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Modernist Cuisine at Home

Nathan Myhrvold, Maxime Bilet · 2 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Modernist Cuisine at Home" by Nathan Myhrvold, Maxime Bilet.
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Amazon Summary
Change the way you think about food: Modernist Cuisine at Home opens up a new world of culinary possibility and innovation for passionate and curious home cooks. In this award-winning, vibrantly illustrated 456-page volume you’ll learn how to stock a modern kitchen, master Modernist techniques, and make hundreds of stunning new recipes, including pressure-cooked caramelized carrot soup, silky smooth mac and cheese, and sous vide–braised short ribs. You’ll also learn about the science behind your favorite dishes like oven-roasted chicken, how to utilize sous vide cooking techniques, and why pressure cookers are perfect for making soup.
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
I feel that learning the classics on cooking is a good way to see how engineering mindset is close to cooking and food preparation mindset.

Talking about Italian food in specific, they're very opinionated about what's the best way to work each ingredient, how to work dough, how long to leave pasta resting, and what's the best blend of herbs and the best species for each recipe. On engineering we call it standardization not fetishism. That's what DOP, DOC and DOCG is about, and that's what the Neapolitan on Neapolitan pizza is about, you know that if you eat a Neapolitan pizza that follow the official process you will have a predicted flavor on your pizza, like it or not.

By reading the classics and asking yourself why they cook that way you will start to understand that you can use shortcuts where the output could be the same or close enough. For instance stone is a very bad heat conductor, that's why you need a very hot oven to deliver the right amount of heat to cook your pizza. But if you use a better conductor you could deliver the same amount of energy on a much lower temperature. On the "Modernist Cuisine at Home"[0] book they research this topic and arrive on the conclusion that a thick baking steel sheet arrives on much better results, they even sell their official baking steel [1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvol... [1] https://modernistcuisine.com/shop/baking-steel/

notechback
DOP, DOC, etc are not about preference, they are designations for regionally protected products names with some production standards. Just like champagne is only champagne if it was made in champagne region from the right grapes in the right methodology.

These assure on the other hand normally a good quality standard as the regional producers' associations have every incentive to keep quality good.

subpixel
Exactly - they are not for standardization, they are for marketing.
basch
and in America, its VPN. https://americas.pizzanapoletana.org/en/members
Jun 30, 2014 · chollida1 on Recipe for a Better Oven
The oven design is of course patent pending:)

On a serious note, Like him or not his books/treatise on cooking is excellent. [1]

I got it for my wife for Christmas about 3 or 4 years ago, can't remember, and all 5 books have been well used.

You'll need a big kitchen for all the specialized gear he recommends but it made cooking fun for me and helped my wife go from an amateur enthusiast to someone who can hold their own with professional chefs. I'm very lucky:)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvold...

devnill
I'd seriously love to own his books but I refuse to give any cash to patent trolls directly.
fezz
On principle, it's one of the rare cases that I'm glad Modernist Cuisine is available as a Torrent. The man deserves it.
silverlake
Coincidentally my copy of MC at Home just arrived today. I had made a few dishes from recipes available on his site and was blown away. It has definitely rekindled my interest in cooking.
Shivetya
I tend to read Cooks Illustrated magazine as I have found that great cooking isn't a lack of equipment but instead learning how ingredients work together and proper preparation and use of those ingredients.

CI does review cooking related appliances, tools, and such, but their focus is on better ways to prepare the food and they go into great detail about the experimentation they have tried and why one worked and another didn't.

tptacek
I have both MC and the much cheaper Modernist At Home and recommend the latter (the smaller cheaper one) over the former.
VLM
Ditto on the latter, get the at home version. Its only like $100 (the big set is like $575 or so)

I was kind of surprised to start reading the article and immediately start guessing he's aiming at either more sous vide in the home or a combi oven in the home and I had to read about 3/4 of the way thru to find yup its a combi oven story.

One little problem with combi ovens is they work really well when sterile-ish but I can see some opportunity for nastyness and corrosion. People letting water sit for weeks all dusty and moldy and then wonder why the kitchen and food smell. Dirty oven walls now with extra moisture for special mold growth what could possibly go wrong. Maybe a vaporizer that uses distilled water would be more realistic. A traditional combi just isn't going to work in a residential setting.

Also a meta observation is he's not talking about getting to a destination, but several alternate paths of getting to a destination. So your oven cooks 5% too fast or slow, a "nest" level of intelligence bolted onto the oven should take care of that. Or most of the fooling around with a combi precision thermostat discussion is to get a sous vide like effect... well most of the time just use a sous vide and be done with it? (edited to add what I'm getting at is its possible thru application of extreme engineering to do something difficult... then again there are simpler methods... for example controlling the humidity inside a working oven is no joke to compensate for massive humidity variations in the ambient kitchen air... wouldn't it be a heck of a lot simpler to very tightly control humidity in the kitchen which is COTS and use a conventional oven which is COTS rather than making a very complicated oven?)

I have looked into the market and small excellent sous vide rigs are available, and cheap, but this article is correct, you are not putting a combi into a residential home without totally freaking out the interior decorator, the electrician, the plumber, probably the carpenter... its like dreaming of one of those 25 horsepower 5 minute steam dishwashers the commercial kitchens use instead of home dishwashers... well, you can wish for free, but its about as likely as mass adoption of a turbine car...

batbomb
On a podcast of Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold, he mentioned his dream is to modify his oven with copper tubing and inject water into his oven (he uses bricks for thermal mass). Of course, this was largely in relation to baking and injecting a massive amount of steam quickly, but I think a spray system over thermal mass (metal is the modernist suggestion, but I think possibly some sort of ceramic would be best).

Of course, I read this article and thought exactly one thing:

There's no way an oven like this will be affordable and reliable over a 3+ year. There's way too many things to break.

tptacek
That podcast is completely amazing, by the way. Anyone on HN who is into food that doesn't listen to Cooking Issues is missing out, bigtime.
joezydeco
I know of a few professional ovens that add humidity by spraying water directly on the heating elements. The trick is to use a very small amount at short intervals. You can't quench the calrod or it will crack.
XorNot
So we can imagine independent temperature controls but not making all the humidity bearing cavities UV-exposed?

The dis-infection problem would be trivially solved (relatively) by adding a very powerful UV light and ensuring it hit all the relevant surfaces. 20 minutes of that and nothing would be left alive.

VLM
UV actually doesn't penetrate grease very well. At least that's the story we told each other in the dinosaur decades when our eprom erasers wouldn't erase a chip in time, well, wipe that quartz window with solvent and try again.

Aside from someone who doesn't know anything about UV finding a way to bypass the interlocks and blinding themselves.

As a cooking technique I wonder if you could do anything interesting with strong UV. Literally bleach color from the surface of something. Could you bleach the surface of an angelfood cake to be pasty white yet baked? Might take a higher than sane UV flux for an impractically long time...

Another weird idea: Refrigerator UV bulb. Not entirely insane, well, probably. At least in the raw produce drawer.

marcosdumay
UV does not penetrate well in nearly anything. Materials like quartz are the exception.

Odds are that your refrigerator will only degrade the plastic bags that contain the produce, without even reaching it.

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