Posts Tagged ‘modernist cuisine’

Nathan Myhrvold’s presentation on the Modernist Cuisine book is loaded with astonishing facts and figures: over 2400 pages, 46 lbs., 4 pounds of ink… the list goes on.  But, he leaves out a great deal of the behind-the-scenes facts about  the book and the process of its creation.  As we enter early April, just under a month after the first copies shipped, we are finally uncovering details of the real story behind Modernist Cuisine.  Below are a a few little-known facts that I was able to gather from members of the kitchen team who have asked to remain nameless.

1. The working title of the book was How to Boil Distilled Water At Sea Level Using A Conductive Heat Source and a Wet Bulb Thermometer.  It was later changed to Modernist Cuisine to conserve ink.
2. A month before the book went to print, the team decided to cut a 6th volume that described  the physiology of the human body’s digestive process.
3. As lifelong fan of hidden clues and puzzle-solving, Nathan has placed a secret clue inside the printed pages of book 5. If you cut off the book in half vertically down the exact center and view each half from the side, the interior edge of the stacked pages reveals the recipe for Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum.
4. The book originally included a recipe for Coca Cola, which the Modernist Cuisine team reverse-engineered using a mass spectrograph. However, efforts to recreate an edible aluminum can were problematic, and the recipe was ultimately discarded.
5. The iconic “cutaway” photos in the book were actually created using a prototype device that resembles a light saber.  Intellectual Ventures has several working “light sabers” which it uses for testing defenses against (according to a research assistant) “pests significantly larger than a mosquito”. 
6. During the book’s production, photographer Ryan Matthew Smith was asked to leave a Seattle restaurant after connecting a fiber optic strobe flash to his cell phone camera and tossing his meal in the air.  Ultimately, the restaurant owner apologized and asked to purchase the photo.
7. One of the more famous recipes in the book is the Modernist Hamburger, which requires over 30 total hours and a bowl of liquid nitrogen to create.  Unfortunately, the team decided to exclude their recipe for “2 AM Mini Hamburgers”, which was inspired during the teams extensive experiments with methods of smoking herbs.
8. The recipes in the book have clearly undergone rigorous testing.  However, the extent of the tests is often greater than we realize.  For example, one member of the culinary team spent four days measuring the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  He concluded, applying the central limit theorem, that the number is three.
9. Although it is true that the genesis of the book was Nathan’s desire to understand sous vide cooking, it is not widely known that Nathan turned to sous vide because his microwave had broken and he needed a reliable way to reheat frozen taquitos.
10. If you were to sum the cooking time for all of the recipes (not including parametric variations) included in the books, the result would be 8 years, 2 months, 15 days and 9 hours.  However, the book was completed in fewer than seven years, leading some to conclude that Nathan Myhrvold has secretly developed a time machine.

I hope these facts have given you an inside look at the creation of Modernist Cuisine.  And, as always, happy April fool’s day.

For the past year, I’ve been meeting with Jethro Odom and Eric Rivera several times a month to challenge ourselves to learn modernist cooking. We call ourselves Jet City Gastrophysics, a name that we use with a healthy dose of levity.  Part of our mission has been to learn a new set of fundamentals – working with hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, cooking sous vide, using a centrifuge, spherification, using liquid nitrogen and dry ice, experimenting with transglutaminase (meat glue), making powders and mastering dehydration, pressure cooking, and a whole lot of deep frying.  These techniques are being employed by a small but growing handful of chefs worldwide, but by very few restaurants locally. 

For the past 5 months, our goal has been to craft a menu that lets us showcase what we’ve learned, and present a dining experience that is unique and distinct from anything you’ll find elsewhere.  We’ve named this project our “Thesis Dinner”.  Earlier this year, we got the official word that we would have the opportunity to host some very special guests in April (but more on that later).  With an applewood fire lit under our asses, we presented the first run through of our menu this week to a small group of guinea pigs, none of whom experienced any form of foodborne illness (or vertigo).  Below is a small glimpse at a few of the dishes we’ve been working on, with much more to come in the next few months. 

Above: Shrimp Cocktail.  Restructured shrimp on a sesame tuille with clementine, chili oil and grapefruit zest.  Underneath is cocktail sauce for sous vide shrimp. 

Fried Egg.  Sous vide egg yolk on a cilantro stem nest.  Hollandaise, Sriracha salt.

