>> Kevin Schofield: Okay, let's get started. Good afternoon, welcome. For those of you
just coming in, if you would rather not stand in the back of the room; it's getting kind of
crowded back there. We have an overflow room right next door that you can go sit in,
and we will be showing the whole thing in there as well. So feel free to use that room if
you want to. Welcome my name is Kevin Schofield. I work here at Microsoft Research
and it is my honor and privilege today to introduce Dr. Nathan Myhrvold who is visiting
us as part of the Microsoft Visiting Speaker Series. He is here today to discuss his new
six volume, 2400 page Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Looking to
reinvent cooking, science inspired techniques reveal how to prepare food that ranges
from the otherworldly to the sublime. This book is a truly unique contribution to the craft
of cooking and our understanding of its underlying principles. Nathan is CEO and a
founder of Intellectual Ventures a firm dedicated to investing both expertise and capital
in the development of inventions. In addition to stimulating the inventions of others, he
is himself an active inventor with nearly 250 patents issued or pending including several
related to food technology; I bet you find that difficult to believe. [laughter] he's
probably going to be mad at me for saying this, but Nathan is really a true Renaissance
man. He earned a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a Masters
degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University and has since extended his
research and trust to other fields. His work has been published in Science, Nature,
Paleobiology, The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Physical Review, and he
has contributed articles to The Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal,
Fortune, Time and National Geographic Traveler. As most of you know in a prior life
Nathan was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft and back in 1991 he founded
Microsoft Research. Nathan has been quoted as saying that he left Microsoft in 1999
because it was getting in the way of his cooking. But we are thrilled to welcome him
back today. Please join me in welcoming Nathan Myhrvold.
[applause]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Well it is great to be back at Microsoft. And I will tell you a little
bit about the book. So here is a picture of it. It is quite a thing. Here are some of the fun
facts. Six volumes, 2438 pages, 1.1 million words. If you put those words in a single
line of text it would be the 7 1/2 miles long. [laughter] I am not sure why you would
want to do that, but, you could. We took 150,000 pictures and 3200 of them were good,
so we put them in the book, [laughter] 1522 recipes. We had recipes that were inspired
by or adapted from 72 of the world's greatest chefs. We had six research cooks working
on the project for three years full-time, plus those 72 people outside. Forty four writers,
editors, art staff who contributed to the book. Actually the fact that I had a background at
Microsoft is a large part of the reason why I wrote the book and did it the way I did,
because I realized that at the certain point that there was an opportunity to do a book like
this, but it wasn't an opportunity to write a book by yourself, because it was too big, and
there is no way that a single person could have done all of this. And if I hadn't spent lots
of time working on software, I wouldn't have thought you could do it, but hey, 44 people,
this is nothing [laughter]. You know, we had that much just on one tiny part of one tiny
thing at Microsoft. Forty pounds, altogether, and here is my favorite statistic of all, for
the book, 4 pounds of ink in one volume; isn't that amazing? The printers make a blank
book for you as a mockup and I am looking at it and I am saying gee, is it really going to
be the same? And they said well, it will be heavier. I thought they meant the paper, and I
said well why is it heavier? And they said the ink. You are kidding me? And they said
well a full-page photo has 1000 of an inch of ink on it. You have a full-page photo or a
half page photo on most of your pages, 2400x1000th is like a big chunk of ink. So one of
the questions I asked was ink, why ink, why isn't it digital and online? So this is a picture
we took to sort of show that. The fact is if you want to deliver big, beautiful high
resolution photographs, there is actually no better way to do it than paper at the moment.
We also made our decision as to what platform to target two years ago. And two years
ago when we made the decision, there was no iPad. And we knew something like that
would come out but it would've been crazy for us to bet on it before it even existed.
Kindle was out, but on Kindle, I love my Kindle, for text based books, for novels and
things. But for a picture oriented book the Kindle is pretty bad. You know, you could
make an interactive version of the book, of course, and I think we will eventually. But a
lot of people have this attitude of oh you should have made it interactive so it could be
cheap. And I said oh you don't understand how that works. [laughter] You know, if you
made it interactive and you really made it cool so that you had animations and videos and
lots of embedded interactive features, then it's a lot more work and would potentially be
even more expensive than the other way. That is why it's on paper.
We also made a lot of effort to try to have good quality paper. So the first column you
can see sort of standard half toning, which is kind of pathetic. We wound up using the
one all the way at the other side, I guess all the way on your right, something called
stochastic screening. Now interesting enough we have some patents on the stochastic
screening that I was a co inventor on at Microsoft way back when. Because we realized
when we first started doing, putting--back in my day sonny, I sound like your grandpa,
[laughter] but putting pictures into Windows was like a big deal. Putting fonts was like a
really big deal. But one of the things that we realized was, of course, when you have
digital technology you don't have to halftone on a regular grid. You can mix it around,
and by mixing it around to get a much better result. In fact one of the guys who worked
on Windows 2.0 GDI is actually sitting in the front row here. We also tried to have wide
gamut inks. The gray here on the one side shows you what industry-standard inks would
do to this picture. And of course you can always try to tweak it to make it a little bit
similar, but we sprang for the wide gamut inks, which will let you print the whole thing.
