female speaker: please join mein welcoming to google new york nathan myhrvold. so nathan, you wanted to startwith a presentation about the book and give an overview. nathan myhrvold: yeah, let meshow some pictures, and then we can talk. female speaker: sounds good. and then we'll open it upfor q&a at the end. nathan myhrvold: great.
so i'm going to tell you alittle bit about "modernist cuisine at home." in 2011, wereleased this book, "modernist cuisine." this is what we callthe big book, which was an encyclopedic treatment of allaspects of cooking and the science behind it. so the really interestingquestion is, what do we do next? and one next thing after thatthat we could do, may still do, would be pastry baking anddessert, because the first
book didn't cover that. but as our next act, we decided,in fact, we would do modernist cuisineat home instead. and the idea was basically thatmodernist cuisine was about sort of the no holdsbarred approach to cooking. there are recipes that requirea centrifuge, or a rotary evaporator, or all kinds ofthings that most people-- i have them at home, butmost people don't have them at home.
so we decided we would do a bookthat would take the same ideas as "modernist cuisine,"but apply them in a way that was a smaller, little bitless daunting book. it's a little pamphlet,like 700 pages. female speaker: it weighs morethan my child, we were deciding earlier. nathan myhrvold: and try to dostuff that would address things that peoplecould do at home. so every recipe in here,you can do at home.
it doesn't require unusualequipment. and it doesn't requireunusual ingredients. and we also tried to reallyfocus on practical techniques and use lots of photography tomake it really easy to see what's going on. one side of these showsour step by steps. the other thing shows whatwe call a cutaway. this is where we showyou the magic view inside your equipment.
the people at vikinggave us this viking stove to cook with. we cooked with it for a while. and then we cut it in half. it's sort of like the 4h kidthat gets a little calf, and raises it up, and then, oops. but we cut it in halfso you can see what it looks like inside. like the first book, we havea washable kitchen manual.
it's on washable waterproofpaper. that's so you can take it inthe kitchen, get it dirty. it's a little bit smallerformat, too. and it folds back on itself,because it's spiral bound. and we kind of consider thisthe next part of "modernist cuisine," yet it's focusingon home cooking. and home cooking justmeans two things. one is what i said earlier, thatit's a set of stuff that you can do at home from anequipment perspective.
but equally important is thatit's a set of cooking recipes that are less formal. in the first book, we've gotrecipes from ferran adria, and thomas keller, and hestonblumenthal, and all the best chefs in the world. you don't typically cook thatfood at home all the time. in the new book, we have achapter on mac and cheese. we have a chapter onchicken wings, and other skewered snacks.
so it's a little bit less formalstyle, in addition to being a little bit moreaccessible from an equipment perspective. so here's uncompromisingphysical quality. i wish i could say that aboutmyself, but by god, i can say it about my book. so we tried to make the physicalaspect of the book kind of cool. it's big, it uses great paper.
this is sort of nerdy, but ifigured i'm at google, so that should be ok. but when you typically print apicture in a book, it uses half tone screen, and this iswhat it looks like when you blow it up. it's 175 line. an art book would usea 200 line screen. but this whole idea of using afixed screen is sort of an old analog world concept.
it's still done. we used something calledstochastic screening, which uses an error diffusionalgorithm, and the dots are now all created digitally. and you can see, it justlooks a lot better. here's another thing mostpeople don't realize. the gamut is therange of colors that inks can represent. and most inks have a hard timewith really saturated colors.
so here's a picture from thebook where the grey shows the stuff you can't actuallyrepresent in the color gamut. well, if you buy somethingcalled chroma centric inks, you can show it all. and so people will ask us, howdid you get all of that color in those pictures? is that because you digitallyprocessed it? and we said, no, we actuallysprung for the expensive ink. because it turns it you justcan't represent some colors,
particularly highlysaturated colors. you'll see it's the tomato, forexample, and some of the greens in the apple, or thegreens in that cauliflower. those are the things that don'tcome across, because they're highly saturated. now, of course, a good questionis, why the hell am i doing a book at all? why is it physical? and the original answer for"modernist cuisine" is that at
the time we started, therewere no tablet computers, except for the first version ofkindle, which was tiny and black and white. there was no ipad. it hadn't come out. and so we had to choose aplatform, and we chose print. but here's the other reason-- here's a picture from theoriginal book, and here's what it looks like on kindleand on an ipad.
and once you decide you're goingto do layout for a big, big high resolution display thatyou're going to get this close to, it's hardto just change it. of course you could do it. but if you just literally tookthe pdfs from the book and just said, i'm going to movethem onto a tablet, it's not very usable, because you'realways scrolling one way and scrolling another way. it also, to me, iskind of boring.
because if you just took thepdfs, you don't have any of the things that's magical aboutan interactive platform. so we're talking about onepossible future project is to make a really interactiveversion. but then that actually startsgetting to be real work, because you have to animate, andyou want to have a lot of things live, and you haveto have a little different user interface. so at some point, yeah.
