FEMALE SPEAKER: Please join me
in welcoming to Google New
York Nathan Myhrvold.
So Nathan, you wanted to start
with a presentation about the
book and give an overview.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah, let me
show some pictures, and then
we can talk.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Sounds good.
And then we'll open it up
for Q&A at the end.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Great.
So I'm going to tell you a
little bit about "Modernist
Cuisine At Home." In 2011, we
released this book, "Modernist
Cuisine." This is what we call
the big book, which was an
encyclopedic treatment of all
aspects of cooking and the
science behind it.
So the really interesting
question is,
what do we do next?
And one next thing after that
that we could do, may still
do, would be pastry baking and
dessert, because the first
book didn't cover that.
But as our next act, we decided,
in fact, we would do
modernist cuisine
at home instead.
And the idea was basically that
modernist cuisine was
about sort of the no holds
barred approach to cooking.
There are recipes that require
a centrifuge, or a rotary
evaporator, or all kinds of
things that most people--
I have them at home, but
most people don't
have them at home.
So we decided we would do a book
that would take the same
ideas as "Modernist Cuisine,"
but apply them in a way that
was a smaller, little bit
less daunting book.
It's a little pamphlet,
like 700 pages.
FEMALE SPEAKER: It weighs more
than my child, we were
deciding earlier.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: And try to do
stuff that would address
things that people
could do at home.
So every recipe in here,
you can do at home.
It doesn't require unusual
equipment.
And it doesn't require
unusual ingredients.
And we also tried to really
focus on practical techniques
and use lots of photography to
make it really easy to see
what's going on.
One side of these shows
our step by steps.
The other thing shows what
we call a cutaway.
This is where we show
you the magic
view inside your equipment.
The people at Viking
gave 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 kid
that gets a little calf, and
raises it up, and then, oops.
But we cut it in half
so you can see what
it looks like inside.
Like the first book, we have
a washable kitchen manual.
It's on washable waterproof
paper.
That's so you can take it in
the kitchen, get it dirty.
It's a little bit smaller
format, too.
And it folds back on itself,
because it's spiral bound.
And we kind of consider this
the next part of "Modernist
Cuisine," yet it's focusing
on home cooking.
And home cooking just
means two things.
One is what I said earlier, that
it's a set of stuff that
you can do at home from an
equipment perspective.
But equally important is that
it's a set of cooking recipes
that are less formal.
In the first book, we've got
recipes from Ferran Adria, and
Thomas Keller, and Heston
Blumenthal, and all the best
chefs in the world.
You don't typically cook that
food at home all the time.
In the new book, we have a
chapter on mac and cheese.
We have a chapter on
chicken wings, and
other skewered snacks.
So it's a little bit less formal
style, in addition to
being a little bit more
accessible from an equipment
perspective.
So here's uncompromising
physical quality.
I wish I could say that about
myself, but by god, I can say
it about my book.
So we tried to make the physical
aspect of the book
kind of cool.
It's big, it uses great paper.
This is sort of nerdy, but I
figured I'm at Google, so that
should be OK.
But when you typically print a
picture in a book, it uses
half tone screen, and this is
what it looks like when you
blow it up.
It's 175 line.
An art book would use
a 200 line screen.
But this whole idea of using a
fixed screen is sort of an old
analog world concept.
It's still done.
We used something called
stochastic screening, which
uses an error diffusion
algorithm, and the dots are
now all created digitally.
And you can see, it just
looks a lot better.
Here's another thing most
people don't realize.
The gamut is the
range of colors
that inks can represent.
And most inks have a hard time
with really saturated colors.
So here's a picture from the
book where the grey shows the
stuff you can't actually
represent in the color gamut.
Well, if you buy something
called Chroma Centric inks,
you can show it all.
And so people will ask us, how
did you get all of that color
in those pictures?
Is that because you digitally
processed it?
And we said, no, we actually
sprung for the expensive ink.
Because it turns it you just
can't represent some colors,
particularly highly
saturated colors.
You'll see it's the tomato, for
example, and some of the
greens in the apple, or the
greens in that cauliflower.
Those are the things that don't
come across, because
they're highly saturated.
Now, of course, a good question
is, 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, there
were no tablet computers,
except for the first version of
Kindle, which was tiny and
black and white.
There was no iPad.
It hadn't come out.
And so we had to choose a
platform, and we chose print.
But here's the other reason--
here's a picture from the
original book, and here's what
it looks like on Kindle
and on an iPad.
And once you decide you're going
to do layout for a big,
big high resolution display that
you're going to get this
close to, it's hard
to just change it.
Of course you could do it.
But if you just literally took
the PDFs from the book and
just said, I'm going to move
them onto a tablet, it's not
very usable, because you're
always scrolling one way and
scrolling another way.
It also, to me, is
kind of boring.
Because if you just took the
PDFs, you don't have any of
the things that's magical about
an interactive platform.
So we're talking about one
possible future project is to
make a really interactive
version.
But then that actually starts
getting to be real work,
because you have to animate, and
you want to have a lot of
things live, and you have
to have a little
different user interface.
