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Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

modernistcuisine.com

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Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#51

Post by tptacek »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #6

This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades. In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people…

My uneducated guess is that Myhrvold was just trying to avoid, with "modernist", all the freight that came with "molecular gastronomy", a term that made literally no sense and invokes for many in the industry the specter of Herve This.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#52

Post by lmm »

yumraj wrote: post #42

Most cookbooks seem to optimize for taste. Are there any cookbooks that optimize for nutritional/health value of food with a reasonable emphasis on taste? Not looking to be just pointed to vegan cookbooks.

I've been working my way through a second-hand copy of "Great recipes for good health" lately. I think the balance is probably slightly too far on the health over taste side, but there are some gems in there.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#53

Post by tptacek »

amluto wrote: post #47
cwizou wrote: post #30

The good thing about Modernist Cuisine is that it goes deep into some niche topics (gelling and hydrocolloids, food safety, etc etc), so if you like that kind of thing (and crazy photography of sliced in half stuff), it's great. In terms of recipes, some have mentioned it but it's barely practical, even if you like spending hours reproducing recipes from Michelin stars restaurant books. There are a few gems, like the…

Forget ChefSteps. As far as I’m concerned, this is the reference: https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html

Ehhhh. I've had lots of issues with it, and I can't cite chapter and verse but I think Dave Arnold has some critiques of it too. Really, for what the Baldwin guide is trying to do, you can just Google stuff off Serious Eats for.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#54

Post by tptacek »

Shadowmist wrote: post #39
balfirevic wrote: post #27

One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos

He also has combustion.inc which is a thermometer for nerds.

Which is a great product, for what it's worth.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#55

Post by rat87 »

dluan wrote: post #13
giraffe_lady wrote: post #6

This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades. In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people…

i hated the era of foam, gel, and sous vide everything. as a home cook, i want the randomness that comes with hand technique, but if im paying for a 2/3 star meal i still also want the randomness and authenticity that comes with hand technique, not to be bored out of my mind or trying to show me some impressive lab grade "consistency". in another 20 years, we'll look back on this like we did mayonnaise and meat aspic…

hey some of us like meat aspics nothing wrong with some Kholodets/P'tcha with some horseradish

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#56

Post by tptacek »

scarby2 wrote: post #29
giraffe_lady wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the things you mentioned are deeply out of style in restaurant cooking right now. So we already do look back on this in a similar way. And they were never that common either. This trend had a short peak and the training, staffing, equipment, r&d costs were all sky high. The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless you were specific…

> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking. I was reading the first part of your response and my mind was immediately going "but sous-vide is everywhere" It's one of those things that's just really…

Circulator eggs never made a whole lot of sense, because you already have a reference temperature to work from and so cooking any number of them is just a matter of setting a timer (do what the Ideas in Food people do and steam them).

I can't remember the last time I circulated a steak. But we did a rib roast for Christmas, and I did that in the circulator, in advance, "for insurance purposes", and then cooked it off in a ripping (toaster) oven on the day.

There is no better way to prepare sausages. I would replace my Anova circulator immediately if it broke, simply so I can keep going to Paulina Market, buying a couple of every sausage, circulating them all, and keeping them in the fridge/freezer for ready-to-go meals.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#57

Post by dataviz1000 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #6

This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades. In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people…

> career as a serious professional cook

Interesting. I was a chef for 17 years, 11 in restaurants and 6 as a private yacht chef. How did you end up on Hacker News? For me, I found joy in opening new restaurants which is engineering and followed that path to software.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#58

Post by hellotheretoday »

fn-mote wrote: post #38
cwizou wrote: post #30

The good thing about Modernist Cuisine is that it goes deep into some niche topics (gelling and hydrocolloids, food safety, etc etc), so if you like that kind of thing (and crazy photography of sliced in half stuff), it's great. In terms of recipes, some have mentioned it but it's barely practical, even if you like spending hours reproducing recipes from Michelin stars restaurant books. There are a few gems, like the…

> The site has been bought by Breville At $69/year I’d say it’s pretty clear the direction the site is going.

Chefsteps has been in that direction for a very long time. I was in their community early on, like 2013 or so, and the content they put out then was truly excellent. A paywall was reasonable really; the classes were well researched and informative and I am sure their operation is quite expensive.

But over time they became a bit less focused on interesting stuff and more focused on stuff that would play to social media. Their candy class was a hallmark - very informative, very interesting, and several great recipes that you typically wouldn’t find anywhere else. Like they have a starburst clone recipe that honestly most sites wouldn’t bother with because it’s unbelievably labor intensive. But I made it and it was extremely satisfying

If you go on their YouTube and go back a decade you can see the change in content. Their current stuff is basically cloning Epicurious but occasionally shilling really expensive brevile appliances that have very short warranties despite being 5x the cost of comparable products.

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#59

Post by gilbertbw »

alwa wrote: post #35
skyyler wrote: post #2

It's sold as a reference material, but the photography inside is beautiful. Even if you think the techniques are outside of your reach, it's a really lovely "cookbook" to look through.

Later sold separately as a standalone volume, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine https://modernistcuisine.com/books/photography-of-modernist-... I remember being especially excited about the cutaways: photos of actual cooking apparatus sliced in half on a water jet, then photographed in the act of cooking. Some background on how that came to be: https://seattlefoodgeek.com/2011/11/cutting-your-cookware-in...

There are also some lovely cut in half shots in Chris Young's YouTube videos (one of the people that worked on Modernist Cuisine). e.g. https://youtu.be/IZY8xbdHfWk?t=239

Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43165566

Re: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

#60

Post by charlie0 »

cwizou wrote: post #32
balfirevic wrote: post #27

One of the authors, Chris Young, has a great Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos

Yep, for those who have an air fryer, have a look at his air fries video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk He basically invented triple cooked fries at the fat duck (precooked at 70° celsius then fried twice, with airing/freezing steps in between), and it's a pretty close approximation of them done much simpler.

I've never had tripple cooked fries. What do they taste like?
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