Duck prosciutto (care of Eric Rivera).  Olive oil and edible flowers.

Take out Pho with Playful Accompaniments (not shown).

Sweet Sushi: lima bean gel, coconut rice, nori.

As a heuristic, I tend to avoid foods labeled as “vegan” because, in my limited experience, they tend to be poor imitations of their non-vegan counterparts.  Sure, a tomato is both vegan and delicious, but I’ve never met a vegan pizza that tasted better than the paper on which they print Dave Matthews tickets.  However, at my first visit to the Intellectual Ventures kitchen lab last summer, I ate a bowl of pistachio gelato, which I was later informed was (you guessed it) vegan!  The gelato was smooth and silky, and unquestionably better than any lactose-free ice cream I’ve ever tried.  And although the Modernist Cuisine book doesn’t wander into the realm of desserts, luckily for us, their pistachio recipe is their sole exception.  I’ve substituted cashews for pistachios, but other nuts will work just as well.  I’ve also simplified the emulsifiers called for in the book, which means you can find everything you need to make this recipe at a (finer) grocery store.

Shopping list:

• 680 g water
• 210 g cashew butter (available in the nut butters aisle at Whole Foods)
• 102 g cashew oil
  Note: I haven’t been able to find a bottle of cashew oil, straight up.  Instead, I poured off the oil that had settled at the top of my cashew butter.  Using this amount only yielded 1/5 of the recipe. You can sacrifice 4 more jars, or substitute the remainder with walnut, hazelnut, macadamia, peanut, or even safflower oil – just make sure the oil is unused, or your gelato will taste like french fries.
• 155 g fine baker’s sugar
• 22 g salt
• 2.5 g Xanthan gum
• 2.5 g Guar gum
  Note: both Xanthan gum and Guar gum are available under the Bob’s Red Mill brand at finer grocery stores.

1. Combine the water, cashew butter, cashew oil, sugar and salt in a food processor or blender.  Blend until very smooth.
2. Add the Xanthan gum and Guar gum and blend until combined, about 30 seconds.  The mixture should thicken to the consistency of cream.
3. If necessary, chill the mixture in the refrigerator for 1 hour.  Churn in an ice cream maker, following the manufacturer’s instructions.  If you don’t have an ice cream maker, break 2.5 lbs of dry ice into 1/2” pieces.  Add the gelato base to a stand mixer with the paddle attachment installed.  Mix on medium, then add the dry ice.  Continue mixing until the dry ice fog has stopped.  Transfer to an airtight container and store in the freezer.

This gelato screams “cashews” and is delightfully salty. Now that you’ve got a reliable recipe for nut-based vegan gelatos, you can finally open that Fremont dessert shop you’ve always dreamed of… bongo drums and all.

Tuesday night was the official book launch party for Modernist Cuisine, the 2400+ page epic that can only be defined loosely by the term “cookbook”.  Although it doesn’t begin shipping until March 7th (and you may have to wait longer than that), the book has already sold over 3400 copies in pre-order and has entered Amazon.com’s Top 100 for books, not just cookbooks. 

The launch party, hosted at the Palace Ballroom, was a sold out but still intimate evening.  Admission included a small plate of samples from the book – dehydrated pear, a cube of pastrami with a rye cracker, fried chicken, and a dehydrated corn chowder that blasts into existence only once inside your mouth.

Tom Douglas introduced Nathan Myhrvold, the book’s creator, with obvious reverence and respect.  Apparently, on Monday night, and a handful of renowned chefs, including Tom, gathered at the Intellectual Ventures kitchen lab in Bellevue and were treated to a 30-something course dinner of  a lifetime.  One of the ironies in the way this book was made was that there is no restaurant associated with their kitchen – they have no customers, so until recently, nobody knew what the food tasted like, exactly.  Luckily for a handful of world-class chefs and prominent journalists (and on a separate occasion, one extremely fortunate food blogger, me), the Modernist Cuisine team has been throwing a series of dinner events to prove just how good these dishes taste.

Nathan spoke to the crowd, armed with a PowerPoint to show off spreads from the book, and talked with his usual candor about the process of creating the book.  He commented on the risk-averse nature of both the US Department of Health and the world of book publishing – the former being a politically-driven machine full of inconsistency, and the latter being a least-common-denominator-driven machine full of compromise and devoid of flexibility.  He seems to have set both of those industries straight, likely to their embarrassment.