for now, actually, print is agreat way to deliver large, high resolution picturesto people. and particularly, if i targetthe people in this room or in the tech industry, then tabletswould be even more appropriate. but if i want to have influencewith lots of traditional chefs around theworld and give them an ability to step up, actually print isprobably a better platform from that perspectiveat the moment.
so here's some fun factsabout the new book. two volumes, 9.9 poundsunpacked, 684 pages, 228 of which are waterproof. 23 chapters, 210,000 words,405 recipes, 114 that have step by step photos. and we took about 86,000pictures, of which 1,500 are in the book. so here's how we can sort ofput it in perspective. if you took "modernist cuisineat home," and you put it all
in one line of text at the sametype size, it would be 1.4 miles long, and that wouldstretch from 14th street up to 42nd street. so several subway stops. and of course we're here. that's the you are here. "modernist cuisine," the bigone, that actually would go from lower manhattan all theway up to 116th street. so here's another comparison.
people will say, why is thisbook so expensive? and we say, well, look. the first book was $625. list price, street price,maybe $460. the new book is $140. currently the streetprice is $130. i'd be surprised if thatdidn't go down. i have no way to control streetprice, of course. that's what retailerssell it at.
but it's only $0.41 per recipe,and $0.35 per recipe in the new book. it's $15.63 a pound for this,but only $14.00 a pound. how does that compare? parmesan-reggianois $19 a pound. we are cheaper thanparmesan cheese. so if you love cheese, youshould love this book. it's cheaper. female speaker: that'sa good sales pitch.
nathan myhrvold: yeah, i've beeni'm trying to come out of being a programmer and actuallylearn how to sell. as i said before, we've got lotsof step by step photos. i don't think we have a singlepage that doesn't have a color photo on it. here was another. in "modernist cuisine," wedecided we would have everything with weights. but our new motto is,now with teaspoons!
female speaker: forthe home cook. nathan myhrvold: becausehome cooks-- now, when people ask, what's thefirst gadget they should buy for their kitchen, ialways say a digital thermometer. and then the second oneis a digital scale. and they're like $20. this is not like any kindof expensive thing. but once you get into it,weighing ingredients is faster
and more accurate thanmeasuring them out. and you don't have to worryabout leveling it. and you don't have to worryabout is your sugar clumping a different way, or someother things. so i highly recommendthe weight approach. but now we have teaspoons,by god. whenever we do a recipe,we like to have lots of variations on those recipes. so here was something.
one spread shows pesto, and westarted off making pesto. and then we went, what the hell,let's make a whole bunch of pesto-like sauces. we started off with a chapteron chicken wings. and then we said, let's makeyakitori style chicken wings. but then if you like yakitori,tsukune, these chicken meatballs are really cool. and then pretty soonwe had saute, and tons of other skewers.
so we love having variations. and we want to encourage peopleto mess around and do cool new things with cooking. it's not about here's arecipe for one thing. lots of books will do that. we try to say, here's aprinciple, and here's an example, and now here's a coupleother examples, and then experiment yourself andgo take it other places. we have some tables.
we had a lot of tablesin the big book. we have fewer inthe small book. but here, if you're cookingmeat, there isn't a right way to cook it. if you want it rare or mediumrare or pink or medium, there's different levels anddifferent temperatures, different times thatyou can use. so we try to provide allthat information. we do have things on sousvide in the new book.
and sous vide is something thatmost people don't have the equipment for, butincreasingly they are. so we decided it was fair toput that in the new book. but we also have lots ofalternatives that don't require the equipment. so we have a sous vide salmonrecipe where you just cook it in the sink. just run the hot water. we have sous vide steaks forcamping or tailgate parties,
where you fill a big cooler fullof hot water, put your steaks in ziploc bags. just put them in there,no electric device or anything else. female speaker: no burgersat your house, are there? just, like, regular? do you eat just likea normal sandwich? never. nathan myhrvold: if i'm makingit, usually it's not normal.
but i mean, tonight, i'm givinga talk at the american museum of natural history. and so we're going toshake shack first. because it's the onlypragmatic way to get fed in a certain-- and they do good stuff. the first book had lots ofingredients that are pretty difficult to find. in this new book, we useingredients which
are all easy to find. but they still might notbe totally familiar. and again, we thoughtthat was ok. so we have things thatinvolve agar. people say, isn't thatsome weird chemical? and i say, well, actually, it'sbeen used in asia for 1,000 years. it's actually more traditionalthan gelatin by that standard. it's been around for longer.
but between that and a wholevariety of these other things-- whey protein powderfrom the health food store, or xanthin gum, which isin essentially every grocery store now. because you can't make glutenfree muffins without xanthin. as a result, it'salways there. and we're just saying, hey,now you can use it for something besides glutenfree muffins. you can thicken sauceswith it.
we have a lot of science in thisnew book, not as much as the previous book. but we have a lot of things thatwe describe the science of things, and then try toprovide pointers off to people, either in the web orother books, or the big book that will explain things more. hell of a processmaking the book. here's a few of the photos. here's one of our fun toys.