There are always some things that you can't print. I mean obviously if you take a
photograph of the sun, you are not going to get a sunburn by looking at it. You can't
possibly have the full spectral response but the closer you can come, the better quality the
pictures are going to be. So now I will just walk through some of the volumes and say
what's in them. Volume 1 is called history and fundamentals. And it is mostly about
things that aren't in any cookbook. Cookbooks don't talk about history. They don't talk-we have a whole chapter on microbiology. We have chapters that talk about physics, the
physics of heat, the physics of water, chapters on food safety, even a chapter on nutrition.
So this is very nontraditional for a cookbook, but we thought it was important because the
motivation of the book, because we realized there was lots of information from science
that people had realized about cooking over the course of the last 20 years. There is a
very influential book called On Food and Cooking published by a friend of mine Harold
McGee, and he started a trend of people really understanding the science in the kitchen.
So there is all that body of knowledge. There is also a whole set of techniques that chefs
had invented. But both the science knowledge and the chef knowledge was very difficult
to learn. There was no big standard place you could learn it. You might get snippets of it
here and there, but there were no big standard textbooks.
So I thought gosh if I can pull all that stuff together in one place, it would really be a
service to people trying to learn it. And I knew that because I was trying to learn it. It
was one of the things that after leaving Microsoft I had more time for cooking. And I
was learning all of these state-of-the-art techniques and trying to talk to chefs around the
world and say how do you do this, what are you doing with that? I realized that they
hadn't told each other how to do it. So there was an opportunity for this fundamental
book. But if you do the fundamental book you kind of want to explain why. At least I
did. And I think that is one of the things that separates this book from most cookbooks.
We try to tell you why as well as how and what.
Most cookbooks are about the what, the recipes. All a lot of recipes, and the recipes say
do this, do this, do this and it will work; don't worry about it. That is not very satisfying
if you are a curious person and you want to understand more about it. It also is not very
useful if the techniques that they assume are ones that you do not know how to do. If it is
a standard technique, like sautéing, or anything like that, you can get lots of big thick
books that will teach you all of the basics of French cuisine or all of the basics of Italian
or Chinese cuisine. There was no book like that for modern cuisine, that's why we wrote
the book.
Volume 2 takes a technique and equipment oriented view of cooking. It starts with about
a 200 page chapter about traditional cooking. Where we explain how traditional cooking
actually works. What are the physical principles and other things behind roasting,
baking, frying. And we do that by using really cool photos which we will show some
pictures of. There is one right there of the broccoli steaming in a pot. Volume 3 takes an
ingredient oriented view of cooking and the two principal ingredients in our food are
animals and plants. And so here we discuss meat science. What is the structure of
muscles? What makes some meat cuts tough, some tender? What is the difference
between organ meats and muscle meats? What is the difference between fish, poultry
and mammal meat? In plants we do a similar thing for plants describing all of the
different aspects of plants along with lots of recipes.
Volume 4 takes a perspective of, we call it ingredients and preparations. This is about
more detailed ingredients in the broad categories like animals and plants. So we have a
chapter on thickeners, because a lot of cooking is about how to make a sauce thick, or
how to make a soup thick. Well there are some great modern ways of doing that as well
as a lot of traditional ways. We discuss both and try to put them in context. Emulsions
are another example in the chapter in here. Now mayonnaise is an emulsion; cream is an
emulsion. Milk, in fact, is a natural emulsion when it comes out of the cow that way.
Understanding how you make emulsions, you take the oil and water, two things that
really don't want to mix, and you sort of make them temporarily mix. Here is a really
important part of cooking so we have a chapter on that, as well as chapters on gels, on
foams.
Finally we have chapters on wine and coffee, because those are really important
beverages or an important part of cooking, but they are treated very differently. Wine is
treated almost like it's a separate topic from cooking and it's almost a religion. You
know, you are supposed to sort of bow and be respectful to the bottle of wine. [laughter]
We have a technique we discuss called hyper decanting. This is where you throw wine in
a blender and hit it on frappe. [laughter] So it is kind of a very irreverent view of wine.
We also have a chapter on coffee because dammit, we are from Seattle, [laughter] and
one of the things we say in the book is that most great restaurants in the world, most
Michelin three-star restaurants, the best restaurants in the world, have coffee that would
not be fit for a street vendor in Seattle, because if you are a street vendor in Seattle you
have to have really good coffee. And so we describe state-of-the-art espresso technique
and lots of stuff about all the details of making coffee.
Finally we have two other volumes; volume 5 is called plated dish recipes. This is the
only volume that really looks like a cookbook. If you go to a bookstore and you open up
a cookbook, a cookbook is supposed to have a big full-page picture of the food on one
side and the recipe on the other side. Then you flip the page and there is some more, and
so forth. So we actually have that here because this volume, although there are literally
more than 1000 recipes up to this point, this volume describes them in the terms of whole
plated dishes or whole meals. Throughout the rest of the book we will say here is a great
way to cook chicken. Here is a great way to make a sauce. We might have a suggestion
that you would use a sauce with chicken but we don't put it all together. Here it really is
about making an entire dish with all of the accoutrement and in most cases we go beyond
the dish; we have the side dishes and often the entire meal.