The audience oohed and aahed when Nathan showed footage captured by his super-high speed camera – a corn kernel popping, oil drips hitting a a hot coal, droplets of liquid nitrogen dancing on the surface of a counter.  At one point, he showed an extremely slow motion shot of a champagne cork popping from the neck of a bottle.  It was the stuff rap videos are made of, minus the spinning rims.

During the Q&A, Nathan made the themes of the book very clear: they refused to compromise on quality, nothing should be “dumbed down”, and the vast majority of the book really was accessible to anyone with some basic kitchen gear.  However, it was near his closing remarks that Nathan really explained his motivation.  “I wanted to write this book as a way to give back to the world of cuisine, which has given me so much.”  Indeed, I hope the world of food can continue to find benefactors as generous and as genius as Dr. Myhrvold.

Modernist Cuisine [Amazon]

If you haven’t already, read How The Modernist Cuisine Book Caused My Existential Crisis – Part 1.

And so I wallowed in my untimeliness, still gawking with the turn of every page at the unparalleled photography and exhaustive parametric permutations of each new recipe.  “What could I possibly write now?” I questioned.  And then I had a realization….

It occurred to me that the modernist food revolution I was so sad to miss has actually just barely started.  Rather than feeling “late to the party”, I now recognize that the publication of Modernist Cuisine represents a critical phase for the movement: democratization. 

Until now, only a few chefs in the world have been able to execute the types of dishes featured in the Modernist Cuisine book.  Most of these chefs (Ferran Adira, in particular) are highly skilled and highly creative people, but they’re also people who have the time and resources to devote to such an R&D-heavy brand of cooking.  Experimentation certainly doesn’t come cheap.

Let’s take, for example, the problem of thickening…

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Right now, I’m one of the few very fortunate people in the world who have a copy of the Modernist Cuisine book.  I’ve been a vocal fan(boy) of the project for nearly a year now.  As my wife can attest, discussing the subject of this book has been a favorite pastime of mine… at cocktail parties, friends’ birthdays, on vacation, to tech support call operators, at drive-through windows, and to just about anyone else who will listen.  About two weeks ago while I was driving to work, I got an email asking if I could swing by the Intellectual Ventures office to pick up a review copy.  I nearly drove my car through the median in my eagerness.

I got the books, brought them home, and posted an “unboxing coming soon” teaser article.  That was two weeks ago.  Since then – not a single mention.  The books that I’ve been salivating over for nearly a year finally arrive and I don’t post a word.  What happened?

I had an existential crisis.

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Yes, the box really does way 46 lbs.  Look for an update later this evening.

It is undeniably fashionable, these days, for an upscale restaurant to serve “their take” on macaroni and cheese.  I’ve seen it prepared at least a dozen ways: with wild mushrooms, with truffles, with bleu cheese, with cave-aged gruyere, in mini-cocottes, on oversized platters, broiled, baked, and deep fried.  For the record, there’s nothing wrong with any of these preparations.  In fact, we served a wild mushroom and truffle oil mac & cheese at my wedding!  However, I wanted to take the concept to the extreme and produce the most hyperbolic, modernist version of the dish I could… just to see what happened.  The result: maltodextrin-powdered Beecher’s cheese with a tableside hot cream to make an “instant” sauce.

I originally thought I’d post my results as a joke – an over-the-top preparation that was to comfort food what the Dyson Air Multiplier is to climate control.  However, I was delightfully surprised to find out that this mac & cheese actually tasted fantastic!  The flavors are extremely pure and the consistency of the instant sauce was perfect.  Watch out, Kraft… you’ve got competition.

Makes: 2 snobby servings
Total kitchen time: 4 hours (45 minutes working time)

For the Powdered Cheese:

• 100g Beecher’s Flagship (or Smoked Flagship, if you prefer), grated
• 30g water
• .4g sodium citrate
• 200g (+15g) tapioca maltodextrin

1. Preheat your oven to its lowest setting (180-220°F).
2. Combine the cheese, water and sodium citrate in a small saucepan.  Heat on low until completely melted.  Stir to ensure evenness.
3. Transfer the cheese mixture to a small food processor and add 200g of tapioca maltodextrin and process until it forms a paste.  If you can’t fit all of the tapioca maltodextrin at once, add half and process, then add the remainder.
4. Spread the paste in a thin, even layer onto a silicone baking sheet.  Bake until dry and brittle, 2-3 hours. 
5. Crumble the cheese mixture into a food processor, or preferably a clean, electric coffee grinder.  Process until the mixture becomes a fine powder.  If necessary, add an additional 15g of tapioca maltodextrin.  The mixture should have the same texture as the powdered cheese in instant macaroni and cheese.