So at some point, yeah.
For now, actually, print is a
great way to deliver large,
high resolution pictures
to people.
And particularly, if I target
the people in this room or in
the tech industry, then tablets
would be even more
appropriate.
But if I want to have influence
with lots of
traditional chefs around the
world and give them an ability
to step up, actually print is
probably a better platform
from that perspective
at the moment.
So here's some fun facts
about the new book.
Two volumes, 9.9 pounds
unpacked, 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 86,000
pictures, of which 1,500 are
in the book.
So here's how we can sort of
put it in perspective.
If you took "Modernist Cuisine
At Home," and you put it all
in one line of text at the same
type size, it would be
1.4 miles long, and that would
stretch 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 big
one, that actually would go
from lower Manhattan all the
way up to 116th Street.
So here's another comparison.
People will say, why is this
book 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 street
price is $130.
I'd be surprised if that
didn't go down.
I have no way to control street
price, of course.
That's what retailers
sell 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-Reggiano
is $19 a pound.
We are cheaper than
Parmesan cheese.
So if you love cheese, you
should love this book.
It's cheaper.
FEMALE SPEAKER: That's
a good sales pitch.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah, I've been
I'm trying to come out of
being a programmer and actually
learn how to sell.
As I said before, we've got lots
of step by step photos.
I don't think we have a single
page that doesn't have a color
photo on it.
Here was another.
In "Modernist Cuisine," we
decided we would have
everything with weights.
But our new motto is,
now with teaspoons!
FEMALE SPEAKER: For
the home cook.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Because
home cooks--
now, when people ask, what's the
first gadget they should
buy for their kitchen, I
always say a digital
thermometer.
And then the second one
is a digital scale.
And they're like $20.
This is not like any kind
of expensive thing.
But once you get into it,
weighing ingredients is faster
and more accurate than
measuring them out.
And you don't have to worry
about leveling it.
And you don't have to worry
about is your sugar clumping a
different way, or some
other things.
So I highly recommend
the 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 we
started 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 chapter
on chicken wings.
And then we said, let's make
yakitori style chicken wings.
But then if you like yakitori,
tsukune, these chicken
meatballs are really cool.
And then pretty soon
we had saute, and
tons of other skewers.
So we love having variations.
And we want to encourage people
to mess around and do
cool new things with cooking.
It's not about here's a
recipe for one thing.
Lots of books will do that.
We try to say, here's a
principle, and here's an
example, and now here's a couple
other examples, and
then experiment yourself and
go take it other places.
We have some tables.
We had a lot of tables
in the big book.
We have fewer in
the small book.
But here, if you're cooking
meat, there isn't a right way
to cook it.
If you want it rare or medium
rare or pink or medium,
there's different levels and
different temperatures,
different times that
you can use.
So we try to provide all
that information.
We do have things on sous
vide in the new book.
And sous vide is something that
most people don't have
the equipment for, but
increasingly they are.
So we decided it was fair to
put that in the new book.
But we also have lots of
alternatives that don't
require the equipment.
So we have a sous vide salmon
recipe where you just cook it
in the sink.
Just run the hot water.
We have sous vide steaks for
camping or tailgate parties,
where you fill a big cooler full
of hot water, put your
steaks in Ziploc bags.
Just put them in there,
no electric
device or anything else.
FEMALE SPEAKER: No burgers
at your house, are there?
Just, like, regular?
Do you eat just like
a normal sandwich?
Never.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: If I'm making
it, usually it's not normal.
But I mean, tonight, I'm giving
a talk at the American
Museum of Natural History.
And so we're going to
Shake Shack first.
Because it's the only
pragmatic way to
get fed in a certain--
and they do good stuff.
The first book had lots of
ingredients that are pretty
difficult to find.
In this new book, we use
ingredients which
are all easy to find.
But they still might not
be totally familiar.
And again, we thought
that was OK.
So we have things that
involve agar.
People say, isn't that
some weird chemical?
And I say, well, actually, it's
been used in Asia for
1,000 years.
It's actually more traditional
than gelatin by that standard.
It's been around for longer.
But between that and a whole
variety of these other
things-- whey protein powder
from the health food store, or
xanthin gum, which is
in essentially every
grocery store now.
Because you can't make gluten
free muffins without xanthin.
As a result, it's
always there.
And we're just saying, hey,
now you can use it for
something besides gluten
free muffins.
You can thicken sauces
with it.
We have a lot of science in this
new book, not as much as
the previous book.
But we have a lot of things that
we describe the science
of things, and then try to
provide pointers off to
people, either in the web or
other books, or the big book
that will explain things more.
Hell of a process
making the book.
Here's a few of the photos.
Here's one of our fun toys.
This is an ultra high
speed camera.
It shoots HD quality
720p video at
6,200 frames per second.
So this lets us do
things like this.
Now, what I love about this is
when I was a kid, I'd watch
these Roadrunner cartoons.
And the roadrunner would run off
the edge of the cliff, and
so would the coyote.
But the coyote would only fall
after he looked down.
So nobody told the water it was
time to fall yet, so it
kind of sits there.
