http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_myhrvold/all/1
Some excerpts from this article:
It's a big book—2,400 pages big. Six volumes big. Big like the original slipcase failed Amazon .com's shipping tests and had to be replaced with acrylic. Big like it weighs nearly 50 pounds and costs $625.
If Modernist Cuisine lives up to Myhrvold's hopes when it's published this March, it'll be the definitive book about the science of cooking—the Principia of the kitchen. It's dense and beautiful and inspired, and even though Myhrvold assembled a team of 50 chefs, writers, photographers, designers, scientists, and editors to create it, the final product is in fact an eerily accurate recapitulation of how Nathan Myhrvold thinks.
... he's primarily a scientist. Myhrvold has a master's degree in geophysics and space physics and another one in mathematical economics. He got his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton at 23 and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. He started a software company that Microsoft bought in 1986, founded Microsoft Research in 1991, and left the company as its CTO and chief strategist in 1999. He has hundreds of patents issued or pending. Oh, and he's also a photographer, a patron of paleontology research, and a world-champion barbecue chef. Seriously.
That's a big change from cooking's artisanal roots. "You were taught how to make a hollandaise sauce, and you were never really taught why it works," says Thomas Keller, who runs Per Se in New York City and the French Laundry in Northern California and is generally considered the best chef in the US. "You were just taught how to make it, and you were taught how to fix it if it broke, and that was it." Myhrvold and his team want cooks to understand the science behind the technique.
"If all you want to do is follow recipes, you don't need insights," he says. "If you want to do new things, you have to understand what the hell you're doing."
If Modernist Cuisine lives up to Myhrvold's hopes when it's published this March, it'll be the definitive book about the science of cooking—the Principia of the kitchen. It's dense and beautiful and inspired, and even though Myhrvold assembled a team of 50 chefs, writers, photographers, designers, scientists, and editors to create it, the final product is in fact an eerily accurate recapitulation of how Nathan Myhrvold thinks.
... he's primarily a scientist. Myhrvold has a master's degree in geophysics and space physics and another one in mathematical economics. He got his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton at 23 and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. He started a software company that Microsoft bought in 1986, founded Microsoft Research in 1991, and left the company as its CTO and chief strategist in 1999. He has hundreds of patents issued or pending. Oh, and he's also a photographer, a patron of paleontology research, and a world-champion barbecue chef. Seriously.
That's a big change from cooking's artisanal roots. "You were taught how to make a hollandaise sauce, and you were never really taught why it works," says Thomas Keller, who runs Per Se in New York City and the French Laundry in Northern California and is generally considered the best chef in the US. "You were just taught how to make it, and you were taught how to fix it if it broke, and that was it." Myhrvold and his team want cooks to understand the science behind the technique.
"If all you want to do is follow recipes, you don't need insights," he says. "If you want to do new things, you have to understand what the hell you're doing."
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