>> Kevin Kutz: My name is Kevin Kutz and I'm here to introduce Doctor Nathan Myhrvold who
is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. You likely know him as
the first chief technology officer at Microsoft, as the one who conceived and established
Microsoft Research and as the CEO and cofounder of Intellectual Ventures. His expertise and
invention translates into his long-time passion for cooking. He has followed that passion from
the Kitchens of Rover, one of the best French restaurants in the country but right here in
Seattle to the barbecue pits of Memphis Tennessee. Doctor Myhrvold is here today to discuss
his latest book Modernist Cuisine at Home. He and his co-authors have collected all of the
essential information that any cook needs to stock a modern kitchen, to master modernist
techniques and make hundreds of beautiful and delicious recipes. Drawing on the same
commitment to perfection that produced Modernist Cuisine, Modernist Cuisine at Home
applies innovations pioneered by the cooking lab to refine classic home dishes from
hamburgers and wings to macaroni and cheese. Sadly, he brought no samples of his work
[laughter] and if you skipped lunch… [laughter] but please join me…
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Sorry. [laughter]
>> Kevin Kutz: But please join me in giving…
>> Nathan Myhrvold: I hope you'll buy cookbooks more when they're hungry [laughter]
>> Kevin Kutz: Well played sir. Please join me in giving him a warm welcome. [applause]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Well, it is a pleasure to be at Microsoft Research again. So a couple of
years ago we came out with this Modernist Cuisine which is an encyclopedic treatment of
modernist cooking, 2438 pages, 6 volumes and weighed 43 pounds. That was 2011 when we
came out that. This year we've got a new book Modernist Cuisine At home which is a
modernist look at home cooking. In the first book we had a philosophy that we would describe
what the best way to do something was even if it was impossible to do [laughter], or at least
impossible for most people. I think that's actually okay because I'm curious about how a lot of
things work and how a lot of things are made even if I don't actually do all of it, and probably
half of the recipes in the big book anybody can do at home and maybe another 25% if you really
buy the right equipment and you are up for it you can do it. The last 25%, good luck to you
because very few people have the equipment necessary to do it. For this book we did a
different thing. We said let's make something that everybody can do at home, but still has the
spirit that we had in the first book of reinventing food using new techniques and new methods.
So like the first book, we've got lots of photography to try to make things very accessible. We
cut things in half so if you ever wondered what a Viking stove looks like if you cut it in half, well
by God, that's what it looks like [laughter]. Like the first book there's a washable kitchen
manual. I was tired of having cookbooks that got really dirty, but of course a clean cookbook is
kind of a useless one, right? Plus the book is so big that it wouldn't fit on a lot of counters.
This, the kitchen manual is smaller and it's completely washable. One thing that we were really
big on is that physical quality. We try to have both large pages, really nice paper, great ink and
so forth. Here's one example; this is the resolution of our photos. You know, ordinary photos
are produced in what is called the half line screen and it's 175 lines and it's a typical decent
color photo. Art books will go to a 200 line screen. We actually do something called stochastic
screening which generates the dots randomly. Now actually we have a patent on this
[laughter]. We meaning, we in this case, I was at Microsoft and I'm on a patent on doing
basically this idea, because we used it for when we first -- back in my day we had to do half
toning in Windows [laughter] because we only had 16 colors. That's true. So it's actually a
technique that's there. Another thing that's interesting is the ink. We get asked a lot why our
pictures look so great and vibrant and did we use Photoshop to enhance them, and the answer
is actually quite interesting. It's the ink. Most inks can't reproduce all colors so here's one of
the photos from the book where the grayed out areas are the areas that are outside the gambit
of the colors that you can do. Here it is with the inks that we used in the modernist cuisine
books. If you buy special inks you can put everything there. You can see that mostly what
happens is in really saturated bright colors, so vegetables really suffer. The tomato is basically
gone. The chartreuse cauliflower is gone. The pepper is gone, the orange. We think it's
important to have great ink, but one could ask, given where I am, why have ink at all? Why is