I'll run through a few of the
spreads from the book, and
we'll talk a little bit about
it, and then we can turn into
more of a conversation.
This is our chapter on stocking
the modernist kitchen.
It's about different kinds
of equipment, basically--
countertop tools.
It turns out if you take a
picture of a blender while
it's pureeing tomatoes, you
make a hell of a mess.
But we had this great principle
that it only has to
look good for a thousandth
of a second.
After that, if it all goes to
hell, that's our problem.
That's not the viewer's
problem.
Here's what a whipping siphon
looks like from the inside,
and we explain how you can use
this for making whipped cream
or other kind of whipped foam
things, but also for all kinds
of other stuff.
Again, this is not a
piece of equipment
everybody finds at home.
But they're like $20.
And they're in every Williams
Sonoma, so we
thought it was fair game.
Here's our pressure cooker.
We like pressure cookers.
There's a lot of pressure cooker
recipes in the book.
Here's our Viking stove
cut in half.
Microwave oven.
I was just on the Rachael Ray
Show right before coming here
where I actually did two
microwave things.
Watch closely, and we'll
discuss it afterwards.
So that's popcorn.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Oh, amazing.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Now, the cool
thing about this from a
science perspective is that when
water flashes into steam,
it expands in volume by
a factor of 1,600.
So right now, a tiny
crack 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 pressure
a little bit by
leaking out, but that crack has
also caused a fatal flaw
in the skin of the popcorn.
So you can watch it expand
a little bit.
It's trying to relieve
the pressure.
But ultimately it's not
enough, and woosh.
Open it goes.
That's why the high speed
camera is so much fun.
And here's what a microwave
looks like on the inside,
including, we discuss what
happens inside the cavity
magnetron, which is where the
microwaves are actually made.
In the big book, we also have
instructions for how you can
measure the speed of light
with Velveeta and your
microwave oven.
Do try that at home.
Here's how we do
those 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 originally
had a machine shop at home.
But it's even nicer to have it
in a place where people can
run it 24 hours a day and
clean up for you.
As a programmer myself, I love
that most of these machines
are also really programmable,
so you can actually control
them all by writing programs.
Here's one of our
cool machines.
This is called an EDM machine.
See that wire?
That wire has got a tremendous
amount of electricity coming
through it.
Sparks jump off the electricity
underwater.
And those sparks actually
are able to cut
almost any form of metal.
So here, we're cutting a
cast iron Dutch oven.
And we speeded this up a little
bit, it's kind of slow.
We drain the water
off, and voila!
We have cut it in half.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Amazing.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: And between the
other pieces of equipment,
we can cut glass.
We can cut almost anything
in half like that.
In fact, I like to say we have
two halves of one of the best
kitchens in the world.
You can see a couple of those
that have the red glue on it.
That's a high temperature
silicone.
So we take a piece of Pyrex,
we put a bead of the high
temperature silicon on them.
We glue the piece of Pyrex glass
to the edge of the pan.
So we can actually cook in it.
Now, that gives us that
red goopy look.
And so that's where we use the
little digital technology.
When you cut a pan in half,
you get two halves.
So we put the other half in the
same position and take a
picture, and that gives
us the image bit for
the edge of the pan.
And then we substitute that in
for where that red goop is,
very much like the way in a
Hollywood movie, Spider-Man
will fly through the air
supported by wires, then you
digitally remove the wires, and
he's flying without it.
Tons of other cool things
in the book.
Here's two of them.
Most of the flavor
of chargrilling
comes from fat flareups.
And one of the reasons when
people grill zucchini, the
zucchini doesn't taste all that
charbroiled is there's no
fat in zucchini to drip.
A steak, there's
plenty of fat.
It renders out, it drips,
you get a fat flareup.
That's what gives you the
charbroiled flavor.
So what do you do if you
want your zucchini
to taste this way?
You spritz olive oil
on the fire.
Works great.
And if you really want to
sear something, you want
the fire from hell?
You take a hair dryer and you
stick it up the vent of your
Webber, and boy, oh boy.
You can actually get it going
enough that if the coals are
against the side of the Webber,
they'll go through.
So don't do that.
FEMALE SPEAKER: So for that
photograph, the one that you
were just showing us, is that
where you put the glass on it?
And then you actually cooked
to make that photograph?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD:
Let me go back.
So the answer is no, because
the coals are so hot they
would break the glass.
There's nothing in
front of that.
Some people say, well, but
wouldn't the coals fall?
And we say, of course
they would fall.
That's why Johnny was
underneath there
with a pair of tongs.
And every time they would
fall, he'd put it back.
We made a hell of a mess so you
could get a cool picture.
One of our guys lost his
eyebrows twice in things
flaring up.
It's a real process.
So anyway, here's
fat flareups.
This is what happens.
Here the fat is dropping down.
Initially, it spends most of the
energy actually vaporizing
and heating up.
And then finally it catches.
And it's that fat flareup
that makes most of the
characteristic chargrilled
flavor.
The difference between grilling
and broiling is
broiling, the heat's
on the top.