this is an ultra highspeed camera. it shoots hd quality720p video at 6,200 frames per second. so this lets us dothings like this. now, what i love about this iswhen i was a kid, i'd watch these roadrunner cartoons. and the roadrunner would run offthe edge of the cliff, and so would the coyote. but the coyote would only fallafter he looked down.
so nobody told the water it wastime to fall yet, so it kind of sits there. i'll run through a few of thespreads from the book, and we'll talk a little bit aboutit, and then we can turn into more of a conversation. this is our chapter on stocking the modernist kitchen. it's about different kindsof equipment, basically-- countertop tools.
it turns out if you take apicture of a blender while it's pureeing tomatoes, youmake a hell of a mess. but we had this great principlethat it only has to look good for a thousandthof a second. after that, if it all goes tohell, that's our problem. that's not the viewer'sproblem. here's what a whipping siphonlooks like from the inside, and we explain how you can usethis for making whipped cream or other kind of whipped foamthings, but also for all kinds
of other stuff. again, this is not apiece of equipment everybody finds at home. but they're like $20. and they're in every williamssonoma, so we thought it was fair game. here's our pressure cooker. we like pressure cookers. there's a lot of pressure cookerrecipes in the book.
here's our viking stovecut in half. microwave oven. i was just on the rachael rayshow right before coming here where i actually did twomicrowave things. watch closely, and we'lldiscuss it afterwards. so that's popcorn. female speaker: oh, amazing. nathan myhrvold: now, the coolthing about this from a science perspective is that whenwater flashes into steam,
it expands in volume bya factor of 1,600. so right now, a tinycrack has formed. this is a steam rocket,basically. and it's coming up,and it's trying to relieve the pressure. and it's relieving the pressurea little bit by leaking out, but that crack hasalso caused a fatal flaw in the skin of the popcorn. so you can watch it expanda little bit.
it's trying to relievethe pressure. but ultimately it's notenough, and woosh. open it goes. that's why the high speedcamera is so much fun. and here's what a microwavelooks like on the inside, including, we discuss whathappens inside the cavity magnetron, which is where themicrowaves are actually made. in the big book, we also haveinstructions for how you can measure the speed of lightwith velveeta and your
microwave oven. do try that at home. here's how we dothose cutaways. we have a machine shop. machine shop is part of our lab,and so i highly recommend having a machine shop. well, actually, i originallyhad a machine shop at home. but it's even nicer to have itin a place where people can run it 24 hours a day andclean up for you.
as a programmer myself, i lovethat most of these machines are also really programmable,so you can actually control them all by writing programs. here's one of ourcool machines. this is called an edm machine. see that wire? that wire has got a tremendousamount of electricity coming through it. sparks jump off the electricityunderwater.
and those sparks actuallyare able to cut almost any form of metal. so here, we're cutting acast iron dutch oven. and we speeded this up a littlebit, it's kind of slow. we drain the wateroff, and voila! we have cut it in half. female speaker: amazing. nathan myhrvold: and between theother pieces of equipment, we can cut glass.
we can cut almost anythingin half like that. in fact, i like to say we havetwo halves of one of the best kitchens in the world. you can see a couple of thosethat have the red glue on it. that's a high temperaturesilicone. so we take a piece of pyrex,we put a bead of the high temperature silicon on them. we glue the piece of pyrex glassto the edge of the pan. so we can actually cook in it.
now, that gives us thatred goopy look. and so that's where we use thelittle digital technology. when you cut a pan in half,you get two halves. so we put the other half in thesame position and take a picture, and that givesus the image bit for the edge of the pan. and then we substitute that infor where that red goop is, very much like the way in ahollywood movie, spider-man will fly through the airsupported by wires, then you
digitally remove the wires, andhe's flying without it. tons of other cool thingsin the book. here's two of them. most of the flavorof chargrilling comes from fat flareups. and one of the reasons whenpeople grill zucchini, the zucchini doesn't taste all thatcharbroiled is there's no fat in zucchini to drip. a steak, there'splenty of fat.
it renders out, it drips,you get a fat flareup. that's what gives you thecharbroiled flavor. so what do you do if youwant your zucchini to taste this way? you spritz olive oilon the fire. works great. and if you really want tosear something, you want the fire from hell? you take a hair dryer and youstick it up the vent of your
webber, and boy, oh boy. you can actually get it goingenough that if the coals are against the side of the webber,they'll go through. so don't do that. female speaker: so for thatphotograph, the one that you were just showing us, is thatwhere you put the glass on it? and then you actually cookedto make that photograph? nathan myhrvold:let me go back. so the answer is no, becausethe coals are so hot they
would break the glass. there's nothing infront of that. some people say, well, butwouldn't the coals fall? and we say, of coursethey would fall. that's why johnny wasunderneath there with a pair of tongs. and every time they wouldfall, he'd put it back. we made a hell of a mess so youcould get a cool picture. one of our guys lost hiseyebrows twice in things
flaring up. it's a real process. so anyway, here'sfat flareups. this is what happens. here the fat is dropping down. initially, it spends most of theenergy actually vaporizing and heating up. and then finally it catches. and it's that fat flareupthat makes most of the
characteristic chargrilledflavor. the difference between grillingand broiling is broiling, the heat'son the top. and so no fat can drip on it. and so you don't getthose flavors. and that's reallythe difference. here's a close up of thatsame picture here. here's our hamburgers. and there's nothingholding those in.
