The Tastemaker

The ultimate kitchen is in Bellevue, Wash., and it’s not pretty. There are no granite countertops or sleek stainless-steel appliances. It’s big but not especially spacious. There’s no wood-burning oven, no stools. There is, however, a centrifuge that can create a force 40,000 times as strong as earth’s gravity, for separating pea broth; an ultrasonic welder; plenty of hydrocolloids, to make ice cream or pea butter with; plenty of liquid nitrogen, into which you can dip your burger before you cook it to ensure it won’t get well done while browning; immersion circulators and controlled-vapor low-heat ovens; induction burners to let you cook with magnets; and, of course, a full-scale industrial machine shop to allow you to build any tool you don’t already have. Oh, and it has 72 of the best chefs in the world as advisers and unlimited credit at the store. The kitchen belongs to Nathan Myhrvold. He is using it to create the most ambitious cookbook ever written.

Myhrvold, a billionaire mad scientist with a culinary bent, is surely the man for the job. An übernerd who got his first Ph.D. at 22, the 51-year-old polymath has degrees in mathematical economics and theoretical and mathematical physics but turned to computer science in his 20s and spent 14 years as Microsoft’s technology guru before cashing out 12 years ago. He’s almost certainly the only man to have discovered Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, won the Memphis in May barbecue championship and studied quantum physics with Stephen Hawking. Bearded, bespectacled and given to giggling loudly, the ebullient scientist has the air of a boy left alone in a toy store — a boy with a titanic intellect and vast bank account. At the moment, his nonculinary projects include building a laser that can zap the wings off mosquitoes and attempting to solve global warming by shooting particles into the atmosphere. He is also running a large, highly controversial patent-licensing firm with over 700 employees. But what he really loves is the kind of cooking commonly known as molecular gastronomy, which he prefers to call modernist cuisine. In March he will release a six-volume, 2,438-page, 48-lb. (22 kg) lavishly designed and photographed $625 cookbook that he believes, not unreasonably, will be the definitive work on the subject.

(See a day’s worth of food around the world.)

A cookbook from just one of the world’s leading modernist chefs, like Grant Achatz of Alinea and Next in Chicago or Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in Spain, is typically the subject of endless discussion; Modernist Cuisine has 1,500 recipes from nearly all, along with a great number developed by influential amateurs, bloggers and Myhrvold’s team, operating out of its multimillion-dollar food lab in Seattle. There are two volumes before the books even get around to recipes, one on history and fundamentals and one on the kind of high-powered techniques that define modern cooking. Volume III, a beast, covers the plant and animal kingdoms; Volume IV covers the nonfood ingredients of this kind of cooking — like emulsifiers, gels and foams — and has chapters on wine and coffee, two other subjects in which Myhrvold is an expert. The fifth volume is the closest to a traditional cookbook, dedicated as it is to plated-dish recipes. And since probably no one would carry these behemoths into the kitchen, there’s a sixth volume: a spiral-bound kitchen manual with waterproof, tear-resistant pages.

(See photos of Grant Achatz’s stunning dishes.)

While there have been era-defining cookbooks — Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire (1903) is one precedent — it’s unlikely that anyone will ever have the desire or wherewithal to produce a print project of this magnitude again. Myhrvold has spared no expense and taken the time to get it right. But why should anyone care about a book based on tools that no one actually has, in the pursuit of foods that few people eat? Myhrvold has a ready answer: the books don’t tell you how to cook; they try to make you grasp what is happening when you cook. That, Myhrvold believes, is how you get better at it. They tell you not only how to cook a chicken but also what happens when you do so and how you can control it — by whatever means are available to you. If the books have a signal image, it’s that of a pot or pan literally cut in half to show a cross section of what happens inside as something cooks.

For all the food lab’s use of high-tech tools, the most radical innovation in the books might well be the parametric recipes that, without commentary, lay out the exact temperatures at which various foods change taste and texture — applying science to cooking with the blunt force of a meat tenderizer. Forget tradition. “Most people out there, if they got sick, don’t want their great-grandmother’s surgeon or their great-grandmother’s pharmacist,” Myhrvold says. “They don’t really want their great-grandmother’s cook.” Putting a whole piece of an animal in an oven and hoping that all the parts will turn out equally good isn’t something we have to live with.