For the dish:

• 1 cup pipe rigate (or any other type of macaroni you’d like)
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• Hawaiian black lava salt
• 2 sprigs thyme

1. Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the box.
2. Meanwhile, heat the heavy cream to a simmer.  Just before serving, divide the cream into two mini sauce pots (I used glass port sippers, shown in the photo).
3. To plate, sprinkle a two tablespoons of the cheese powder into a small bowl.  Top with pasta, sprinkle with a pinch of black lava salt, and garnish with thyme.  To finish the dish tableside, pour over the hot cream and stir well to make the cheese sauce. 

I owe a big thanks to Maxime Bilet (author of Modernist Cuisine) for giving me a hand with the powdered cheese recipe.  If you aren’t up for ordering a pound of maltodextrin online, you can also use my simplified powdered cheese recipe from the Beecher’s Cheddar Cheetos article I wrote for Seattle Weekly.  However, tapioca maltodextrin (N-Zorbit) is pretty handy stuff for turning liquids into powders, and is a staple in modernist kitchens.

It’s time I let you in on a secret. I fantasize all the time. I have wild, indulgent fantasies that sometimes go on for days and would make a hedonist blush. They’re detailed, vivid thoughts of sometimes sordid, occasionally illegal, always climactic experiences. I have these fantasies when I’m falling asleep at night, when I’m taking a shower, and especially when I’m cooking dinner. You see, these fantasies, believe it or not, are about food.

We’ve all had the occasional Iron Chef narrative run through our head as we toil away in the kitchen–the disembodied voice of Alton Brown commenting on the deftness of our knife strokes and pungent smell of our chiffonaded herbs, occasionally tossing in his prediction of our intent: "I believe the challenger is making . . . yes, that looks like a blanquette de veau." However, my fantasies are usually about a meal, the meal, in which all of my wildest wet food dreams materialize, if only for one supper. The strange part is that the fantasy comes in two flavors.

Fantasy #1 is what you might expect from me if you’re a regular reader: Ferran Adrià and a cadre of other chefs put on a modernist feast that lasts for hours and requires a team of 50 to prepare. The "kitchen" is stocked with colloid mills, spray freezers, centrifuges, particle accelerators, and at least one flux capacitor, which is critical to correctly execute the palate-cleanser between the 16th and 17th course. The dishes that emerge are full of surprises and textural transformations. There’s a non-Newtonian truffle foam that coyly evades my fork’s stabbing advances. Hand-sculpted lickable crystals, arranged in homage to Superman’s fortress of solitude, are shattered tableside to reveal a lilac fog that rolls over a champagne-fed morel-mushroom edible landscape. The spherified tears of a Siberian white tiger are served in orchid cups, topped with a magnetically insulated coconut plasma. The foods seem to defy the laws of physics, and flavors are so bold, vivid, and unexpected that I do a double-take with each bite. As I’m eating, I cleverly reverse-engineer the complicated processes that transformed the rare and exotic ingredients into the high-concept, impressionist dishes that emerge in a never-ending sequence from a buzzing stark-white kitchen.

Fantasy #2 is different . . . in fact, quite the opposite. I’m in a country house, sitting at a large wood table resawn from the heart of a felled tree. Just outside, embedded in the acres of manicured landscape, are rows of vegetable beds growing the most beautiful and succulent herbs, lettuces, red beets, potatoes, cauliflower, legumes, and carrots I’ve ever seen. On a shady patch of land dominated by a century-old evergreen, 10,000 wild mushrooms poke up from the soil, already washed clean by a passing morning storm. Near the house, a brown hog is slurping peacefully from his trough of maple syrup, 30 year-old brandy, and charred applewood. Later, when I visit him with my knife, he turns gleefully onto his back to offer me a slab of bacon from his ever-healing belly. On the rolling hills in the distance, a flock of argyle sheep have been standing guard outside the naturally dehumidified cave in which they age the wheels of cheese they lay each spring. In the kitchen, a silent chef wielding no more than a blade and an iron skillet prepares a feast over a wood fire. The dishes are simple and pure, requiring no seasoning except a generous lump of golden raw butter, churned à la minute.