we've just sort of proppedthem right at the edge. and they kept falling. we have a big chapteron ingredients. ingredients, of course, reallycentral to all of cooking. something on basics. this is about makingsauces and stocks. a chapter on eggs, salads,and cold soups. turns out you need about two orthree pounds of raspberries dropped one or two at a timebefore you get the timing
right to get a photolike this. you drop them, and there's abunch of ways you can set up light beams to trigger. but there's variations enoughthat fundamentally, several pounds of raspberries dropped. female speaker: and nathan,you took a lot of these photographs yourself, correct? nathan myhrvold: that's right. yeah, i originally was goingto take all of them.
but i got a lot of otherthings to do. but i took quitea few of them. and then our photo teamtook the rest. here's salad making, pressurecooked vegetable soups. we had a recipe in modernistcuisine for carrot soup that was one of the mostpopular recipes. so we took it and made a wholechapter out of it, tried lots of other ingredients, managedto make it work with some-- the first version actuallyused a centrifuge.
so we weaned ourselvesoff the centrifuge. and here's a bunchof those soups. steak. we have a whole chapteron steak. carnitas. braised short ribs. so if that doesn't makeyou hungry, well then, you're a vegan. but, see pressure cookedvegetable soups earlier.
roast chicken. so roast chicken is aninteresting thing. the ideal roast chicken isfundamentally a contradiction. you're trying to get theinterior flesh to be juicy and the exterior to be crispy. but they're right besideeach other. so by the time you've heatedup the skin enough to be crispy, you've overcookedand dried out the flesh. so one thing people dois they brine it.
and if you dunk the wholechicken in salt water, the action of the salton the proteins-- the uncooked proteins of themeat-- actually makes them absorb a lot more water. and so there's a real physicalchemical reason that salt will make it juicier. trouble is, there's proteinin the skin also. and when you make the skinjuicy, that's called rubbery. so what do you do?
and the answer is, we usedsyringes to inject the brine into the meat without gettingany on the skin. now, you can say that's kind ofa freaky thing to do, but it turns out you can getsyringes all over the place. when i first started coming tonew york, it was union square park you'd go to get syringes. but in fact, there was anotherpark in the city which was informally called needle park. but you can get syringesall over the place.
and if you really care aboutmaking the ultimate chicken, this is how you do it. then the other thing is, we hangthe chicken inside the refrigerator like this. that prevents the salt fromaccumulating on the skin. and if you leave it uncoveredin the fridge with a plate underneath it, it letsthe skin dry out. and that makes it much easierto make it crispy. and this is the result.
when you do it right, when youtake the chicken out at the end, and you hit it with a tongsor a spoon, the skin will crack. it's almost like glass. and then here, we'reserving it. but we have another wholechapter on chicken wings. and i understand in one of thegoogle cafeterias today, they served a couple of our wings. female speaker: i don't thinkthey used hypodermic needles
there, but yes. nathan myhrvold: generallyfor the wings, you don't need to do. we have another techniquefor the wings. now, chicken noodle soup, sortof the jewish penicillin. we thought we'd do a wholechapter on that. here's our salmon chapter. pizza. mac and cheese.
that's the mac and cheesesauce being made. and boy, the interesting thinghere is, normally you put a lot of starch into a cheesesauce to keep the fat in the cheese from separating. cheese is an emulsion. and when you heat it uptoo hot to melt it, it separates out. you've probably seen pizzaswhere you get this layer of grease on the top, and then thecheese is kind of stringy
and disgusting? well, in a sauce, thatreally doesn't work. so the typical thing is, youput lots of starch in. well, that adds a lotof carbohydrates. but the main thing is,it dulls the taste. because the starch moleculeswind up coating everything, so it doesn't taste anywhere nearas cheesy as the cheese does. it's cheese-ish sauce,not cheese sauce. turns out if you add a littlebit of sodium citrate, which
is in every grocery store innew york, because it's also called sour salt. it's used in passover. it's also the solid formof citric acid. just a little bit of that keepsthe emulsion, and so you can make a cheese sauce thathas no starch in it at all, and it tastes amazinglycheesy. and then if you cast it intosheets, you can use that to make your own melty cheese tomake melted cheese sandwiches.
and we find melted cheesesandwiches work so much better when there's no gravity. recipes we developed for theinternational space station. so anyway, that's someof the pictures. and i thought we could-- female speaker: have a chat? nathan myhrvold: yeah. talk about it. female speaker: thank you.
that's extraordinary. you know, you call this"modernist cuisine at home." but i feel like your homekitchen is very different from my home kitchen. i think we've gathered that. i don't have things cutin half and the like. so what do you think i couldmake in my new york kitchen from your book withouthypodermic needles and a blow torch?