And so no fat can drip on it.
And so you don't get
those flavors.
And that's really
the difference.
Here's a close up of that
same picture here.
Here's our hamburgers.
And there's nothing
holding those in.
We've just sort of propped
them right at the edge.
And they kept falling.
We have a big chapter
on ingredients.
Ingredients, of course, really
central to all of cooking.
Something on basics.
This is about making
sauces and stocks.
A chapter on eggs, salads,
and cold soups.
Turns out you need about two or
three pounds of raspberries
dropped one or two at a time
before you get the timing
right to get a photo
like this.
You drop them, and there's a
bunch of ways you can set up
light beams to trigger.
But there's variations enough
that 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 going
to take all of them.
But I got a lot of other
things to do.
But I took quite
a few of them.
And then our photo team
took the rest.
Here's salad making, pressure
cooked vegetable soups.
We had a recipe in Modernist
Cuisine for carrot soup that
was one of the most
popular recipes.
So we took it and made a whole
chapter out of it, tried lots
of other ingredients, managed
to make it work with some--
the first version actually
used a centrifuge.
So we weaned ourselves
off the centrifuge.
And here's a bunch
of those soups.
Steak.
We have a whole chapter
on steak.
Carnitas.
Braised short ribs.
So if that doesn't make
you hungry, well
then, you're a vegan.
But, see pressure cooked
vegetable soups earlier.
Roast chicken.
So roast chicken is an
interesting thing.
The ideal roast chicken is
fundamentally a contradiction.
You're trying to get the
interior flesh to be juicy and
the exterior to be crispy.
But they're right beside
each other.
So by the time you've heated
up the skin enough to be
crispy, you've overcooked
and dried out the flesh.
So one thing people do
is they brine it.
And if you dunk the whole
chicken in salt water, the
action of the salt
on the proteins--
the uncooked proteins of the
meat-- actually makes them
absorb a lot more water.
And so there's a real physical
chemical reason that salt will
make it juicier.
Trouble is, there's protein
in the skin also.
And when you make the skin
juicy, that's called rubbery.
So what do you do?
And the answer is, we used
syringes to inject the brine
into the meat without getting
any on the skin.
Now, you can say that's kind of
a freaky thing to do, but
it turns out you can get
syringes all over the place.
When I first started coming to
New York, it was Union Square
Park you'd go to get syringes.
But in fact, there was another
park in the city which was
informally called Needle Park.
But you can get syringes
all over the place.
And if you really care about
making the ultimate chicken,
this is how you do it.
Then the other thing is, we hang
the chicken inside the
refrigerator like this.
That prevents the salt from
accumulating on the skin.
And if you leave it uncovered
in the fridge with a plate
underneath it, it lets
the skin dry out.
And that makes it much easier
to make it crispy.
And this is the result.
When you do it right, when you
take the chicken out at the
end, and you hit it with a tongs
or a spoon, the skin
will crack.
It's almost like glass.
And then here, we're
serving it.
But we have another whole
chapter on chicken wings.
And I understand in one of the
Google cafeterias today, they
served a couple of our wings.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I don't think
they used hypodermic needles
there, but yes.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Generally
for the wings, you
don't need to do.
We have another technique
for the wings.
Now, chicken noodle soup, sort
of the Jewish penicillin.
We thought we'd do a whole
chapter on that.
Here's our salmon chapter.
Pizza.
Mac and cheese.
That's the mac and cheese
sauce being made.
And boy, the interesting thing
here is, normally you put a
lot of starch into a cheese
sauce to keep the fat in the
cheese from separating.
Cheese is an emulsion.
And when you heat it up
too hot to melt it,
it separates out.
You've probably seen pizzas
where you get this layer of
grease on the top, and then the
cheese is kind of stringy
and disgusting?
Well, in a sauce, that
really doesn't work.
So the typical thing is, you
put lots of starch in.
Well, that adds a lot
of carbohydrates.
But the main thing is,
it dulls the taste.
Because the starch molecules
wind up coating everything, so
it doesn't taste anywhere near
as cheesy as the cheese does.
It's cheese-ish sauce,
not cheese sauce.
Turns out if you add a little
bit of sodium citrate, which
is in every grocery store in
New York, because it's also
called sour salt.
It's used in Passover.
It's also the solid form
of citric acid.
Just a little bit of that keeps
the emulsion, and so you
can make a cheese sauce that
has no starch in it at all,
and it tastes amazingly
cheesy.
And then if you cast it into
sheets, you can use that to
make your own melty cheese to
make melted cheese sandwiches.
And we find melted cheese
sandwiches work so much better
when there's no gravity.
Recipes we developed for the
International Space Station.
So anyway, that's some
of 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 home
kitchen is very different from
my home kitchen.
I think we've gathered that.
I don't have things cut
in half and the like.
So what do you think I could
make in my New York kitchen
from your book without
hypodermic
needles and a blow torch?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Well, you know,
there's a lot of New
York kitchens that have
hypodermic needles.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Not in this
audience, I'm hoping.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: And I
love blow torches.
Blow torches are one of the
coolest single tools.