First, a scramble of eggs, already fluffy and lightened by the hens’ daily intake of fresh Jersey cream. Next, a steaming plate of roasted root vegetables–carrots, beets, turnips, radishes–with colors so vibrant and pigmented that they stain the white platters. Then a soup of green peas, roasted porcinis, and cured ham. Loaves of crusty bread emerge from the crackling wood oven, glistening with flaky salt mined from a Himalayan boulder deposited by a passing glacier two million years ago.

Reaching for his ingredients, the chef opens the refrigerator door, which is actually a pass-through into the farm where a quartet of sage-coated border collies have been laying out the mise en place for the meal. The chef picks up a decadently marbled tenderloin which has been dry-aged by the wing flapping of swans and tenderized by the gentle, rhythmic humping of a dozen field mice. He sears the steak perfectly, releasing tears of demi-glace which I spoon atop a snowy-white mash of russet potatoes, already flavored by the Provençal herbs with which the land is fertilized monthly. Every dish is unadulterated, every ingredient is clearly identifiable. The flavors define purity, and the terroir is a tangibly connective thread throughout the meal and its backdrop.

I’m not the only one who has fantasies like this. At last night’s release party for the book "Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land" by Kurt Timmermeister, 200 people showed up to thank Kurt for making their fantasy #2 come true. For the past five and a half years, Kurt has served a Sunday dinner at his farm house on Vashon Island. And although he may have different methods for aging his beef than those I picture in my fantasy, his dinners have evoked the same emotion. All the ingredients (with very few exceptions) come from his 13 acres, and the food is transformed as minimally as possible on their short journey from his farm to his table. I wrote about my dinner experience there some time ago, but listening him speak last night, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is some amount of tension between my two fantasies.

Lots of folks have raised concerns that modernist cooking (or "molecular gastronomy," as it is often called) is an aberration or a perversion of cuisine, and that the chemicals used in the process are inherently unworthy of ingestion. After all, it takes a fair amount of manipulation to turn an olive into a powder, a gel, a sphere, a foam, or a flash-frozen tuille. Standing among a roomful of Kurt’s fans, I imagined how they would respond if I gathered up bushels of farm-fresh produce and proceeded to cryo-fry it in a vat of liquid nitrogen. My guess? They’d find other uses for the pitchforks besides shoveling hay.

Then, I imagined what it would be like at a release party for a modernist chef’s memoir. I’ve recently been reading the latest biography of Ferran Adrià, and I know his followers would attend in droves, bringing equally strong sense memories of their Fantasy #1-like experiences at el Bulli. Ferran is credited for contributions to cooking in the way Einstein is recognized for contributions to physics, and without his genius, the cutting edge of cuisine today may not have evolved past the iceberg wedge salad. Outside a small set of emerging modernist techniques, Western civilization has been cooking the same way for several hundred years. Yes, it is novel in 2011 to eat an entire meal gathered from a few acres of land, but for most of human history, you had no other choice.

Is there a tension between my two fantasies? No, not at all. If done with integrity, there’s plenty of room for both approaches. For example, I admire the anatomical realism of da Vinci’s drawings, or the way in which Vermeer accurately depicted natural light. But I also appreciate the emotive reinterpretation of the subjects in Picasso’s paintings or the stylized exaggeration in Modigliani’s portraits. In the same way, I love raw butter churned from the fresh cream of a happy cow, and the powdered bone marrow you might choose to sprinkle on top. Modernist cooking is not opposed to farm-to-table; in fact, I would bet Ferran’s groupies would love a dinner at Kurt’s. However, modernist cooking is new and new things scare a lot of people–especially people with limited information. Try this experiment: Tell your friends you’re getting into modernist cooking and so seasoned their food with sodium chloride, which you ordered off the Internet. Count the number of friends who freak out (they weren’t paying attention in 8th grade chemistry, or they’d know sodium chloride is table salt).

I’m glad that these two movements are happening simultaneously. It indicates that we as a society are starting to care more about what we eat and how. In a nation that has become monopolized by industrial food production, our own apathy is our biggest weakness against better eating. Although Kurt’s dinner series has ended, we’re lucky to live a short drive from some of the best small farms in the country . . . and they serve dinner too. Go eat something that was just picked from the ground, or just slaughtered for your dinner. Then go eat something modern and unexpected, designed to challenge your preconceptions. When dinner is over, you’ll have all-new fodder for your food fantasies.