nathan myhrvold: well, you know,there's a lot of new york kitchens that havehypodermic needles. female speaker: not in thisaudience, i'm hoping. nathan myhrvold: and ilove blow torches. blow torches are one of thecoolest single tools. they're $20 at home depot. and when you need intenseheat to touch up. when you sear a steak, it'snice if you sear the edges of the steak.
it just looks a wholelot nicer. and you can do that by kind ofholding it up with tongs and trying to jam it into thebottom of the pan. that works. but it's even easierto put it on a pan. and you just take the blow torchand you go around the edge of the steak. so don't dismiss blow torches. but essentially all of therecipes in the book you can do
in your new york kitchen. some of them will be easier foryou if you get some sous vide equipment. some of them will turn out alittle bit better if you get a pressure cooker. but sous vide is themost exotic we get. but we thought it would bekind of a betrayal of our roots if we didn't includesous vide in a home book, especially now that everywilliams sonoma and sur la
table and comparablestores has them. so it sort of qualifies. but for people that don't havethem yet, we say how you can approximate it at home. female speaker: right. and what you said, runningthings under hot water. so the thing about sous vide isthat you want an accurate thermostat. in a lot of traditional cooking,you are the human
thermostat, either by using athermometer, or just by using your intuition, you're supposedto sit there and modulate the heat. well, digital technology makesmuch better thermostats then we will ever, ever be. and there's some people thatsay, well, if i use that, you're taking the soulout of cooking. and i say, bullshit. i do not feel soulful playingthe human thermostat.
sorry. that's something thattechnology can just do better than me. so we describe in the book howyou can do sous vide either by keeping a pot of water hot onthe stove and playing human or if you have a large volumeof water, in the case of the salmon recipe, you run the waterin the sink up to about 120, 130 degrees,you check that. the tap water will doin almost all cases.
then you seal the salmonin plastic bags. and you just put it in there. and as long as you've got areasonable size sink and not too much in the way of salmon,there's enough heat capacity in the water that you don't needto actually keep actively heating it to keep itthat temperature. the temperature willdrop a bit. but that's ok. female speaker: well, i mean,obviously technology is your
background. and that's sort of whereyou come from. and technology clearly plays ahuge role in all of your work on the modernist series. so can you talk a little bitabout that, and how your background in technology hassort of influenced the evolution of this series tothe point it's at now? nathan myhrvold: well, i justgave you one of the examples of i don't think it's really badto use digital technology
to control the thermostataccurately so i can have this exactly at the temperature thati want, or to use scales or other sorts of things. in the case of the first book,"modernist cuisine," i actually wrote a lot of code inthe process of making the book, because we did things topredict the heat distribution in a piece of food, or heatdistribution in a pan. does it matter that you havethe fancy copper pan? and the answer is, it reallydoesn't matter.
copper is a much betterheat conductor. so the idea is, well, you'regoing to get all this lateral heat movement. the thing is, the pan'sthis big around. the thickness is this much. so yeah, it's a goodconductor. but laterally, it would haveto go 100 times as far as it goes up. so it doesn't spread that muchunless you have a copper pan
with like, an inchthick block. oh, that would work great. but then it'd be too heavy tolift and too expensive to buy. and in fact, the real issue wediscovered in doing this modeling is you want to makesure your pan and your burner are well matched. you put a big pan on a littleburner, and no amount of fanciness in the pan isgoing to help you. if you size them appropriately,and your plan
is not tissue paper thick,you'll be fine. female speaker: i guessthe answer is it played a big role. technology, well, it's the way isee the world is through the lens of technologyand science. i had a reporter in the uk sortof give me a hard time for the first book. and they said, well, what makesyou think you should bring science intothe kitchen?
i said, i'm sorry, science wasalways in the kitchen. i'm just trying to takeignorance out. because the laws of natureare how things work. and you wouldn't say, oh gee,it's such a shame that the architect who built thisbuilding understood how buildings stand up. gosh, isn't that terrible? no, it's a great thing. that means we're not goingto come plummeting down.
and for the same reason, givingpeople insights as to how the science actually worksis both cool, if you're curious, and it's useful. and so i would like to say ourbooks are for people who are both passionate and curiousabout cooking. if you're not passionate aboutit, you're not going to buy a big fancy book like this. you don't necessarilyhave to be a cook. if you're curious enough,that'll do.
if you're not curious, there'sall kinds of cookbooks you can buy that'll say here's 30 minutemeals, or cooking for dummies, or something else. and you follow those recipesexactly, and you'll get what you get. it's if you have a curiosityto say, well why does it work that way? and how do chefs at toprestaurants do it? and why is this is done?
that's where we really havea proposition for you. and so the whole thing waswritten from a technologist's or a scientist's or anengineer's point of view, rather than from a traditionalist's point of view. female speaker: and so what wasthe initial inspiration for writing the series? as you mentioned, you obviouslycome from a technology background.
so where did the interestin food come in? nathan myhrvold: so i'vebeen interested in food since i was little. when i was nine years old,i decided to cook thanksgiving dinner. i told my mom she couldn'tcome in the kitchen. i cooked it all by myself. i would do a lot betterjob today. and then for many, many years,i was a self-taught chef.
