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| Top Chef’s Carla, at Pebble Beach, recently“went over to the ‘dark side’” on TC, using weird science |
In my private chef life, I am thrilled to cook for and consequently be a “fly on the wall” in the presence of some of the world’s most brilliant and inspiring film and computer “geeks”. When John Lasseter, a true originator of computer animation and co-founder of Pixar, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese are hanging around, I listen. Over the years, I have learned that they simply do not think or approach life in the way that most other people do. The way they process and solve problems is fascinating and crosses over from tech to art to science to psychology and back again, allowing them to create things that quite literally change the fabric of culture and the world. George could have made billions on his film and audio inventions alone, without even creating R2 D2, Wookies and Darth Vader. (I am just so happy that he did it all!)
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| Chef Thomas Keller on the Jenn Air Chef’s Stage |
When a mind like that hits the cookbook world, wild and crazy things happen. Microsoft multi-millionaire, theoretical physicist, moonlighting restaurant cook and genius computer scientist Nathan Myhrvold was designing his own dream kitchen at his home in Seattle years ago and bought a sous vide machine and could not find any information on how to use it. This amazed him. As all Top Chef fans know, sous vide is a cooking method in which food is vacuum sealed and cooked in a circulating water bath at a perfect temperature, yielding perfect internal temperatures. The king himself, Thomas Keller, often called T.K. by most chefs (code for “the man”, or one who rocks so hard, he need not be named in full) wrote an entire book on the subject. Thomas Keller's book, "Under Pressure, Cooking Sous Vide" is a great seller, but who has all those sous vide machines, I wonder. Click here for a T.K. video explaining sous-vide.
Myhrvold took his untold millions and created Intellectual Ventures a lab and think tank dedicated to working on some of the “biggest problems in science and technology”, including new x-ray scanning technology and malaria prevention using lasers. From his sous vide inquiry, he realized the dearth of deep scientific information available about “how cooking works”, despite being 20 years into the uber-scientific “molecular gastronomy” trend, made famous by Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Spain and Grant Achatz at Alinea, in Chicago. Just look at this gorgeous food gallery from Alinea, truly beyond sensational…
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| Chef T.K. goes back to “old school” basics with his grilled and roasted chicken dishes from Bouchon |
Fast forward to today, and his new cook book called "Modernist Cuisine; The Art and Science of Cooking", a 50 pound, 1600 page, $625 treatise encompassing cooking, molecular science, technology, physics and a lot of passion and painstaking research by his chef/scientist team at Intellectual Ventures. With scientific precision, he answers some of the most mysterious truths in culinary science. For example; “If you have two steaks, one that is one inch thick and one that is two inches thick, how much longer does the thicker on take to cook?” asks Myhrvold. “Twice as long? Actually it is four times as long. How come cookbooks don’t tell you that?” Well, his book does, and then some! For example, his team serves “Spot Prawns with Carotene Butter”, perfectly cooked delicate prawns served with a sauce made from cooked carrots and butter, put through a centrifuge to extract the purest essence of flavor and texture. I want that on my plate, now.
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| Lamb Two Ways last summer at Bouchon Restauran |
The future of the trend is waning. El Bulli is famously closing; Achatz is opening a new restaurant that is not emphasizing the “science” that made him famous, saying “the tide is turning”. Will sous vide machines, liquid nitrogen and reverse griddles go away? Will Marcel ever stop “foaming” everything? Certainly, not. Will this book be considered an over-reaching, post-trend vanity project? I doubt it. There are many, many chefs and home cooks out there that love being “a fly on the wall”, reading, cooking and getting a glimpse of true genius and a blast of pure inspiration right down to our very own DNA.
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