Modernist Cuisine. The Art and Science of Cooking (Extra large) [Tapa dura]

In the interest of full disclosure, I had access to a free electronic review copy from the publisher prior to receiving my (unfortunately NOT free) copy from Amazon.com, and I work for an organization mentioned a few times in the book (eGullet).
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It's hard to review this book without it coming across as hyperbolic: after all, it's a 50-pound, 2400-page beast that will cost you an entire year's cookbook budget and must have cost unfathomable sums to produce; you're either going to love it or hate it. However, I can say with confidence that if you liked McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, you are going to love Modernist Cuisine.

While the press coverage of the book so far has focused on the more esoteric aspects of the book--centrifuges, rotovaps and chemicals, oh my!--the book actually simply treats those items on equal footing with woks, sauté pans, and water. It covers them because you can cook interesting, tasty food with them. Of course, the weird stuff gets all the attention, because, well... it's weird. But this is a book that devotes an entire chapter to *water*. And the things it teaches you *will* make you a better cook. The authors are never satisfied with "it just works, don't ask why." It seems like every paragraph, on every detail, is tightly focused on the question of not just "what happens?" or "how do you do it?" but also "WHY does it work?" and "HOW does it work?" This book is particularly excellent if you are science-minded, but it is written with such clarity that I believe anyone can learn these things from it. Who knew that blowing on a spoonful of soup to cool it was so complicated, and so interesting?

Probably the most relevant criticism I have encountered is the notion that the recipes it presents are unapproachable. And a few things do, in fact, require a centrifuge (though the majority of the time it is an optional step). There is no doubt that many if not most of the recipes require ingredients that standard American kitchens don't stock. Most of us don't have Agar and Xantham Gum in our cupboards, and some find the very idea of cooking with "chemicals" a frightening, foreign, or downright objectionable practice. Truth be told these "chemicals" are no more (or less) unnatural than baking soda or refined sugar (the book spends a great deal of time discussing food safety and nutrition before diving into the "crazy chemicals"). Amazon even sells a starter kit that I've found quite useful: Experimental Kit Artistre - 600 grams. And for the most part these ingredients are not used "just for fun": the goal of the Modernist Cuisine movement is to examine the foods we eat, and our perceptions of that food, and try to make things that taste great, and perhaps even engage us on an intellectual and emotional level. I've made a few recipes from the book so far, and in particular the Mac & Cheese was astonishing: it is far and away the best M&C I've ever had or made, without question. It actually tastes like cheese! (What a concept, I know). And it's easier to make and more forgiving than the traditional béchamel-based method. So some of the recipes are simple, and some are complicated. If you have Alinea you probably have a pretty good idea of what the complicated ones look like: daunting, yes, but *not* unachievable if you are willing to put the time in.

Obviously a review of a 2400-page book could go on more or less forever, but I think the upshot is this: if you are interested in learning the "how" and "why" of cooking, of even the most mundane processes (they cover boiling water in great detail), this book is probably deserving of six stars; it is simply monumental. Save your pennies, this is a worthwhile purchase. If, on the other hand, that is *not* interesting to you, it's probably two stars: get the first and second volumes from a local university library, and don't worry about the rest (if you are only going to read the first two volumes I'd say it's tough to justify the price tag).

Pros:
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* Level of detail is incredible
* Covers the "how" and the "why" of every detail of the cooking process
* Depth and breadth of coverage is... well, worthy of 2400 pages
* Stunning photography, graphic design, and even printing

Cons:
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* Many of the recipes are very challenging
* Coverage of hyper-expensive equipment can be off-putting
* Too tall to fit on any normal bookcase

Books like Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, Alinea, and El Bulli 2003-2004 showcase modernist cuisine (or the by many hated label 'molecular gastronomy') from the perspective of a creative chef. If you bought some of these books and found the recipes fascinating but the rest of the books a bit too much written by a PR agency, you might like the current book. Much more emphasis has been put on making the text informative. Whereas chefs tend to go for very emotional language, these authors go for a scientific language. However, you don't need to be a scientist to understand the content, but that is the heart of the book. (If you hated chemistry/physics in school, this book is not for you). So in my view, the objective is to understand cooking innovation from a traditional scientific (some would say geeky) perspective, rather than from the perspective of a creative chef. So don't expect to hear anything of how to merge locally foraged ingredients (a la Noma) or combine senses like hay smell with autumn vegetables (a la Alinea) or sheer creative genius (a la ElBulli). The focus is cooking innovation, but there is also a lot of material that is interesting even without using any new machinery in the kitchen. Whenever they talk about traditional cooking the focus is on saying something novel and useful. The authors are not just interested in repeating old knowledge.