See the top 10 food trends.

Don’t Try This at Home?

Whether anyone will actually buy the set doesn’t matter in a practical sense to Myhrvold, who could easily afford to burn every copy to heat his Washington home and still have enough money left to buy a fleet of submarines. But he wants the books read; more than that, he wants them to change the way people cook, which has been imprecise since the Cro-Magnon campfire. “The idea you would rely on intuition to judge something you are terrible at judging makes very little sense to me. Why don’t you blindfold yourself too? If reading the thermometer is a bad thing, why see? Why taste?” asks Myhrvold, his voice rising. “Why not just throw salt on and guess?”

He laughs. “We use thermometers, we use temperature-controlled devices like sous vide baths and CVap ovens, and we love them. Now, there are people who say, Oh, that takes the soul out of cooking to use sous vide. I think that’s a load of crap.”

(Watch Rocco DiSpirito cooking low-calorie comfort food.)

There’s no doubt that, while eating a meal in a science lab lacks something by way of atmosphere, the food produced can be very, very good. Max Bilet, a French chef who worked in the legendary British restaurant the Fat Duck and is now one of Myhrvold’s collaborators, cooked me a modernist tasting menu during a visit to the lab. A vegetable stew served with centrifugally separated pea broth was as bright and lively as a salad pulled right out of a rooftop garden (except for the beaker the broth came in). The mushroom omelette was like no mushroom omelette I had ever had — and at the same time the essence of every one I’d had, its aerated and steamed eggs so light that it barely seemed to have any mass whatsoever. A steak was cooked sous vide to a perfect medium rare and then seared to give it texture and color. But the real stars were the fries, which were slow-cooked and chilled, and then placed in an ultrasonic bath of the sort that jewelers use. The bath created thousands of tiny fissures and cracks that, when exposed to boiling oil, made the fries unspeakably crunchy and intensely good, especially when showered with small-grain salt.

There was no question that this was some of the best food I could remember eating. Similar experiences have led to such modernist meccas as El Bulli and the Fat Duck being ranked as the top restaurants in the world. But how much of that was novelty and virtuosity and the fact of having an army of cooks, servers, dishwashers and even machinists at their disposal? It seemed to me unlikely that the wonders Myhrvold and his team were achieving in the lab would ever translate into the daily life of cooks in America. Most of the technologies that have revolutionized the way we cook — canning, freezing, the pressure cooker, the microwave — appealed because they made things easier. Why, I asked Myhrvold, should his revolution, with its high degree of difficulty, have an effect? If people have been cooking with pots and pans and broilers all these hundreds of years, what made him think that they would change now, even with his parametric charts at their disposal?

(See photos of the finest kitchen masters squaring off.)

Myhrvold has anticipated this question. There’s a note of defensiveness when he talks about the revolutions of the past that changed the way we eat, like the French nouvelle cuisine of the ’60s and the new American cooking of the ’70s and ’80s. “I think knowledge is good,” he says. “I think empowering people to make better chickens is good. If you took a survey of roast chickens right now, they’re better than they were 30 years ago. The quality of raw materials is higher. People’s taste is better. It’s unbelievable what the improvement has been. I think it’s a better world now than it was then. And it can keep getting better. Why,” he pauses, picking his words carefully, “is ignorance good?”

A moment later, Myhrvold is calm and sunny again. “I believe human creativity is unlimited and that people will continue to come up with fascinating and wonderful food — both chefs and homemakers. Everyone who cares about cooking.” He smiles. “New things happen all the time.” But for a modernist, culinary or otherwise, new things don’t just happen; someone makes them happen. Myhrvold is just doing what he can to help.

This article originally appeared in the March 7, 2011 issue of TIME.

See the top 10 bad beverage ideas.

See pictures of what makes you eat more food.