And we had a principal in making the book which is any kind of food is sort of all
equally legitimate and equally a possible topic of refinement and improvement. So we
have one of our recipes in here is for hamburger. And if you really care about
hamburgers and you really want to make the ultimate hamburger, you can and you can
lavish as much care on that as you would on some dish that might sound like a very fancy
French dish that you are supposed to lavish care on, actually you can do with either one.
And if you are really into the refinement, what the hell, we will tell you all the way. So
we went way overboard in trying to figure out the ultimate way to make a hamburger.
And we do that for roast chicken and for Southern barbecue. After we did the barbecue
chapter, one of our chefs is Indian and she says oh come on, curry is kind of like
barbecue. And so, by, God we did a whole thing on Indian curries.
You can't write a 2400 page book if you are good at saying no. [laughter] This is one of
the things I have learned. We also have a sixth volume. These volumes are large. They
are physically enormous. That is great for having big copies of the, seeing the photos and
so forth. But it's kind of big to balance on a counter. And it's kind of too pretty to
balance on a counter so we thought about how can we get the recipes in a form that you
can take into the kitchen. We also hit on having an 8/2 by 11, so somewhat smaller
format book, spiral-bound so that you can fold it back on itself on waterproof washable
paper. So if you spill on it you can wipe it off.
So here are some of the pictures. We hit on this idea early on of what we call the
cutaway photo, where we show you the magic view inside food while it cooks. And then
we annotate these in the book with lots of details to show here is exactly how this works,
here's what's going on here, here is what is going on there. So this is the case of boiling
water canning and if you look closely you see we cut the jars and half too. Here is
another great photo. Here is a photo, a cutaway photo of a centrifuge jar. So a centrifuge
is a fantastic tool. It spins liquid in these little jars and it spins them fast enough that they
experience a force equal to about 40,000 times Earth's normal gravity. That causes any
difference in density or weight to be dramatically magnified, and so things separate out.
And this is a Hungarian goulash sauce that we put in there and it separated into eight
different layers, by the force of gravity, each one having a different characteristic density.
Here is where we are searing some fish. This is some pomegranate seeds. Here is our
cutaway of a pot roast. This is grapefruit sections that we have peeled with an enzyme
which causes the outer membranes to become loose; you can just put them right off. This
is potato starch, or actually this is a potato. The starch is the purple granules; the blue
lines are the cell walls of the potato. Each cell has got a bunch of granules inside of it.
So here is an example of one of those cutaway photos. This is actually the first picture I
took for the book. And it shows broccoli that is steaming and then the various sidebars
will explain things. In this particular case we have a section about how steaming
although theoretically steaming ought to be higher faster heat transfer than boiling, in
practice it is not for most vegetables, and that is because actually there is a film of
condensation that forms on the outside so steaming -- we thought it should be faster.
Theoretically it is faster. Lots of books say it is faster. Our damn experiments showed
that it was slower. So let me look it up, we discover a food science journal paper from
1946, were this guy says, you know, it ought to be faster, but dammit, it is slower.
[laughter] So we had a little sidebar on that.
Here is our wok picture. Now a lot of people ask how we took these pictures and they
assume that this is all digital photo magic with Photoshop and of course they are digital
photos and of course we did use Photoshop, but no we really cut stuff in half. So that
wok is cut, in that case it is not quite cut in half; about a third of it is cut off, so there is
still a little bit of the bowl of the wok underneath. And we discovered why people don't
cut their woks in half normally [laughter]. The oil kept getting into the fire, so this
caught fire three times. [laughter] so if you want to do cutaway photos, you have to be
willing to make a hell of a mess. But we have this great motto which is it only has to
look good for a thousandth of a second. [laughter] The rest of the time it can be horrible.
And if we get that right thousandth of a second, it is all set. So here we can see another
example of us zooming in and showing all of what is going on. Here is our hamburger
cutaway.
So in some of the cases when we are containing a liquid we would glue a piece of glass, I
will show you a picture of that in a minute. But here, those coals are just sitting there on
the edge of this Weber barbecue that we cut in half. And so they kept falling off, and
they would fall and roll onto the floor. We would put them back with the tongs really
quick, take the shot, and then oh shit, some of them would fall again [laughter]. And in
fact the part that required lots of digital photo magic and some technique called HDR,
and so forth, is that the amount of light you get off those coals is of course very much less
than the amount of light you get when you pop the flash to photograph the burgers. So
the exposure does require lots of digital photo manipulation and algorithmic magic. The
cutaway shot you just cut the stuff in half. In fact here is how you cut staff in half. This
is our machine shop. [laughter] and this is-- my company has got this, in fact, this is right
down the street. It used to be the Bellevue Harley-Davidson service center [laughter].
We so we still get these guys that look like they came out of the ZZ Top video come in
and saying, hey, where did the Harley place go? [laughter] so I actually have a
[inaudible]. This is a wire EDM machine and here we are using it to cut a pot. The way
this machine works is it passes a lot of current through a very thin wire and sparks jump
off of the wire and it is sparks that actually cut the metal and you can see the sparks there
flying. And it turns out that you have more control over the sparks if you do it under
water, believe it or not. So this is sped up a little bit; it is not really quite this fast, but
there you go. There is cutting a pot in half.
So as a result we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world [laughter].