If you’ve been playing along at home, you know that I’m a teeny-tiny bit obsessed with the soon-to-be-released, 2400-page Modernist Cuisine book.  Well, my excitement skyrocketed last week when I had the rare privilege to peek at a few hundred [digital] pages of the book, guided by author, CEO and hero of geeks everywhere, Dr. Nathan Myhrvold.  I was honored by the invitation, which I can only assume was prompted by a prank phone call from the Make A Wish Foundation on my behalf.

Among the seemingly endless pages of stunning photographs, captivating history and practical instruction, the book is sprinkled with fascinating tidbits like this one.  Did you know that you can measure the speed of light using your microwave and a few slices of Kraft Singles?

From the section “Cooking in Modern Ovens”:

You can measure the speed of light by melting cheese, chocolate or even marshmallows in your microwave.  Microwave cooking leaves patterns of melting on soft, smooth surfaces that correspond to roughly half the wavelength of a microwave.  These patterns are caused by the way the microwaves crisscross in the oven chamber and either combine their energies or cancel one another out.

Here’s how to replicate the experiment at home.

1. Cover a flat plate, platter or cardboard disc with soft cheese slices.
2. Place the plate in the microwave.  If your microwave has a turntable, disable it, or remove the turntable platter and place the plate on an inverted ramekin to bypass the turntable motor.
3. Heat on low power until it has melted in several spots.
4. Measure the distance, in millimeters, between the centers of any two melt spots.  Double that number to get the wavelength. 
5. Multiply the wavelength by the frequency, in MHz, of your microwave (listed on the back).  For example, if your microwave is 2.45GHz (typical), you’d multiply by 2,450,000.  [We multiply by MHz instead of GHz to fudge in a factor of 1000, which is the conversion from millimeters to meters.]
6. Compare your value to the generally accepted value of 299,792,458 meters per second

The value I calculated was 306,019,200, which is is only off from the actual value by 2%.  Not bad for fake cheese! 

Between now and the release of the book in March, I’ll be highlighting a few more geeky food tricks from the book.  In the meantime, you can find more information at http://modernistcuisine.com/.  If you’re ready to pull the trigger, the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

Here she is, ladies and gentlemen, in all her 46lb glory!  This is the first published image of the Modernist Cuisine books, in their acrylic case.  This shot doesn’t show the accompanying kitchen manual, but it is enough to make food geeks everywhere salivate.  That March 14th date can’t come soon enough!

This turned out to be one of the more dangerous machines I’ve ever built.  The goal was to make a cotton candy machine out of parts I had lying around.  The finished product was an aggressive, 1/2 horsepower, 4000°F beast of a machine that lasted long enough to prove itself before dying of awesomeness. 

If you want to build a cotton candy machine at home, all you need is:

• A tin can, like a tuna or dog food can
• A drill with a very small drill bit
• A motor (ex, your drill, an old CD player, a blender)
• A heat source, such as a propane torch, a lighter, or the coils from an old toaster
• A bucket to catch the cotton candy, or alternately a sheet of paper to wrap around the assembly
• Sugar

Follow the steps in the video to see just how easy this machine is to build.  Oh, and don’t forget… safety first.  My favorite part of this project was setting up a blast shield in front of the camera before we turned on the machine.

Special thanks to Victor (@sphing) for filming!

 
‘Tis the season of giving, and particularly, giving back.  Unfortunately, hunger remains a pressing issue in Western Washington.  Every day, far too many individuals and families don’t know where they’ll find their next meal.  Luckily, Seattle is home to more than a few fantastic role models for the fight against hunger.  One such leader is Chef Maxime Bilet, a member of the Intellectual Ventures team and co-author of the Modernist Cuisine book (available in March 2011).  I had the chance to ask Maxime about his work with the Hunger Intervention Program and how modernist cooking fits in with fulfilling basic nutritional needs.

What does the Hunger Intervention Program do, and why is it important to Seattle?

The Hunger Intervention Program (HIP)is a local non-profit here in Seattle whose mission is to provide nutritious meals and basic cooking skills to the homeless and hungry. HIP’s new initiative is the Community Kitchen – an incredible initiative to help empower homeless and low income families to feed themselves by providing hands-on training in food preparation, safety, and nutrition education. They have recently begun using the community kitchen to reach out to mentally disabled patients.