They're $20 at Home Depot.
And when you need intense
heat to touch up.
When you sear a steak, it's
nice if you sear the
edges of the steak.
It just looks a whole
lot nicer.
And you can do that by kind of
holding it up with tongs and
trying to jam it into the
bottom of the pan.
That works.
But it's even easier
to put it on a pan.
And you just take the blow torch
and you go around the
edge of the steak.
So don't dismiss blow torches.
But essentially all of the
recipes in the book you can do
in your New York kitchen.
Some of them will be easier for
you if you get some sous
vide equipment.
Some of them will turn out a
little bit better if you get a
pressure cooker.
But sous vide is the
most exotic we get.
But we thought it would be
kind of a betrayal of our
roots if we didn't include
sous vide in a home book,
especially now that every
Williams Sonoma and Sur La
Table and comparable
stores has them.
So it sort of qualifies.
But for people that don't have
them yet, we say how you can
approximate it at home.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Right.
And what you said, running
things under hot water.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah.
So the thing about sous vide is
that you want an accurate
thermostat.
In a lot of traditional cooking,
you are the human
thermostat, either by using a
thermometer, or just by using
your intuition, you're supposed
to sit there and
modulate the heat.
Well, digital technology makes
much better thermostats then
we will ever, ever be.
And there's some people that
say, well, if I use that,
you're taking the soul
out of cooking.
And I say, bullshit.
I do not feel soulful playing
the human thermostat.
Sorry.
That's something that
technology can just
do better than me.
So we describe in the book how
you can do sous vide either by
keeping a pot of water hot on
the stove and playing human
thermostat.
Or if you have a large volume
of water, in the case of the
salmon recipe, you run the water
in the sink up to about
120, 130 degrees,
you check that.
The tap water will do
in almost all cases.
Then you seal the salmon
in plastic bags.
And you just put it in there.
And as long as you've got a
reasonable size sink and not
too much in the way of salmon,
there's enough heat capacity
in the water that you don't need
to actually keep actively
heating it to keep it
that temperature.
The temperature will
drop a bit.
But that's OK.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Well, I mean,
obviously technology is your
background.
And that's sort of where
you come from.
And technology clearly plays a
huge role in all of your work
on the Modernist series.
So can you talk a little bit
about that, and how your
background in technology has
sort of influenced the
evolution of this series to
the point it's at now?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Well, I just
gave you one of the examples
of I don't think it's really bad
to use digital technology
to control the thermostat
accurately so I can have this
exactly at the temperature that
I 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 in
the process of making the
book, because we did things to
predict the heat distribution
in a piece of food, or heat
distribution in a pan.
Does it matter that you have
the fancy copper pan?
And the answer is, it really
doesn't matter.
Copper is a much better
heat conductor.
So the idea is, well, you're
going to get all this lateral
heat movement.
The thing is, the pan's
this big around.
The thickness is this much.
So yeah, it's a good
conductor.
But laterally, it would have
to go 100 times as
far as it goes up.
So it doesn't spread that much
unless you have a copper pan
with like, an inch
thick block.
Oh, that would work great.
But then it'd be too heavy to
lift and too expensive to buy.
And in fact, the real issue we
discovered in doing this
modeling is you want to make
sure your pan and your burner
are well matched.
You put a big pan on a little
burner, and no amount of
fanciness in the pan is
going to help you.
If you size them appropriately,
and your plan
is not tissue paper thick,
you'll be fine.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I guess
the answer is it
played a big role.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah.
Technology, well, it's the way I
see the world is through the
lens of technology
and science.
I had a reporter in the UK sort
of give me a hard time
for the first book.
And they said, well, what makes
you think you should
bring science into
the kitchen?
I said, I'm sorry, science was
always in the kitchen.
I'm just trying to take
ignorance out.
Because the laws of nature
are how things work.
And you wouldn't say, oh gee,
it's such a shame that the
architect who built this
building understood how
buildings stand up.
Gosh, isn't that terrible?
No, it's a great thing.
That means we're not going
to come plummeting down.
And for the same reason, giving
people insights as to
how the science actually works
is both cool, if you're
curious, and it's useful.
And so I would like to say our
books are for people who are
both passionate and curious
about cooking.
If you're not passionate about
it, you're not going to buy a
big fancy book like this.
You don't necessarily
have to be a cook.
If you're curious enough,
that'll do.
If you're not curious, there's
all kinds of cookbooks you can
buy that'll say here's 30 minute
meals, or cooking for
dummies, or something else.
And you follow those recipes
exactly, and you'll
get what you get.
It's if you have a curiosity
to say, well why does
it work that way?
And how do chefs at top
restaurants do it?
And why is this is done?
That's where we really have
a proposition for you.
And so the whole thing was
written from a technologist's
or a scientist's or an
engineer's point of view,
rather than from a
traditionalist's point of view.
FEMALE SPEAKER: And so what was
the initial inspiration
for writing the series?
As you mentioned, you obviously
come from a
technology background.
So where did the interest
in food come in?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: So I've
been 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't
come in the kitchen.