Here you can see one of the tricks that we would do. You can't see it super well here, but
there is a piece of Pyrex, heat resistant glass that has been glued in front of this pot with
this high-temperature silicone. Unfortunately the only silicone we could get that was
high enough temperature is red. But the great thing is, when you cut a pot in half you
have two halves. So what would we do is we would photograph this all put in place.
And then we would take the other half and put it in so we would photograph just that
little edge, and we would swap the bits out for the edge. It's very much the way in a
Hollywood movie how they have people fly through the air supported by a wire, and then
you digitally take out the wire.
Here is our heat and energy chapter. So we have partial differential equations in the
book. We are the only cookbook with partial differential equations, [laughter] and may
also end up being the last cookbook with partial differential equations [laughter].
I actually wrote thousands of lines of code in the process of writing this book because we
created programs to simulate heat flow and simulate all kinds of other aspects of various
processes going on in the food. Like here is the general heat equation; here is more
detail. Okay this is a nerdy enough audience that I thought it would be okay if I brought
those up. [laughter] Here's an example, actually of one of the calculations. Suppose you
have got a grill, and the grill is glowing superhot, well the way that heat is leaving that
grill and going to your food is through infrared radiation and it is bouncing around a
bunch. So here is the grill and if we assume that that is the part that is all equally hot how
does the radiation and therefore the intensity of cooking fall off as you move away? Now
if you are very, very far away it should go like the inverse square law. But that's only
when it's on the other side of the room and it is so far away that the cooking aspect does
not matter at all. So in fact I wrote a simulation to simulate all of this, and that led to this
thing here, this weird horn shaped thing. This is what we call the sweet spot. So this is
the range where the side to side variation is within 10%, because if you are cooking
something you really don't want to have a huge falloff so that one edge of your steak is
raw and the other end is overcooked, or if you are cooking lots of things, the ones in the
center get cooked more than the edge, so you want to know where that is. And it is
interesting it has this sort of a horn shaped, power law horn that comes out.
And we discovered quite a few things by doing this, our in-depth modeling. Here is an
example of one of our step-by-step things. And this is about grinding the ultimate
hamburger. So it turns out if you really are into hamburger, little things matter, including
the alignment of the grain in the hamburger. So if we zoom in here you can see how we
do it. As these little cylinders of meat come out of the grinder, you just pass the thing
back and forth trying to as much as possible to align those grains. And when you can do
that and you slice it what it means is all of the grain of the meat is sort of perpendicular,
here is the patty, it's all perpendicular, which means when you bite it, you are biting it
with the grain and it is easier to bite. Now the reason that that is important is because it is
really annoying if when you bite a sandwich, if when you pull it away some things are
tougher than other things, because then you pull them out when you pull it away from
your mouth. It's supposed to all like cut cleanly. So it's a little point but if you are
grinding your own hamburger meat, by God, this makes a difference.
We have a whole variety of other things on the ultimate hamburger including we cook it
with liquid nitrogen. The, I mean don't you? [laughter] So the best way we found to
actually cook the meat is to first cook it via a technique called sous vide, but we don't
cook it normally in sous vide you seal things in a vacuum bag, but if you seal the
hamburger in a vacuum bag, the atmospheric pressure will condense the burger more than
we like it condensed. So we do it in a Ziploc bag or in a sous vide bag that you don't seal
and so you have to hang the top outside the outside. Well that cooks up medium rare, but
you would like to have the burger be crispy and brown on the outside. What we tried lots
of ways of doing that and our favorite way is we take the cooked burgers, all been cooked
medium rare and we put it in liquid nitrogen for 30 to 45 seconds. Now that gets it really
cold. And then we put in the deep fryer. [laughter] and it sounds crazy but it is a great
mix, because what happens is you freeze a layer of meat that comes inside and that makes
a thermal barrier so that heat transfer on the outside of the burger from the hot fat is so
fast it easily browns it; it can overcome the heat, but you don't overcook the inside and if
you time it right, you get the perfect burger. And here is the perfect burger. It really
helps to make burgers on the space station, because there is no gravity. [laughter] In the
book we discuss actually each component of this. We make the bun; there is a special
way you make the bun and there is an amino acid called L-Cystine, if you add it prevents
the gluten from getting too tough because you want a really soft bun. Well that isn’t
mayo, that’s a beef suet Mussolini and we seem to know how to make that. That is a
special mushroom patty. We infuse the lettuce with smoke, to make a smoke flavored
lettuce. A vacuum compressed tomato, by God, we make the cheese. It turns out that in
1916 a guy named James Kraft invented a way of making cheese melt perfectly. And
that was the foundation of the Kraft Cheese Company and you all know that product as
Velveeta. And the basic idea was that if you added some stabilizers you could keep the
emulsion in cheese stable even when you melted it. And sodium citrate is the simplest
stabilizer that you can add. The trouble with Velveeta is that it tastes like Velveeta
[laughter], so we wanted a Swiss cheese thing; so we describe how to make your own
Velveeta basically out of gia and emmental cheese or basically any cheese that you would
like. And I already told you about that; this is mushroom ketchup. So that is our ultimate
burger.