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On Thursday, I had the extremely rare privilege of getting an inside look at the kitchen laboratory at Intellectual Ventures.  If you aren’t aware, Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures CEO) along with chefs Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, has spent the last four years working on the book Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.  This will be no ordinary cookbook – at 2400 pages and 5 volumes, it is unarguably the most in-depth, detailed compendium on the scientific process of cooking that has ever been written.  I’ll have many more interesting facts on the book in upcoming posts, but if you want the big picture, check out my interview with Nathan Myhrvold back in May.

The pictures and videos below are from a reception that the Modernist Cuisine team hosted as part of the International Food Blogger’s Conference.   Needless to say, this is the most sophisticated kitchen on earth, and as a food geek, I was in heaven.  Click through for more photos and video.

[Click the picture to view full-size] This panorama gives you a sense of the kitchen’s layout.  All of the stations are on wheels and the whole kitchen can be rearranged as the team focuses on different projects. 

In this video clip, CEO and King of the Food Geeks Dr. Nathan Myhrvold discusses the decision to not dumb down the book to cover only the equipment you’re likely to have in your home kitchen.

[Click the picture for the full-size image (so you can read the labels)]  This is the Modernist Cuisine kitchen’s idea of a spice cabinet.  Many of the products are available through the website www.chefrubber.com

A centrifuge is used here to separate solids from liquids and clarify sauces and stocks.  The green bottle is finely-blended raw peas that have separated into solids and pea water.

In this video, Chef Chris Young talks about the benefits of having a kitchen without customers.  The unique design of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen allows the staff (up to 36 people at certain points in the book’s development) to focus on research and testing of new recipes and techniques. 

You’re looking at the world’s only deep-fried watermelon chips.  I have no idea how they managed to deep fry watermelon, but I promise that it’s a dangerous proposition if attempted incorrectly.  The chips were light and delicious, with a recognizable hint of caramelized watermelon flavor.

Those look like beautiful cherries, don’t they? They’re actually made of foie gras.  And yes, they were delicious.

Chefs plate a small bite of horse mackerel sashimi with ginger and plum, proving that not all of the recipes require a particle accelerator.

My favorite dish of the night’: "tongue and cheek pastrami and rye”.  A thin slice of sous vide smoked Wagyu beef cheek is served with thinly-shaved tongue and delicate rye chips.  But, what makes this dish spectacular is the beef marrow mousseline (shown being shot out of a CO2 charger).  The mousseline is like the richest, fattiest mayonnaise you could imagine, except it’s made from sous vide egg yolks and bone marrow, and it is served warm. 

The frozen pistachio “cream” (ie. pistachio ice cream) alone is worth the price of the book.  As you can see from its beautiful glossy sheen, the ice cream was creamy and incredibly smooth.  What makes this dish really incredible is that the ice cream is made only from pistachios, emulsifiers and sugar.  No milk. No Cream. No eggs.  That’s right, it’s vegan!

And, for a little whimsy, they made olive oil and vanilla bean gummy worms.

And finally, I was thrilled to get a picture with Nathan.  See that grin on my face?  I kept it for days.

For more information on the book, check back here and also be sure to visit the official site for the project, www.ModernistCuisine.com. 

Update: The book finally has a shipping date – March 14th, 2011!  Pre-order your copy today!

If you couldn’t tell, I’ve been slightly obsessed with molecular gastronomy (“modernist cuisine” if you’ve read the Nathan Myhrvold interview).  Unfortunately, I’m a long way off from having centrifuges, rotary evaporators and tanks of liquid nitrogen lying around my lab kitchen.  Luckily, some of the geekiest cooking techniques work very well with home kitchen substitutes, and dry ice sorbet is the perfect example.  Eric Rivera first introduced me to this technique during one of our periodic food experimentation meetings.  Depending on the sugar content of the sorbet base and the type of mixer attachment, you can produce anything from fluffy, soft, taffy-like sorbets like this one to desserts with the consistency of Dippin-Dots.  Last night I added lime zest, lime juice and a shot of tequila to the sorbet base, then topped the result with lime salt for the coldest, sweetest smoothest margarita sorbet you’ve ever tasted!

Note: Whenever you’re working with dry ice, WEAR THICK GLOVES. Having sensation in your appendages is a good thing.

Note Two: In the video, I say to bring the sorbet base to a boil.  Further testing has shown that’s really not necessary.  A simmer is usually sufficient for the sugar and water to be completely combined.