If you liked McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, but found it too focused on ingredients as opposed to cooking, you will like the current book. If you are worried about the price of the book I have two suggestions. Buy the McGee's book and then only if you like it actually buy the current book. Buy Beginning Sous Vide: Low Temperature Recipes and Techniques for Getting Started at Home and start experimenting with a low-cost set-up for sous-vide cooking, described in that book. (There is also Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide, but I would not recommend that book unless you are willing to splash on a vacuum sealer that can also seal liquids.) If you're like most people you might stop here, because most would argue that sous-vide is the modernist technique that is closest to mainstream use. You will have enough new knowledge to make great food.

UPDATE: The best intro book is Modernist Cuisine at Home. Buy that book and only if you like it you should buy the five volumes. Note that the one volume book is a new book so it contains a lot of new recipes. END UPDATE

The set contains some 25 chapters. Here are just a few highlights to give you a better feel for the book:
Chapter 3. Food safety. They discuss the almost complete absence of tricinella in US pork, but they don't go as far as to suggest eating raw pork (which is just as nice as raw beef). At least you will stop overcooking pork. Also useful section on how to remove germs from your kitchen. Very practical and science based.
Chapter 7. 150 pages of traditional cooking techniques. This is very much similar to McGee's book, except more practical. Very useful and practical without the use of (much) modernist equipment
Chapter 9. 90 pages of sous-vide cooking. I'd say that this is all you need to start experimenting. A lot of tables to understand temperature and cooking time combinations.
Chapter 11. Very interesting chapter on ingredients from the animal kingdom. Just a few things: aging of beef, how to cut a tuna, how to make crispy skin. I wish this chapter was much longer, because it is very interesting and covers new areas.
Chapter 13. This chapter is all about thickening of liquids (later chapters ditto on gels and foams). Starts by discussing traditional ingredients and then "new" chemicals. You also learn how to make the edible soil that I've seen in quite a few restaurants.
Chapter 18. 60 pages of how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Very interesting, but the authors buy into the coffee cult a bit too much. It would have been interesting with some scientific experiments here to, but I guess they ran out of steam :)

If I had it my way, I would remove volume 5 (plated-dishes) and move some of the more interesting recipes to the main text as master recipes. I would also skip volume 6 which is just a reprint of most of the recipes. Furthermore, I would have hired some good copy editors. There are simply too many errors in this book. Most of the errors have no consequence. The authors provide a long list of errata on their webpage, but who has time to go through such a document. We are not train spotters. The authors should be customer friendly enough to also provide a summary of important errata. (This last point is off course less relevant for future customers because they will get the benefit of the corrected second printing.) Finally, it is odd that the accompanying website some 1/2 year after the publication do not have a forum.

Finally some random thoughts:
- I am interested in innovation and this book is very interesting from that perspective too. I will with interest see how/if the knowledge in this book spreads to the FMCG, white goods and fast-food industries. Sous-vide meat is so much tastier so it does warrant a special cooking machine in your kitchen. Sous-vide equipment is becoming available on amazon, but considering how simple the equipment is, prices should come down in the near future. I don't understand why Phillips, Samsung, and Whirlpool don't already have their own sous-vide range.
- I think several methods in the book are going to be dead-ends. Like the use of centrifuges (USD10K+) to separate orange juice or almond oil. That is probably just going to appeal to the hard-core techies, but if they get the price down to USD2-3K things chagne. Still I love to have a book with lots of esoteric knowledge covered as well. That is afterall how innovation happens. Knowledge gets spread and people build on it. We don't know which pieces of knowledge that will be the useful stepping stones.
- It is going to be interesting to see how the old-style/slowfood/local-ingredients camp and the hightech/chemical/modernist camp are going to influence food and cooking in the years to come. I have been a traditionalist dreamer thinking that it was better in the old days when pure ingredients were cooked in a copper pot, but I am personally beginning to rethink. Making bread is in many ways a chemical, non-natural process as well. I'm about to try making stock with a pressure cooker. That could be an easy transition if the taste is superior. I will have a harder time with the chemicals changing the consistency and texture of the food.