when i was working at microsoft,actually, i decided i would stop beingself-taught. and i decided i wanted to goto chef school in france. so i convinced bill to giveme a leave of absence. and i went to work. well, to get into the chefschool, i had to have professional experience. so one night a week for twoyears, i worked in a french restaurant in seattle.
and then after that, the chefschool would take me. so i went and i went to thisintensive program there. and so i've been intoit for a long time. but then after leavingmicrosoft, i started cooking a lot more. that was kind of part ofthe reason i left. and i realized that therewasn't a big book that explained cooking from thepoint of view i had. now, there's two waysto make a product.
one is to say, i'm going to domarket research and find out what they want. and they is some funny set offolks that we interview them and run focus groupsand surveys. and it's a fine way of makinga product for some things. but that's not howwe did the books. we did the books the completelyother way, which is to say, we were going to makethe book we wanted. it's our damn thing.
and then we just pray thatthere's other people that agree with us. and the difference is that allof the best things in the world, in my view, are made thissecond way-- by making what you want. now, unfortunately, some of theworst things are made that way, too, or some of thegreat disasters. because it turns out you makewhat you want, and nobody else does want it.
but i decided we'dtake the risk. and so, it was through that. and then the internet playeda huge role in it. there's a forum site calledegullet, and i started posting on egullet about sousvide and other aspects of modern cuisine. and it was people on egulletthat gave me the suggestion i write the book. but it was more than that.
it was the community of peopleon egullet spanned home cooks to some of the top professional and everyone was eager to getthis kind of information. and so that convinced me that itwasn't only going to be me that i was making this for. female speaker: so what was yourfavorite discovery in the process of writing the book? because there's obviouslysome really cool things that came out of it.
but what was the bestthat you found? nathan myhrvold: well, myfavorite single one is a little hard to explain. but in traditional barbecuecooking-- this is in the southeastern us, whenyou make barbecue. there's something calledthe stall-- s-t-a-l-l. and if you're cookinga brisket or a pork shoulder or some other bighonking piece of meat, then people notice that thetemperature would rise and
rise and rise and rise. and then it would hit thispoint where it would stop rising, and it wouldstall for hours. and then it would eventuallycome up again. well, there are thousandsand thousands-- do a google search onbarbecue stall, and you will see thousands. you could get a few things forsomebody's barbecue stall like in a farmer's market.
but you filter those out, andthere's still thousands of people saying, what the hellis the barbecue stall? what causes this? and they have lotsof theories. and we discovered theywere all wrong. and we found out what reallycauses the barbecue stall. female speaker: tell us. nathan myhrvold: ok. it works for the samereason we sweat.
people sweat because when waterevaporates, it takes a lot of heat with it. and sweating is our body's wayof using evaporative cooling. we'll spend some water toget a lot of cooling. well, meat is about 75% water. so you put it in a hot barbecueand hot air, it's going to start evaporating. and that cools things down. and what happens is that stallperiod is the period when no
matter how much heat you putin, more heat is leaving because of evaporation. now, the funny thing is, oneof the traditional remedies for this is to slather moresauce on it, which is exactly like trying to heat the thingup by putting a hose on it. you will never get it hot ifyou keep slathering it on. but people do for a while. and there's variousthings about it. and so to test this, wetook some briskets
and cut them in half. and then we would either wrapone in foil or seal it in a sous vide bag, all instrumentedwith lots of temperature probes. and right beside it,one that was open. and the one that was sealedhad no stall at all. and the one that was open hadexactly the stall that you would predict. female speaker: that'sso interesting.
so what is your favoritecookbook? apart from your own. nathan myhrvold: yeah, it'sa really good question. historically, the one that washugely inspirational to me, but also very difficult, becausei first got it when i was nine, was "escoffier." female speaker: you werea very precocious child, weren't you? i was reading ramona thepest when i was nine.
nathan myhrvold: painin the ass for mom. female speaker: the differencebetween me and you, i think. nathan myhrvold: so "escoffier"was an inspiration to me, both positivelyand negatively. the positive aspect is thatescoffier was incredibly influential to basically chefsall over the world. the book came out in 1903. and it really sealed the dealfor french food being synonymous with high-end foodfor the next century or so.
it just was incrediblyinfluential. the negative inspiration is thatit also had a variety of things that i definitelydidn't want to do. so a typical escoffier recipewill say, prepare this, put it in a hot oven, andcook until done. now, in escoffier's time, hewas writing for people that were apprentices. they would've apprenticed to amaster chef, and they didn't have any technology.
even though they hadthermometers, it wasn't common in a turn of the previouscentury kitchen. so hot oven, what thehell was that? cook until done? what the hell is that? we wanted to make sure that wehad stuff that had this more technological perspective ofsaying, now, we're going to tell you how to do it so you canget a good result, even if you've never done it before.
and we're going to do that bytelling you, cook it to this temperature. cook it in an oven ofthat temperature. and here's how you tellif it's done. and here's how you tellif it isn't done. and try to make the thingsas objective as possible. so it was sort of an inspirationfor me in a couple different ways, positivelyand negatively. female speaker: interesting.
