The End of Cuisine

Buy _Modernist Cuisine At Home_, or, if you don't want to subsidize Myrvhold, _Ideas In Food_ and _Maximum Flavor_ (from the same authors). These books are full of applications of modernist cooking that are useful in home kitchens.

Here's an easy example: you can turn any cheese --- any cheese --- into a cheese with the texture and melting properties of American cheese; you heat it, add a little liquid and a little sodium citrate, in a ratio you can find in the books or online. The cheese melts and the citrate instantly emulsifies it, so even a veiny blue or a mature cheddar melts smooth. Pour into a cool metal pan, slice and wrap.

You're not going to make a lot of "airs" and foams and freeze-dried powders and powdered oils (though: the maltodextrin olive oil powder trick is pretty cool to play with), but there's a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff to modernist cooking that you'll use a lot once you know them.

From "modernist cuisine at home" which is kind of the diet version of the full $625 set, I have made the pressure cooked carrot soup and it is in fact the best carrot soup I've ever eaten.

So you need a pressure cooker. And probably an immersion blender or at minimum a blender of some kind.

I've also done a variety of extractions. Carotene butter (which I think you need for the soup above anyway). This requires little more than a vegetable or herb with fat soluble flavors (like lots of carrot) and some butter and a saucepan. And a juicer. Maybe I'm a weirdo (oh, who am I kidding, I'm a weirdo) but I like carotene butter on ... everything. Its like butter-ketchup, but tastier.

The recipes are not necessarily oriented around generating the maximum volume of food or quantity of food per unit of raw material input. So it takes a lot of carrots to make a large batch of carotene butter. So it does. And its worth it.

A lot of it is ideas and techniques. So the advice on homemade hamburgers was interesting and informative and I was able to successfully employ it. But I didn't "git clone" the recipe, I just kind of fixed up my technique.

Sous vides are great because they actually allow you to measure things properly. Do you consider pressure cooking "modern" because that's also great. There's also some cool stuff you can do with a whipping siphon[0]

[0] https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/whipping-siphons/landing

I have a similar skepticism of modernist cooking. I have very egalitarian ideas about good food--it should be for everyone. This has probably never been true, but the fact that people are trying to make new foods that are even harder for the common person to achieve rubs me the wrong way.

Of course my idea of a perfect meal trends towards amazing Banh Mi from a food truck rather than Kobe Beef fillet mignon, so YMMV.

Quite a bit actually. Foams for instance are very easy and fun to play around with. Hydrocolloids aren't very expensive, let you do cool stuff, and often take very little time/effort to use. Toss an eight of a teaspoon of xanthan in your next salad dressing and watch it get creamy as all hell and not separate.

Beyond that, there's a lot of info in there about classical cooking too that is quite informative. You'll improve the performance of your charcoal grill by lining it with foil, for instance. It's neat seeing how proper wok cooking works, even though you can't try it at home because you'll never get a hot enough burner.

Its just an "artisan" way of using techniques from industrial food manufacture. So buy junk and preprocessed food if you want the cheap option!

>they all seem to involve an expense of time and equipment that I'm not willing to invest given the alternatives.

Not to mention an unhealthy obsession with triviallities in food, the same way others fixate on model airplanes.

Cook your steak in the oven with an in-the-oven meat thermometer. Set oven to 250 and cook until proper internal temperature matches preferred doneness

You can make salmon sous vide in a kitchen sink with a zip lock bag and a thermometer.

Can you give some more examples of the kinds of closed-mindedness you're trying to get at? I'm trying to understand your line of thought. Are you saying that Myhrvold is being an asshole because he's elevating what he is doing to a much higher level than it justifies?

Not agreeing or disagreeing - genuinely curious.

This what I really like about "modernist cuisine", and why I think it's silly that some people consider it the future of cooking. It's really fun and delightful to very occasionally enjoy food as prepared by a mad scientist, you know? If I'm shelling out $200 for a meal, I'd rather experience it as this sort of ephemeral performance art rather than yet another perfect, but ultimately unmemorable, traditional dish. But aside from the occasional technique or two (sous vide), nobody's gonna be doing this sort of stuff at home.

In France, back in the day, the King was served entire meals at once, which would sit there cooling off while spectators gawked from the gallery. It was one thing if you could afford to eat great cuisine, but if you could afford to let it go to waste, that showed real power. That kind of thing inspired the democracy movement.

So, in the long term, it is simply not possible for serious cuisine to grow more detached from eating than it has been.

Most cuisines are ethnic and you can point to a spot on the map, like italy. MG and modernist is more like "point to the internet".

Given that, by analogy, for most people "italian night" is ordering dominos pizza. However, it is possible to make a homemade tomato sauce and pour it on homemade fresh pasta made into the shape of homemade ravioli thats stuffed with home made home ground italian sausage. Most people would be surprised / shocked at that effort. That doesn't mean the homemade ravioli is less Italian than ordering Dominos or Dominos is more real because more people "cook" Italian that way.

So yeah, I've spent 5 hours making carrot soup. An entire afternoon. And it was really good.

This has always been the case. Small food stalls can produce great quality good cheaply. So expensive reauatrants have to work on the ephemerals or 'experience'. Its just that this kind of restaurant has grown significantly in our generation where eating out costs less because of the efficiencies of the modern world.

So? He also an amateur paleontologist whose work in that field has been published in Nature, has masters degrees in both space physics and mathematical economics, a PhD in theoretical physics, has worked as a postdoc for Stephen Hawking, is an award winning nature photographer, won first place at the Memphis barbecue championship, and is one volcano lair away from true mad scientist territory with his proposals for large scale geoengeering to deal with climate change.

People at his level somehow manage to have both a very diverse set of interests and to excel at all of them. It's kind of annoying...I have a very diverse set of interests, and I suck at most of them. How do they do it?

Yes, Nathan Myhrvold is a well known patent troll. He should be called out for what he really does, instead of being called an "inventor".

Not me. Though the author is gracious to Mhyrvold and recognizes the rare opportunity to join in this meal, he does not seem especially complimentary to the food. Actually, he seems unimpressed. Despite all the technical wizardry, the meal might have simply fallen short of something prepared simply. It's a valid opinion.

There is a lot to dislike about him. A man who becomes the preeminent patent troll after already having a enough money to do anything he wants-- worst kind of person, if you ask me.

Thanks; changed.

I don't think this is what you're talking about but one of the ways of killing mosquitos is to lace a gallon of water with a chemical that attracts adults and kills them along with any eggs. In practice, this would basically target only females.

After a quick search I found this link leading to a page of Intellectual Venture's

http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i...

It's pretty cool but unfortunately looks tied to IV. My first guess might be to avoid any criticism that by killing ALL mosquitos, they're harming the ecosystem. I guess that's wishful thinking for a company that I kind of despise even being on their website.

There isn't sex identification technology.

Mosquitoes eat nectar from plants. They only use blood for mating purposes (and the female is the one that has to get it).

So if there are mosquitos around humans, they are almost all female anyway (and the ones that aren't don't bite).

It's not very expensive. They measure the frequency of the wing beats. You can even build your own: http://makezine.com/2010/08/30/make-23-how-to-shoot-mosquito...

I'd guess the idea is if you kill all the mosquitos then you are decimating the food supply for the animals that eat mosquitos.

But if you just kill the females at least it cuts whatever damage you're doing to the food supply by half.