I cooked it all by myself.
I would do a lot better
job 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 being
self-taught.
And I decided I wanted to go
to chef school in France.
So I convinced Bill to give
me a leave of absence.
And I went to work.
Well, to get into the chef
school, I had to have
professional experience.
So one night a week for two
years, I worked in a French
restaurant in Seattle.
And then after that, the chef
school would take me.
So I went and I went to this
intensive program there.
And so I've been into
it for a long time.
But then after leaving
Microsoft, I started
cooking a lot more.
That was kind of part of
the reason I left.
And I realized that there
wasn't a big book that
explained cooking from the
point of view I had.
Now, there's two ways
to make a product.
One is to say, I'm going to do
market research and find out
what they want.
And they is some funny set of
folks that we interview them
and run focus groups
and surveys.
And it's a fine way of making
a product for some things.
But that's not how
we did the books.
We did the books the completely
other way, which is
to say, we were going to make
the book we wanted.
It's our damn thing.
And then we just pray that
there's other people that
agree with us.
And the difference is that all
of the best things in the
world, in my view, are made this
second way-- by making
what you want.
Now, unfortunately, some of the
worst things are made that
way, too, or some of the
great disasters.
Because it turns out you make
what you want, and nobody else
does want it.
But I decided we'd
take the risk.
And so, it was through that.
And then the internet played
a huge role in it.
There's a forum site called
eGullet, and I started posting
on eGullet about sous
vide and other
aspects of modern cuisine.
And it was people on eGullet
that gave me the suggestion I
write the book.
But it was more than that.
It was the community of people
on eGullet spanned home cooks
to some of the top professional
chefs in the world.
And everyone was eager to get
this kind of information.
And so that convinced me that it
wasn't only going to be me
that I was making this for.
FEMALE SPEAKER: So what was your
favorite discovery in the
process of writing the book?
Because there's obviously
some really cool things
that came out of it.
But what was the best
that you found?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Well, my
favorite single one is a
little hard to explain.
But in traditional barbecue
cooking-- this is in the
southeastern US, when
you make barbecue.
There's something called
the stall--
S-T-A-L-L. And if you're cooking
a brisket or a pork
shoulder or some other big
honking piece of meat, then
people notice that the
temperature would rise and
rise and rise and rise.
And then it would hit this
point where it would stop
rising, and it would
stall for hours.
And then it would eventually
come up again.
Well, there are thousands
and thousands--
do a Google search on
barbecue stall, and
you will see thousands.
You could get a few things for
somebody's barbecue stall like
in a farmer's market.
But you filter those out, and
there's still thousands of
people saying, what the hell
is the barbecue stall?
What causes this?
And they have lots
of theories.
And we discovered they
were all wrong.
And we found out what really
causes the barbecue stall.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Tell us.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: OK.
It works for the same
reason we sweat.
People sweat because when water
evaporates, it takes a
lot of heat with it.
And sweating is our body's way
of using evaporative cooling.
We'll spend some water to
get a lot of cooling.
Well, meat is about 75% water.
So you put it in a hot barbecue
and hot air, it's
going to start evaporating.
And that cools things down.
And what happens is that stall
period is the period when no
matter how much heat you put
in, more heat is leaving
because of evaporation.
Now, the funny thing is, one
of the traditional remedies
for this is to slather more
sauce on it, which is exactly
like trying to heat the thing
up by putting a hose on it.
You will never get it hot if
you keep slathering it on.
But people do for a while.
And there's various
things about it.
And so to test this, we
took some briskets
and cut them in half.
And then we would either wrap
one in foil or seal it in a
sous vide bag, all instrumented
with lots of
temperature probes.
And right beside it,
one that was open.
And the one that was sealed
had no stall at all.
And the one that was open had
exactly the stall that you
would predict.
FEMALE SPEAKER: That's
so interesting.
So what is your favorite
cookbook?
Apart from your own.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah, it's
a really good question.
Historically, the one that was
hugely inspirational to me,
but also very difficult, because
I first got it when I
was nine, was "Escoffier."
FEMALE SPEAKER: You were
a very precocious
child, weren't you?
I was reading Ramona the
Pest when I was nine.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Pain
in the ass for Mom.
FEMALE SPEAKER: The difference
between me and you, I think.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: So "Escoffier"
was an inspiration
to me, both positively
and negatively.
The positive aspect is that
Escoffier was incredibly
influential to basically chefs
all over the world.
The book came out in 1903.
And it really sealed the deal
for French food being
synonymous with high-end food
for the next century or so.
It just was incredibly
influential.
The negative inspiration is that
it also had a variety of
things that I definitely
didn't want to do.
So a typical Escoffier recipe
will say, prepare this, put it
in a hot oven, and
cook until done.
Now, in Escoffier's time, he
was writing for people that
were apprentices.
They would've apprenticed to a
master chef, and they didn't
have any technology.
Even though they had
thermometers, it wasn't common
in a turn of the previous
century kitchen.
So hot oven, what the
hell was that?
Cook until done?
What the hell is that?