i'm going to do a coupleof finish this sentences with you. female speaker: ask you tofinish this sentence, and then we're going to openup for questions. so i'll ask whoeverhas a question. there's two mics in the room. and if you can use one of themics, because we are recording this for youtube, thatwould be great. so you can start lining upand we'll get going.
modernist cooking is? modernist cooking is cookingto make stuff taste great without regard to feelingyou have to slavishly follow tradition. female speaker: i amchallenged by? nathan myhrvold:keeping clean? i make a hell of amess when i cook. female speaker: becauseyou're cutting everything in half, i think.
that might be partof the problem. nathan myhrvold: it turnsout cooking well-- we found out why most peopledon't cook with a wok cut in half. female speaker: i probablycould've told you that. a food trend i hate is? nathan myhrvold: so a food trendi hate, which has got multiple different forms,is when a buzz word gets perverted to a use it didn'toriginally have.
and so a good example of that,or bad example, depending on your perspective, is organic. organic, once upon a time, meantit was this stuff grown by this hippie couple sortof at the edge of town. and it kind of was ugly. but it tasted really good,because it was picked in all these ways. today, because people will pay apremium for organic, organic has been largely eviscerated byfolks that have read all of
the rules, lobbiedthe government to change the rules. and the food they have iseffectively the same. local is another oneof these things. it's nice that something'slocal. but i promise you, as localstarts getting a market edge, people will find waysto cheat on it. one of the examples we have in"modernist cuisine" is honey is essentially fructose.
it's 90some percent fructose. but high fructose cornsyrup, a lot of folks think that is bad. and there's some reasonsto believe that it is. but the hypocrisy ofthe following thing just drove us crazy. we found there's a bunch ofcommercial honey places that basically fed bees withartificial flowers with high fructose corn syrup.
so it was fructose laundering. you feed it to the bees, thebees loved it, because they didn't have to do much work. they suck up the fructosehere, squirt it into the honeycomb, and justhugely productive. so they can sell peoplenatural honey. here's another one. the reason that you've got ared color and some of the flavors in cured meat like baconis because of nitrates.
and there is some legitimateconcern about whether nitrates are all that good foryou, and so forth. but if you go to whole foods,you'll find nice, rosy red bacon that's nitrate free. how did they do that? they take concentrated celeryjuice, which has got the same nitrate concentrate asthe original brine. but it happens but there's alot of nitrates in celery. now is that nitrate free?
no. but in a ruling with the federaltrade commission, in fact, because it started off ascelery juice, the fact it has the identical quantity-- and if it didn't have the samequantity, it would not turn the meat red. and that's why if you reallycared about nitrate free bacon, it better be gray. because otherwise it's nitrateby another name.
so anyway, i hate usinghypocrisy to try to fool people in some way. female speaker: ok,so that was a very long finish the sentence. nathan myhrvold: sorry. female speaker: so we're onlygoing to do one more so that we make sure. i'm trying to think-- threethings that are always in my fridge are?
nathan myhrvold: fish sauce,sesame oil, and some rendered duck fat. female speaker: i was expectinga much more bizarre answer, so that's all right. you surprised me. ok, can we start over there? audience: first of all,thanks for coming. the book is fantastic. and i'm very much so lookingforward to using it.
my question is actually inregard to something you made reference to right whenyou first stepped up. and that's in regardto baking. so i don't know whether you'veexplored this as a potential next step. but i'm curious as to yourthoughts around-- baking, to me, seems to be muchmore exact, much more scientific. so i'm wondering what yourthoughts are about how maybe
you see that as potentially aneasier world to explore, as opposed to traditionalcooking? nathan myhrvold: so you'reabsolutely right that from a cultural perspective, bakingand pastry is more precise. nobody adds bakingpowder to taste. first of all, it tastesterrible. second of all, you can't judgeby taste what's the right amount to make yourmuffins rise. and you'd better measure itpretty precisely, otherwise
your muffins are going toover-rise, or they're going to be like hockey pucks. so pastry chefs boughtoff on a lot of these things earlier on. one funny example is in thebook, we use percentages in addition to grams. because if you want to scale itup, it's handy to do that. and the system we use is calledbaker's percentages. why?
because every bakingbook has it, but no non-baking books have it. and it was funny, the numberof even professional chefs who'd say what's theirpercentage crap? and their pastry chef wouldsay, uh, chef, i'll explain it to you. we've used it for 100years in pastry. so that's one thingthat's different. another thing that's differentis that there are pastry books
that take you much closer tothe state of the art than savory books did. so if you read a pastry book bypierre herme, for example, paco toro blanco, and i couldlist all kinds of them, they probably would have more recipesand more techniques that were close to the state ofthe art than if you tried to find the same kind of thingfor cooking meat, for example, where the state of the art was50 years ago, in terms of what you find in books.