Come on you can do it, there. Here is one of our fun toys in the lab. We have a video
camera that will shoot an HD resolution, I will do that one more time just because,
whoops. So the part I love about this is that nobody has told the water that it is time to
fall yet. So this is very much as a kid I would watch these Wile E. Coyote cartoons and
the coyote runs off the cliff but doesn't fall until he looks down. Well evidently the water
isn't going to fall until it looks down. And the reason for that is actually quite interesting.
It is because the balloon has so little mass. Now watch this closely and I will tell you
what it is. We have a chapter on gels. And I decided no chapter on gels would be
complete without a recipe for ballistics gelatin. [laughter] So by God we have a recipe
for ballistics gelatin and I figured, hey, on CSI or Myth Busters we have all seen ballistics
gelatin. Well, we made a block of it, and we have a high-speed camera. Pretty soon
someone is going to go get a gun. [laughter]
Watch closely. This is a kernel of popcorn. Watch it expand, and expand, expand and
voilà. So the point behind this is that when water boils into steam, it expands by a factor
of 1600. What is happening here is this, you can't see it, this little jet of steam is coming
out. You can watch this expand as it is trying to relieve the pressure. It can't relieve it
fully and so it expands, and explodes. And so that is how popcorn actually works and we
use this as an illustration in the book of this important principle because that water is
expanding by a factor of 1600 is super important in cooking. That is why it takes so
much energy to boil water. That is why pressure cookers work, and there is a whole
variety of things that that are essential to. Well if you want to make an omelette, you
have to break a few eggs. And if you have recipes for omelettes and you have already
been shooting some ballistics gel [laughter], I can't say as there is a tremendous amount
of cooking points to it but [laughter] my God we just watch it over and over again in the
lab. [laughter]
So that is all I have for this. I would be happy to take some questions at this time. Yes?
>>: How was the hamburger?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Well, I think the hamburger is great. But the interesting thing
about comfort food items like that is that people have their own very personal notion of
it. There was a restaurant critic who tried our hamburger who is normally is a very
sophisticated restaurant critic but he said, oh come on, shouldn't it be greasy and
overcooked? I said that is not the way I like it but hey, everyone has their own favorite.
So for our favorite approach, which largely means my favorite approach [laughter], it's
fantastic. But you really have to appreciate the subtleties. There are plenty of burgers
that are really good; they just aren't that good. Yes?
>>: So if you were to try to do this professionally you could possibly grill burgers in the
usual [inaudible] but how much of this could actually be implemented by mere mortals
[laughter]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: There are no mortals here. You all work for Microsoft. [laughter]
[applause] But, okay, that is a really good question, and it is a question that I often get.
How many of these recipes and techniques can you actually do? And there are a couple
of answers, normally I say about half the recipes in the book anybody could do. If you
are willing to go buy some stuff at the kitchen store, but only things in a kitchen store;
you don't have to do anything super exotic, you could probably push that to 75%. And
the last 25%, that is quite adventuresome. [laughter] There are some people that say oh,
well, come on, this isn't really for people in the home. But in fact, online there is a site
called E-Gullet, there is this huge enthusiastic set; there must be 50 or 100 people who
are all cooking all of these recipes at home. And sitting over here in the front row is
Scott Heimendinger here of Microsoft who is also Seattle food geek and he was cooking
all of these things at home before he even knew how. [laughter] So it is certainly
possible to, you know, there is a liquid nitrogen that you can buy in lots of places actually
very cheap. There are services that even deliver it; in fact they deliver to doctors’ offices
and things like that. And in fact I get it delivered to my house in Madina and the guy
always says, you know, I don't have any other homes on my route [laughter]. Yes, over
there in?
>>: My question is can you recommend a good Redmond area source for liquid
nitrogen?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Actually if you e-mail, or see Amy over here we will send you
exactly who we use. Liquid nitrogen cost less than bottled water, okay? People think
that it must be really exotic, but 78% of the air in this room is nitrogen. And all you have
to do is make it cold and it becomes this liquid. And it is great fun and people think that
it is like really dangerous. If you work hard enough, anything can be dangerous. But if
we had liquid nitrogen I would stick my hand in it. I would pull it out really fast,
afterwards [laughter], but I would stick my hand in it, whereas you would not get me to
stick my hand into a deep fryer for example. Yeah, down there.
>>: How much space in the book do you devote to baking?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: None. So, he asked how much space in the book do we devote to
baking. Although I found it hard to say no to things, we had to draw the line somewhere.
So in principle we have no coverage of baking pastry or dessert. Now in practice, we
cheat a little bit. So we do have the hamburger bun. We have one or two other bread
recipes in the book. We have no dessert except we have three or four ice creams and we
have a crème brûlée and a this or a that, so we probably have a half a dozen really cool
dessert things. But mostly we don't do that. It is one of the possible things that we will
do next is to do a pastry, baking and dessert book, although we haven't decided to do that
yet. One of the really frequent questions I get, people will say, so the book is done.
What next? And I say how about what I am doing right now? Because, in fact, I am
going around talking to people like this all the time now and probably will until the end
of the year. Yes?
>>: What was the most surprising kitchen debunking new discovered as you did your
research?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: So there were a bunch of kitchen myths that we already knew
about that other people had debunked. Probably the single most surprising one for us, I
will tell you two. One is that plunging things into ice water doesn't stop the cooking.