We wanted to make sure that we
had stuff that had this more
technological perspective of
saying, now, we're going to
tell you how to do it so you can
get a good result, even if
you've never done it before.
And we're going to do that by
telling you, cook it to this
temperature.
Cook it in an oven of
that temperature.
And here's how you tell
if it's done.
And here's how you tell
if it isn't done.
And try to make the things
as objective as possible.
So it was sort of an inspiration
for me in a couple
different ways, positively
and negatively.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Interesting.
I'm going to do a couple
of finish this
sentences with you.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: OK.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Ask you to
finish this sentence, and then
we're going to open
up for questions.
So I'll ask whoever
has a question.
There's two mics in the room.
And if you can use one of the
mics, because we are recording
this for YouTube, that
would be great.
So you can start lining up
and we'll get going.
Modernist cooking is?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Great.
Modernist cooking is cooking
to make stuff taste great
without regard to feeling
you have to
slavishly follow tradition.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I am
challenged by?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD:
Keeping clean?
I make a hell of a
mess when I cook.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Because
you're cutting
everything in half, I think.
That might be part
of the problem.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: It turns
out cooking well--
we found out why most people
don't cook with
a wok cut in half.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I probably
could've told you that.
A food trend I hate is?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: So a food trend
I hate, which has got
multiple different forms,
is when a buzz word gets
perverted to a use it didn't
originally have.
And so a good example of that,
or bad example, depending on
your perspective, is organic.
Organic, once upon a time, meant
it was this stuff grown
by this hippie couple sort
of 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 a
premium for organic, organic
has been largely eviscerated by
folks that have read all of
the rules, lobbied
the government
to change the rules.
And the food they have is
effectively the same.
Local is another one
of these things.
It's nice that something's
local.
But I promise you, as local
starts getting a market edge,
people will find ways
to 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 corn
syrup, a lot of folks
think that is bad.
And there's some reasons
to believe that it is.
But the hypocrisy of
the following thing
just drove us crazy.
We found there's a bunch of
commercial honey places that
basically fed bees with
artificial flowers with high
fructose corn syrup.
So it was fructose laundering.
You feed it to the bees, the
bees loved it, because they
didn't have to do much work.
They suck up the fructose
here, squirt it into the
honeycomb, and just
hugely productive.
So they can sell people
natural honey.
Here's another one.
The reason that you've got a
red color and some of the
flavors in cured meat like bacon
is because of nitrates.
And there is some legitimate
concern about whether nitrates
are all that good for
you, 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 celery
juice, which has got the same
nitrate concentrate as
the original brine.
But it happens but there's a
lot of nitrates in celery.
Now is that nitrate free?
No.
But in a ruling with the Federal
Trade Commission, in
fact, because it started off as
celery juice, the fact it
has the identical quantity--
and if it didn't have the same
quantity, it would not turn
the meat red.
And that's why if you really
cared about nitrate free
bacon, it better be gray.
Because otherwise it's nitrate
by another name.
So anyway, I hate using
hypocrisy 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 only
going to do one more so that
we make sure.
I'm trying to think-- three
things that are always in my
fridge are?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Fish sauce,
sesame oil, and some
rendered duck fat.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I was expecting
a 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 looking
forward to using it.
My question is actually in
regard to something you made
reference to right when
you first stepped up.
And that's in regard
to baking.
So I don't know whether you've
explored this as a
potential next step.
But I'm curious as to your
thoughts around--
baking, to me, seems to be much
more exact, much more
scientific.
So I'm wondering what your
thoughts are about how maybe
you see that as potentially an
easier world to explore, as
opposed to traditional
cooking?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: So you're
absolutely right that from a
cultural perspective, baking
and pastry is more precise.
Nobody adds baking
powder to taste.
First of all, it tastes
terrible.
Second of all, you can't judge
by taste what's the right
amount to make your
muffins rise.
And you'd better measure it
pretty precisely, otherwise
your muffins are going to
over-rise, or they're going to
be like hockey pucks.
So pastry chefs bought
off on a lot of these
things earlier on.
One funny example is in the
book, we use percentages in
addition to grams.
Because if you want to scale it
up, it's handy to do that.
And the system we use is called
baker's percentages.
Why?
Because every baking
book has it, but no
non-baking books have it.
And it was funny, the number
of even professional chefs
who'd say what's their
percentage crap?
And their pastry chef would
say, uh, chef, I'll
explain it to you.
We've used it for 100
years in pastry.
So that's one thing
that's different.
Another thing that's different
is that there are pastry books
that take you much closer to
the state of the art than
savory books did.
So if you read a pastry book by
Pierre Herme, for example,
Paco Toro Blanco, and I could
list all kinds of them, they
probably would have more recipes
and more techniques
that were close to the state of
the art than if you tried
to find the same kind of thing
for cooking meat, for example,
where the state of the art was
50 years ago, in terms of what
you find in books.
That said, the world of baking
and pastry chefs are very
receptive to all of
these things.
Here's actually one
other point.
At a lot of restaurants in New
York, the modern techniques in
the kitchen, all pioneered
by the pastry chefs.
