The Tastemaker

Can Nathan Myhrvold's scientific culinary opus change the way we cook?

By Josh Ozersky Saturday, Mar. 12, 2011
    • Ryan Matthew Smith / Modernist Cuisine LLC

    Prep chefs Myhrvold samples a dish created by co-authors Young, far left, and Bilet

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    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."

    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?

    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.

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