Everyone thinks oh yeah, you plunge it into ice water to stop the cooking. And it is a
logical fallacy but it is very similar to Galileo disproving that heavier objects fall faster.
It made perfect logical sense that heavier objects should fall faster, right? They are
heavier. Only it turns out that the world doesn't work that way. Well in the same way, if
you imagine a piece of food, imagine this is a piece of food, heat is moving from the
outside in, while you are cooking it, because the outside is hotter; you are not still
cooking it; it is done cooking.
The heat is going to move in at a rate that depends on several things, but it is primarily
bottlenecked by the thermal conductivity or some action called the diffusivity of the
material. So it is moving at this characteristic rate so if I imagine a pulse of heat here on
the outside, so that pulse of heat will move to the inside at this rate. Well now suppose I
plunge it into ice water. Now I am putting a pulse of cold in which is negative heat but
colloquially we could call it a pulse of cold. It moves at the same speed. So it can't ever
overtake that.
So if by what you mean by stop cooking, is you want to stop the maximum temperature
that the interior reaches, it will always reach the same temperature. And it is exactly like
saying suppose that you and I are both driving somewhere and we both go 30 miles an
hour and you leave 5 min. ahead of me. Will I ever catch you? No. I can't. And for this
reason you can't ever catch it. But I discovered this makes perfect sense after the fact.
We discovered this while I was doing modeling. I was curious about this and so I did a
mathematical model of it, and it showed, and then of course we tried it and it kind of has
to work.
The other great one is there is a cooking method called comfi, where you cook things in
oil or fat and any chef will tell you that there is a characteristic texture, this wonderful
rich silky texture you give to meat by cooking it slowly in fat. That is complete bullshit.
[laughter] I love comfi; I love eating it; it's fantastic stuff. But I was wondering when we
were writing the meat chapter, how the hell does that work? How does the oil get inside,
all the way to the center? It couldn't possibly because the oil molecules are really big;
they could not diffuse in; there is no where near enough time, so it couldn't possibly be
true. So we did a bunch of blind taste tests where we would take the same meat, the
traditional thing to do in France is duck legs. So we take duck legs, we would cook it
traditionally immersed in fat and then we would also steam it and as long as we kept the
time and the temperature the same in a blind taste test afterwards, none of us could tell.
So, I tell this to chefs and they get almost violently angry [laughter] and say I do not
agree with this. And I say well, that is your first problem because this isn't about
agreeing, okay? You should try it. And if you try a controlled experiment, nature is
right. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree. Now if you try the experiment and
you really feel you can tell, well great. That is great for you. But you have to take an
empirically oriented view of this. That's one of the interesting things in the book and it is
one of the interesting mindset issues is if nature acts a certain way, that really is the way
people work. I get some people who have a food philosophy or an ideology that borders
on religion. They will tell me things like why are you putting science in the kitchen? It
will suck all of the soul out of cooking. And I will say well, I hate to tell you this but the
science is already in the kitchen. Okay, the laws of physics are the laws of physics and
they are going to happen this way and it is not a question of whether you take the laws of
science in or out of the kitchen, it is whether you take ignorance in or out of the kitchen.
[laughter] That doesn't always win them over when I put it that way, but [laughter] yeah?
>>: How did you choose to leave out beer, [laughter] and what did you drink with your
hamburger? [laughter]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: So I am not that much of a beer drinker. I think that is why we
left beer out. But the other reason is we weren't making wine, nor would we be making
beer. Mostly what our wine chapter is about his debunking lots of myths. And frankly
there are fewer myths about beer. Beer is a little bit more straight up the way it is. We
have a big section where we discuss the subjective nature of wine tasting. And there are
all these wonderful experiments that have been done. There was a French psychologist
who drew this set where he would take white wine and food coloring and dye the white
wine red and then offer the same wine, two different colors to a bunch of wine experts
and get their opinions.
There is another great experiment where they took the big vineyard, it was Château la
Tour, and there was a second label called La Fort de la Tour which is about a third the
price of la Tour. And so they did these things called triangle tests which we discuss in
the book quite a bit, and you should try this with any food that you are interested in. You
take, you have one person makes three samples of two different foods, so one of them is
repeated. And the question is can you tell the odd man out, which one is different? And
of course if you have one person prepare it and someone else do it blind. And it is
amazing how much your senses can be fooled by the order in which taste things and by
lots of other stuff. And it is amazingly hard to pick that one thing that is different.
Obviously, if there is a strong difference, you can, but if it is subtle you can't. So in this
one test the Fort de la Tour could be told which one was that could be told about 40% of
the time. Now 33% would be random so it's only slightly better than random. But then
the funny thing is that of the people who could tell, the majority preferred the Fort de la
Tour. [laughter]
So with, we had lots of material like that for wine. There are tons of, because it has so
much mythology around it. For beer I wasn't aware of anything that we could say is
interesting. The same thing about tea; we don't really discuss tea in the book in detail.
We have a cool way of making tea in an ultrasonic bath. [laughter] it is like the best way
to make tea, but there is no mythology for us to reform. Okay another question? There
was one in the back before?