So at Jean-Georges, Johnny
Iuzzini, the first sous-vide
cooked in Jean-Georges was
by Johnny for pastry.
At Le Bernardin, it was
Michael Laiskonis.
And both of them, and lots of
other pastry chefs like them,
drag the rest of their kitchen
into the at least 20th
century, and maybe
into the 21st.
But for the same reasons,
they're also very
receptive to it.
And there's an awful
lot of really
interesting creative things.
So watch this space.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So I enjoy smoking
meats at home.
And I find one of the great
things about it is if you're
patient, and you can control
the temperature, then a
brisket or ribs or a pork
shoulder will just tend to be
delicious no matter
what you do.
So what do you recommend to sort
of take it up a level?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: OK.
So we're really big
on barbecue.
And what I'm about to
say tastes great.
But this is total anathema to
traditional barbecue folks.
So you're totally right that low
and slow is the way to go.
Only we like to go
lower and slower.
So for pork ribs, I'd cook them
at 140 degrees for 48
hours, sous vide.
So this is not like,
hi, honey!
Let's have ribs tonight!
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Then
you smoke them
for a couple of hours.
Again, you don't want to exceed
maybe 140 degree air
temperature.
Turns out you can smoke them
either before or after you
hook them sous vide.
And for a pork shoulder, I
would do the same thing.
I might actually take the
temperature up a little bit,
to, say, 145 degrees,
but for 48 hours.
For short ribs, we typically do
145 degrees for 72 hours.
So this is truly patience
oriented.
But oh my god, the results you
get are just unbelievable.
Now, there's a guy named
Steven Raichlen who's
considered one of the
world's foremost
authorities on barbecue.
He's literally sold millions
of his barbecue books.
He came to our lab.
And we made these short
ribs for him.
And he wrote on his blog that
they 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 a
smoker, you're already at the
bleeding edge of craziness.
AUDIENCE: You can keep
it outside, though.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: That's fine.
But you can do your sous
vide cooking inside.
You can do it ahead
of time, right?
In fact, you can also freeze
it or keep it in the fridge
after you've cooked it
sous vide that way.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Take a
couple days off work.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah.
We find you only smoke it
for an hour or two.
Depends on how heavy of a
smoke flavor you want.
But smoking for a really long
period of time doesn't do that
much good, because the
penetration depth that you get
was smoking drops off
exponentially.
And so smoking it for six
hours isn't that useful.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So this idea that we
can replace a lot of the sort
of technique and skill that
used to be was required to
cook right with technology
is really neat.
And I'm just wondering if I,
as a home cook, go and do
that, if I buy your book and buy
my digital thermometer and
so forth, and so I don't have
to know when my food is done
by looking and smelling, I now
have a lot of free time.
So what skills should
I develop?
What's my highest marginal
return to time I can develop
in the kitchen?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Come
back to work?
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: I was gonna
say, you work at Google!
You don't know what to
do with free time?
What's free time?
But here's a different way.
Here's sort of an answer, which
is, there's a tremendous
amount of cooking that is
aesthetic at its essence.
And there isn't a technological
solution for that.
So what combinations of
flavors do you put in?
What combination of textures
do you do?
If the dinner party got
so simple, well,
add a couple of courses.
There's always an axis that you
can move in where there's
an unbounded amount of stuff,
and where technology isn't
going to help you.
So while you've automated some
things so that you'll never
overcook it, you'll never
undercook it.
It's all perfect,
it's done great.
Well, then, use that
time to experiment.
Do some more cool stuff.
Add a couple dishes,
add garnish.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
FEMALE SPEAKER: OK, this
is our last question.
AUDIENCE: Thanks again.
You mentioned that the
thermometer would be the first
thing that you purchase,
or you would
recommend as a purchase.
I remember the first
Thanksgiving where I took over
the kitchen.
It wasn't at 9.
Probably 19.
But I put in the probe
thermometer, 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 sure
enough, it was raw.
And so I wonder, like, do you
cover basically the fact that
meat is not equal
all throughout?
Like, the proper way of
measuring temperature--
because that's really
important.
Not just having the tool.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah.
So we do discuss that.
The really cool thing I have in
this ovens that I have at
home, which are sort of
commercial grade ovens.
You probably have them somewhere
in one of your
cafeterias.
They have the coolest thing.
They have a temperature probe
that's got five separate
probes in it.
And so not only does it pick the
coldest one, but it also
looks at the gradient.
And so then you could tell how
it's heating up or cooling
down, and by doing that, you
can figure all the way.
But in general, what you want to
do is you want to pick the
thickest part of something.
In the case of poultry, the
traditional thing is to put it
down near the hip joint.
That's not really because that's
the thickest part.
The thickest part is still
going to be the
breast for a turkey.
But that's the part that
probably you're most concerned
about undercooking.
So, yeah.
We definitely cover
that in the book.
And it's true, you need to make
sure your temperature is
representative, otherwise you're
going to fool yourself.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Thanks.
That's all we have time for.
Thank you so much
for being here.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Well,
thank you.
FEMALE SPEAKER: It
was really great.
Thanks.