So, here you are, reading this review. That alone is enough for me to tell you that if you're intrigued and thinking maybe you want to own Modernist Cuisine, then I can answer all of your concerns and questions right now by saying YES! YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED! Just click the button and order it, and settle back and read the rest of this review while you wait for delivery :)

Does MC live up to its hype? Yes it does. Is it relatively expensive as cookbooks go? Well, on a pound-for-pound basis, no, not really. Sure, in absolute terms something like $450-$625 for a "Cookbook" will seem crazy to many, but their error will be in pigeonholing MC as "Just a Cookbook", which is like categorizing a Ferrari as "just another car".

Are the authors of MC the ultimate Gods of Cooking? Well, no, not necessarily. They have their own viewpoint which becomes pretty clear after reading through any amount of the text, but still their contribution to the science and practice of cooking is huge, and their resulting construction (this set of books) is worthy of ownership for ANYONE interested in food OR cooking.

Reading MC is like reading McGee's On Food and Cooking, but with actual practical advice, actual recipes, and incredible illustrations.

So, misconceptions: "This book is only for the Molecular Gastronomy crowd". Really not true. There's surprisingly little Xtreme Cooking in the first three volumes. This set has a HUGE amount of general information that will be relevant and interesting to any cook, and indeed any lover of food. Even if you find the plated dish recipes in volume five to be inaccessible to you, you (yes YOU) will get an amazing amount of useful and fascinating information out of the first four volumes (at least).

Another one: "No mortal can actually cook any of the recipes in this book". Well, there are a few like their Mac & Cheese that pretty much anyone can probably do, but the majority of the recipes in the book become accessible as soon as you're willing to acquire the capability of cooking Sous Vide, which does not seem at all unreasonable. But even if you never cook a single recipe out of this set, you can easily get your money's worth from it just for the knowledge about food and cooking that it will impart to you.

What will you find in here? Lots of information you won't find anywhere else. This might not be the *only* book you need to own on cooking, but if you don't have a copy then your world will be seriously incomplete. Here's a quick rundown of the contents:

Volume one: History, Microbiology for Cooks, Food Safety, Food and Health, Energy, Water. The history section is interesting, but honestly the book really pick up until it starts talking about really practical stuff. In this respect, volume one, while fascinating, is the most boring of the lot. There's lots of interesting stuff packed into the Food Safety chapter for example, but in later volumes the authors seem to play more fast and loose with some of the safety issues. But this volume sets the standards and the basis for using the cooking techniques in the rest of the set safely. The food and Health section can be summarized as "Honestly we don't know very much about nutrition." and "It's probably not so much what you eat as how much you eat.". The authors give many examples of where the "common wisdom" about nutrition from the last 20-30 years actually turns out to be unjustifiable once the high-quality long-term studies are in. The chapter on the physics of Water sets the stage for perhaps the most core scientific principal that permeates the rest of the book: the way that water affects almost everything in cooking.

Volume two: Techniques and Equipment. Covers all the traditional cooking methods (grilling, pan-frying, etc., etc.) and for each it provides interesting and scientifically useful information about how it *really* works. Again, almost nothing in here is specific to Molecular Gastronomy type cooking. It's all really useful information that anyone can use, especially the backyard BBQ aficionado. In addition, this volume covers cooking Sous Vide in depth. Chapter 10 covers equipment for the Modernist Kitchen, and while it's easy to be scared off by the fact that they include a $10,000-$30,000 centrifuge in the "Must-have tools for the Modernist Kitchen" list, the reality is that having some form of vacuum sealer and a temperature controlled water bath for Sous Vide cooking will cover the majority of the techniques in the book. Sure they cover lots of Xtreme techniques, but, again, the reality is that a much higher percentage of the information in the book will be relevant, or at least interesting, to almost any reader.

Volume three: Animals and Plants. More than you ever wanted to know about how animal muscle flesh becomes meat, how it behaves chemically, under various forms of cooking etc. Lots of practical advice about how to do stuff. Parametric recipes for Risotto that alone will be worth the price of the book for some people. 400 pages of interesting and useful, practical information. Most of it not so obscure that any cook won't be able to learn MANY useful things from it.

Volume four: Ingredients and Preparations. Finally, some actual "modernist" space-age stuff. This volume covers Thickeners, Gels, Emulsions, and Foams, and additionally includes chapters on Wine and Coffee. Many if not most of the techniques described here are accessible to the home cook, even if they do involve exotic ingredients that would formerly have been more at home in a commercial food processing company or a food science lab. Lots of interesting and new ideas for food creation and presentation.