>>: Those two big machines in the back if they jumped from your lab into the home
what you think the next formerly medical or scientific technology is going to be to cross
that threshold?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: That's a good question. I think steam ovens at one level or
another. If you cook with low temperature steam it is either an alternative to using a
water bath for sous vide; you also can cook things that won't fit so well in a plastic bag.
So for example we use low-temperature steam oven to make crème brûlée and other
kinds of custards. If you put the custard in a bag of course it will cook perfectly well but
it kind of doesn't look so good then. And you can buy little $150 tabletop convection
ovens today; there is no fundamental reason that couldn't be a steam oven in a few years.
I think that is one that would be pretty easy for people to accept, maybe even easier than
a water bath.
Another one is called a Roto Stator homogenizer. In a blender you have some blades that
spin round. And the blades are spinning freely; there is nothing else around them. And
as a result what the blade is acting against is simply the inertia of the fluid. So it hits the
fluid and that makes the, it either hits the little particle of food to break it or to shear the
fluid. What you use in a lab is something called a Roto Stator homogenizer has a
spinning thing like that and another thing that is stationary and it comes really close,
hundredth of an inch, something like that that forces all of the fluid through that little gap,
that hundredth of an inch gap and that, by having something to push against, it is just
radically more effective. So all this is a different kind of a blender and so it ought to be
cheap but today if you buy them from a lab equipment place they are thousands of
dollars. There is no reason that it shouldn't be the same price as a Vita Mix or some other
nice blender. I am sure we can we will see those in the kitchen in a few years. And then
who knows over time, more. Yes, in the back.
>>: When do you think the book will be back in stock@Amazon.com? [laughter]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: I am really not good at estimating. Four and a half years ago I
made the first outline for the book and I went back and compared it and it is almost
exactly what we wrote. The differences at the top of the outline it said estimated page
budget 600 pages. [laughter] Well unfortunately I estimated in the other direction and
our first printing was 6000 copies and we sold them out before any of them arrived. And
so they have all by this week, everyone who ordered those pretty much maybe by next
week for some people that live far enough away that it's slow, to get to them. Those
should all be distributed to the world. I ordered 25,000 as soon as we saw the sales
spiking up, but it takes four months to get them from China. So they will be coming in
June. June 13th, I think the first boat leaves China, which means in June and July those
should all be coming.
But of course people have been ordering the book in the meantime. So we have got all
these projections. I did a whole bunch of actual computer models this weekend
[laughter] and probably it will be mid August before the book is like totally in stock, 24hour ship from Amazon and that sort of thing. It turns out there are lots of things I've
learned about this whole process. One is a crazy way things get shipped. Amazon and
other retailers have done this interesting optimization that makes it, adds a week to the
whole schedule. They place all of these service centers in places where it is quick
assuming the book was in stock at the service center it is quick to get it to people. But
they put them in places that are almost impossible to get to, because they assume that is a
slow process. So if you say what is the quickest way to get a book in stock? That is what
Amazon optimized for. It is not a quick way if you are shipping from China. So there is,
one of their service centers is in southern Illinois and we, literally the books land in
Seattle on Port of Seattle. They get moved onto rail cars and they go by rail to this place,
and then they go by truck the last hundred miles and it takes 10 days, which is ludicrous
because there are all these Amazon service centers they are passing, but a certain fraction
of the thing has to go there. So all of those things won't really matter by the time it gets
July, August. Yes?
>>: Really enjoyed the blog [inaudible] recipe [inaudible] have any idea were we can get
some of these? [inaudible] have you thought about maybe using…
>> Nathan Myhrvold: There is this thing called the internet [laughter]. Perhaps one of
your friends here will tell you about it? [laughter] Now it turns out, you picked an
interesting one. Sodium citrate is in every grocery store because it is used in Passover. It
is called sour salt and so in the kosher section of essentially any grocery store that has a
kosher section there is sodium citrate. But you can also get it online. A lot of the other
ingredients that seem to be weird ingredients, there is something called xanthan gum.
Xanthan gum is distributed by a company called Bob's Red Mill. And there are little
Bob's Red Mill sections with pancake mixes and flour in every Safeway and Whole
Foods and every everything, so most of the stuff surprisingly you can just get locally no
problem. There are a few things that are a little bit more exotic, but websites have
sprouted up. Here is one where make sure you spell it right or you will get a surprise. It
is called Chef Rubber. [laughter] There are lots of other rubber websites that have a
different orientation, but Chef Rubber started off as a website selling flexible molds to
pastry chefs. That is why it is called Chef Rubber because they have rubber molds. They
have a whole set of these weird ingredients. But really a surprising number you can buy
right down the street in Seattle no problem. Yes?
>>: Who designed the books?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: So we had a team of people that designed the books. We hired a
full-time art director. We tried using an outside art director and that really did not work
very well so we hired a guy full-time, who was the art director from Scientific American.
You know partly that is because the editor in chief of the book, Wayt Gibbs, was from
Scientific American and so we knew people there. But a science magazine also struck us
as a good model because they would have photos and things but they would also have
lots of graphs and things are a little bit more technical. His name is Mark Clemens so he
was the main art director, but we all kibitz to which probably made the book worse than
if he had done it himself, but by God we all did. And the photos were all taken, or almost
all taken by two people. Started off only being me, and then I hired an assistant and
pretty soon my assistant had more time and was better at it than I was and so he did most
of the photos. Yes?
