traditional method is to say, ‘Use one approach and try to achieve two goals that are totally contradictory,’” Myhrvold says. “You can kind of balance them, but it’s always a trade-off. The modern approach says screw that. Instead of trying to do this as one step, let’s do it as two.”
Of course, not too many cooks will splurge on an immersion circulator and vacuum machine, which run $800 to $1,000 or more, or a combi oven for $12,000, but Myhrvold likens those appliances to the microwave.
“Microwaves started off wildly expensive,” he says, “and then they got popular and changed the way people reheat things. I think the same thing will happen for this kind of equipment. It will drop enormously in price.”
Myhrvold delivers these kinds of statements with certitude, and who are we to argue? He has backed up his culinary claims with rigorous scientific tests, and when asked to explain them, does so clearly, never patronizing or getting frustrated.
Admittedly, he’s been in the position of explaining his breakthroughs for most of his life to those of us not quite as bright—for those of us, say, whose first thought for how to eliminate global warming would not involve suspending sulfur-dioxide-emitting hoses 15 miles above the Earth.
But where we might push back is on the emotional level: Many devoted cooks would say that modernist cooking takes some of the joy out of our favorite pastime. His egg scrambling is antiseptic—no smell of foaming butter, no sound when the egg hits the pan, no pride when the eggs come out great. There’s just the lab-like whirring of a machine sitting on the counter and the guaranteed results of scientific precision.
“There are chefs who say this takes the skill out of it, or the soul out of it,” he says. “And I say, ‘I don’t want to be a human thermostat.’ This digital device can be a thermostat way better than I can, and I find no dishonor in that.”
This kind of precision cooking is more in line with the mentality of pastry chefs than it is with savory chefs, who often pride themselves on being able to pull steak out of the pan based on intuition and touch.
“Pastry chefs bought into this notion of saying we have to measure things and be precise,” Myhrvold says. “They also bought into the notion that you can’t be a pastry chef without dealing with lots of little white powders. When you start using unconventional ingredients, like gellan or agar or methylcellulose, to a pastry chef it’s like, ‘OK, fine. I used to have 10 strange white powders. Now I have 20. So what?’”
Methylcellulose? What about the approach epitomized by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, who prefers minimal manipulation of natural ingredients?
“There’s no way I’m going to stand up for bad ingredients,” Myhrvold replies. “We love seasonal ingredients. It’s a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.
“I don’t think having a chef modify an ingredient is necessarily bad,” he says, listing bread, wine and cheese as examples of modified “natural” ingredients.
Then it was time for breakfast. Myhrvold plated his sous-vide scrambled eggs and pastrami, and the Food & Wine staff gathered around to taste. After a chorus of “yums” from the staff and pleas from our editor to sell his homemade pastrami retail, he made his way out the door, immersion blender in hand.
He was on his way to meet his mother for lunch at Chez Panisse.