Volume five: Plated dish recipes. This volume is a showcase of the authors ideas and those adapted from other "modernist" chefs around the world. While the previous volumes (especially the later ones) contain many recipes, this volume shows how to construct complete plated dishes constructed out of multiple individual recipes and processes. In that regard it's perhaps the least interesting to a general audience that lacks the complete stable of equipment necessary to execute at least some of the dishes presented. But in terms of ideas, there's a wealth of information here for the professional or amateur home-cook.

Volume six is the Kitchen Manual, which is a spiral-bound plastic-type paper (i.e. almost indestructible) reproduction of most of the recipes in the book, along with a limited amount of reference material. The idea being that you can just take this into the kitchen when you actually want to cook something from the book. It's a nice touch, but does not really contain anything that isn't in the other volumes. It's basically just the recipes from the other volumes, and does not contain all the plated dish recipes due to space constraints.

The set's production quality is excellent. The total weight of the set is around 47 pounds, and it comes packed in multiple layers of cardboard and paper and with a nice acrylic storage case. The individual books are very large and just on the edge of usability in terms of size and weight when you curl up with one to read through it. But it's both an Objet d' Art that will look beautiful on a kitchen counter as well as a fount of knowledge that one can return to again and again.

The information contained in the set is very accessible, all of the text is very readable, and the pictures and their printing are exquisite. I would be surprised if, in the end, you didn't have a few quibbles with the authors on one point or other, but regardless of what you think of them, their production of this set does indeed represent a landmark in the history of food and cooking, at least comparable to the impact of McGee's On Food and Cooking.

There's way cool, totally useful, interesting information in this set. Whether you are a professional chef, a technology and science inclined home cook, or just a dedicated foodie or lover of beautiful things. It's really just not all that expensive considering what you get. If you fall into any of those categories, then you will NOT be disappointed.

A few slightly more philosophical points (originally from my blog reply at ruhlman.com) in regard to the more famously exotic techniques and equipment of Modernist Cuisine / Molecular Gastronomy:

I think one of the things that excites me about this book is that people will take the ideas that appeal to them and they will find ways to make them work with whatever means are available to them.

If you're a bazillionaire and want to distill/concentrate something, it's pretty easy to go out and by a $70,000 rota-vap which will do the job quite well. But there are of course much simpler distillation techniques that ought to be easily accessible to the home cook that might be pressed into service to at least do something similar. Once it's pointed out that you can do something interesting with this technique, people will find ways to accomplish those techniques, or even invent something new and even more exciting in the process.

Sous vide immersion circulator too expensive? People will adapt. DIY sous vide controllers are already one of the most often mentioned projects for hobbyists playing with things like the popular Arduino microcontroller for example.

To the degree that the ideas in MC are compelling, I think there will arise a "modernist cuisine at home" movement that will embrace simpler solutions along with the undoubtedly forthcoming consumer versions of some of these more exotic technologies, just as the Sous Vide Supreme and even PolyScience's own Sous Vide Professional have started to bring these technologies at least a bit closer to the reach of the average home cook.

I think there are a lot of food geeks out there who are excited by the idea of being able to play with food construction and "food hacking" and MC is going to give these people a whole new hobby (which might turn into a significant segment of the kitchen gadget market).

There are a lot of people who like food but who don't really "cook" for one reason or another, just as there are a lot of people who like art and may even want to create it, but don't think they can draw. In that world we now have various 3D software packages that people find empowering because the computer does exactly the stuff they don't think they're good at. For the less artistically inclined cook wannabe, MC comes along with its scientific quantitative methods with the message that things aren't magic and it's possible to understand how things work and construct a dish or recipe more or less from first principles without years of practice. It's somewhat like having a computer programming language for food.

In this respect it's not so much Modernist Cuisine but Modernist Cooks that may be enabled by the book. It may inspire an entirely new route of entry into the field of cooking.

Which is more appealing? Going to a cooking school where day after day you have the old school techniques drummed into you until you can reproduce them perfectly even though you don't really know WHY that particular magic works, or would you rather learn the science behind everything and start with a blank slate and ultimately derive many of the classic techniques while actually understanding how and why they work and then having the basis for new evolutionary experimentation?

I think if I were the head of the Culinary Institute of America, or any similar institution, I would call all of my instructors into a room and point to my new copy of MC sitting on the table and ask them "Why is it that WE didn't produce this?".

G.