>>: So through all this wine tasting and recipe tasting that went into making this book,
did you ever keep track of any health metrics for example when you were I don't know
having that burger the effects it had on…
>> Nathan Myhrvold: So the health effects are an actually interesting topic in two ways.
First of all Kevin who has known me for a long time will tell you that I actually weigh
less now than when I was at Microsoft by a fairly substantial margin. So I actually lost
weight while doing a cookbook, [laughter] which is surprising until you realize 2400
pages to proofread is really quite a lot. We have a whole chapter called food and health.
And the reason we have the chapter on food and health is initially because people said oh
God, you got this stuff called xanthan gum and isn't your food all full of chemicals? And
I say yeah, and it's actually full of elements too, [laughter] because of course everything
is a chemical, but we took it seriously so we wrote a whole section on what are the health
implications of these things like xanthan gum, which are weird ingredients that you have
not heard of or agar or other things and it turns out, the difference between these new
ingredients and older things is that the new ones have been tested and so you actually
know they are safe and the old ones you frankly don't.
Most things we eat fall, for the FDA they fall under a category called GRAS, generally
recognized as safe, which means no one ever tested it. A lot of people believe that if you
took sucrose, ordinary table sugar and you subjected it to the full battery of FDA tests, it
would not pass, because it causes cavities; it causes all these things that it undeniably
causes and so people would vote not to allow us to have sucrose. It is not such a crazy
thing because 150 years ago sucrose was bought in the apothecary store. It was treated
like it was a drug or an unusual ingredient. And it was only when people found ways of
making it really cheaply that in fact it moved over to become something that was a really
common food item.
So then after doing the stuff on those ingredients and having a whole thing discussing the
scientific evidence, I had someone say, okay fine. You're not going to kill me with the
xanthan gum. The xanthan gum is fine because xanthan gum is made by bacterial
fermentation so if you don't like it you better not have vinegar because vinegar is also
made by bacterial fermentation, a very similar process. Okay so this person said look
you are not going to kill me with xanthan but you still have but you still have foie gras
and butter and isn't this just horrible?
So we decided to say let's look up all of the best statistical evidence on those things. And
we discovered that in fact many of the things that sort of everyone knows is bad for you,
in fact, there is very little or weak statistical evidence that it is bad for you. So for
example, there is no correlation, no statistical correlation between eating saturated fat and
either heart disease or cancer. Now we all know, know in quotes, the opposite. You are
supposed to eat low-fat this and so on and so forth. But it turns out the best current
statistical studies show there is no correlation. There is no correlation between eating
fiber and colon cancer. And we tell that whole story in the book because it is sort of an
interesting story. A British surgeon had this idea, just his random idea that maybe fiber
would reduce it. He never did any tests. He wrote a popular book on it. And the thing
that really made fiber take off, which has made many of these other things take off is a
food company, in that case it was Kellogg's decided they would start advertising that
raisin bran was good for you. And the FDA didn't stop them. And when they didn't stop
the health claim for fiber for that that caused a tremendous number of food companies to
jump on the bandwagon because health is where they can sell you a bunch of stuff.
And frankly they took a bunch of sawdust and they put it in your yogurt and your muffins
and everything else, so they could say it was high-fiber. [laughter] And even if fiber,
natural fiber was good for you it is not clear that the fiber supplements that they put in,
which literally was sawdust and things like that, was going to do the same thing. Well it
takes a long time to test these things, and people did eventually do four different very
controlled, very good studies of fiber in the diet and its effect on colon cancer, and that is
none, zero. And here is one that is even worse. There is a study called the Nurses’ Study
that studied the health of 86,000 nurses for 25 years and it was one of the big landmark
diet and health studies. One segment of the nurses ate butter; the other ate margarine.
And in that era, the reason you would eat margarine, the primary reason was it was
polyunsaturated, so it must be better for you. Only in that era margarine was made of
trans fats. So in fact the butter eaters had no higher coronary death rate than anyone else
and the margarine group had four times the death rate. So in fact well-meaning people
saying oh, you ought to eat polyunsaturats, killed a lot of folks, because they had people,
not only did they kill them; they made them eat margarine first. [laughter] So it was a
controversial chapter and some of the people in the book, or in the book team said look,
why are we going to pick a fight with this? You're going to have lots of activists that get
upset. I said look our book is for food lovers and if I tell them that bacon is not so bad
for them, how mad are they going to be? [laughter] Okay one more question, yes?
>>: What is your favorite recipe from the book?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Favorite recipe? Probably one, one definite favorite is the one I
cook for myself most often, and that is a scrambled egg recipe that we have in the book
which I make a couple of times a week. And I will tell you the key secret of it right now
and you can do it all at home, because half of it is about the ingredients and half is about
equipment. So on the ingredients side is, if you are making a three egg scrambled eggs,
throw one egg white away, so two whole eggs and one egg yolk. It makes it yellower; it
makes it creamier, to my taste it is infinitely better scrambled eggs no matter how you
cook it. The next thing we do is we cook in a steam oven or sous vide because we can
control the temperature exactly and that always makes it perfect every time. So that is
probably my single favorite recipe and it involves nothing very exotic, but that's okay.
Okay? Terrific.
[applause]