that said, the world of bakingand pastry chefs are very receptive to all ofthese things. here's actually oneother point. at a lot of restaurants in newyork, the modern techniques in the kitchen, all pioneeredby the pastry chefs. so at jean-georges, johnnyiuzzini, the first sous-vide cooked in jean-georges wasby johnny for pastry. at le bernardin, it wasmichael laiskonis. and both of them, and lots ofother pastry chefs like them,
drag the rest of their kitcheninto the at least 20th century, and maybeinto the 21st. but for the same reasons,they're also very receptive to it. and there's an awfullot of really interesting creative things. so watch this space. audience: thanks. audience: so i enjoy smokingmeats at home.
and i find one of the greatthings about it is if you're patient, and you can controlthe temperature, then a brisket or ribs or a porkshoulder will just tend to be delicious no matterwhat you do. so what do you recommend to sortof take it up a level? so we're really bigon barbecue. and what i'm about tosay tastes great. but this is total anathema totraditional barbecue folks. so you're totally right that lowand slow is the way to go.
only we like to golower and slower. so for pork ribs, i'd cook themat 140 degrees for 48 hours, sous vide. so this is not like,hi, honey! let's have ribs tonight! [interposing voices] nathan myhrvold: thenyou smoke them for a couple of hours. again, you don't want to exceedmaybe 140 degree air
turns out you can smoke themeither before or after you hook them sous vide. and for a pork shoulder, iwould do the same thing. i might actually take thetemperature up a little bit, to, say, 145 degrees,but for 48 hours. for short ribs, we typically do145 degrees for 72 hours. so this is truly patienceoriented. but oh my god, the results youget are just unbelievable. now, there's a guy namedsteven raichlen who's
considered one of theworld's foremost authorities on barbecue. he's literally sold millionsof his barbecue books. he came to our lab. and we made these shortribs for him. and he wrote on his blog thatthey were the best ribs of any kind he'd ever had in his life,which was more than we could possibly hope for. so try that.
get sous vide. but hey, if you already have asmoker, you're already at the bleeding edge of craziness. audience: you can keepit outside, though. nathan myhrvold: that's fine. but you can do your sousvide cooking inside. you can do it aheadof time, right? in fact, you can also freezeit or keep it in the fridge after you've cooked itsous vide that way.
female speaker: take acouple days off work. we find you only smoke itfor an hour or two. depends on how heavy of asmoke flavor you want. but smoking for a really longperiod of time doesn't do that much good, because thepenetration depth that you get was smoking drops offexponentially. and so smoking it for sixhours isn't that useful. yeah. audience: so this idea that wecan replace a lot of the sort
of technique and skill thatused to be was required to cook right with technologyis really neat. and i'm just wondering if i,as a home cook, go and do that, if i buy your book and buymy digital thermometer and so forth, and so i don't haveto know when my food is done by looking and smelling, i nowhave a lot of free time. so what skills shouldi develop? what's my highest marginalreturn to time i can develop in the kitchen?
female speaker: comeback to work? nathan myhrvold: i was gonnasay, you work at google! you don't know what todo with free time? what's free time? but here's a different way. here's sort of an answer, whichis, there's a tremendous amount of cooking that isaesthetic at its essence. and there isn't a technological solution for that.
so what combinations offlavors do you put in? what combination of texturesdo you do? if the dinner party gotso simple, well, add a couple of courses. there's always an axis that youcan move in where there's an unbounded amount of stuff,and where technology isn't going to help you. so while you've automated somethings so that you'll never overcook it, you'll neverundercook it.
it's all perfect,it's done great. well, then, use thattime to experiment. do some more cool stuff. add a couple dishes,add garnish. female speaker: ok, thisis our last question. audience: thanks again. you mentioned that thethermometer would be the first thing that you purchase,or you would recommend as a purchase.
i remember the firstthanksgiving where i took over the kitchen. it wasn't at 9. probably 19. but i put in the probethermometer, and the convection oven was going. and a few hours later,it reached temperature, started beeping. and i'm like, all right!
it's done. and mom's like, no way. and we cut in, and sureenough, it was raw. and so i wonder, like, do youcover basically the fact that meat is not equalall throughout? like, the proper way ofmeasuring temperature-- because that's reallyimportant. not just having the tool. so we do discuss that.
the really cool thing i have inthis ovens that i have at home, which are sort ofcommercial grade ovens. you probably have them somewherein one of your cafeterias. they have the coolest thing. they have a temperature probethat's got five separate probes in it. and so not only does it pick thecoldest one, but it also looks at the gradient.
and so then you could tell howit's heating up or cooling down, and by doing that, youcan figure all the way. but in general, what you want todo is you want to pick the thickest part of something. in the case of poultry, thetraditional thing is to put it down near the hip joint. that's not really because that'sthe thickest part. the thickest part is stillgoing to be the breast for a turkey.
but that's the part thatprobably you're most concerned about undercooking. so, yeah. we definitely coverthat in the book. and it's true, you need to makesure your temperature is representative, otherwise you'regoing to fool yourself. female speaker: thanks. that's all we have time for. thank you so muchfor being here.
nathan myhrvold: well,thank you. female speaker: itwas really great. thanks.