this a physical book? I'm kind of a digital guy. Why would I do this analog thing? When we first
started the books, this Kindle here was the only e-book and it's tiny and it was black-and-white
only at that time and so this was not exciting at all. Now after that iPads came out. There's an
iPad over there. An iPad is still tiny compared to the page size that we have, so if you want
really beautiful high resolution pictures, analog is actually a much better way to go. Now
eventually we'll all have super big beautiful tablet-like touch screens everywhere. Not yet. So
at the moment we don't have any plans to make a digital version. The other thing is simply
taking dead PDFs and putting them on screen just doesn't seem that exciting to me. If you want
to do a digital version, the thing that would be cool to do would to then have an interesting
user interface and do animations and simulations and then it becomes a software project
[laughter] and we'd rather write cookbooks [laughter]. So here’s some fun facts about the new
book. Two volumes, 9.9 pounds, 684 pages, 228 of which are waterproof, 23 chapters, 210,000
words, 405 recipes, 114 photos out of 86,000 that we took for the book. It's really wonderful
that bits are cheap. And then 1500 -- and so here are a few statistics. So the original book was
625 and this one is only $140 [laughter]. Someone was interviewing me about this and they
said you know the new book is so cheap. And then they stopped themselves and said you know
what you've done? You've made $140 cookbooks seem cheap [laughter], because the book at
home is the second most expensive cookbook being sold [laughter]. But look at the value
[laughter], okay? $.41 per recipe; in the new book, $.35 per recipe [laughter]. Now, what
would you pay? Don't answer [laughter]. That's only $15 a pound for the first book and $14 for
the next book, but Parmesan cheese is $20 a pound [laughter]. So if you like Parmesan cheese,
buy this book. It's cheaper [laughter]. So if we took all of the text in Modernist Cuisine in Word
and we put it all on a single line of text at the point size, it would be 1.4 miles long. That would
be going from Pike Place market to the Space Needle. If in fact we did it for the big book; that
would be the Space Needle to Boeing Field. You can probably tell how I travel. Now I'm going
to change gears after telling you a little about the book, I'm going to tell you a little bit about
modernist cuisine the movement and why we did this whole thing. The basic ideas behind what
we call the modernist movement is first that art can be created in the kitchen. That's a pretty
important and pretty fundamental point. There's a lot of things that are crafts, but craft is
different from art. Craft is paintings that you might buy or knickknacks at the Bellevue Art Fair.
Art is what's in galleries and what has lots of intellectual pretensions and so forth. We think
that cooking actually spans that whole range. Now most people who approach cooking
approach it from the perspective of craft or artisan rather than artist and so you'll see bakers
calling themselves artisanal bakers or artisanal cheese makers. There's nothing wrong with
that. But there's a real distinction between a craft which is done sort of with one sort of
approach in mind versus art. We think that this actually can be art. The other key point is that
science has a set of rules that governs how the world works and it's really useful to know how
the world works. I had a woman in the UK who was interviewing me for a magazine say, what
made you think you needed to put science in the kitchen? And I said, sorry. Science was
already there [laughter]. It's the laws of nature. All I was trying to do is take ignorance out of
the kitchen [laughter], because the historical tradition for cooking has been here's a recipe.
Don't ask why. Do this, do this, do this, do this and if you follow it and do those things pretty
closely you'll get the right result. But I'm not going to tell you why. And then over time people
started making things up because humans are a storytelling species, you always wonder why, so
people say sear the steak to seal in the juices. It turns out searing the steak does the opposite.
It doesn't seal in the juices; it makes them flow out more. But it was a nice sounding thing to
say, so one of the approaches we took in our book is to say let's figure out how cooking actually
works and then empowered by knowing how it works, you can go and cook in better ways and
in new ways, or maybe you are empowered in a different way. You’re empowered because you
think it's cool and now you understand how it works. There's a certain joy to understanding
things. That's why people do science and that's why people try to do new things like Microsoft
Research. And so modernist cuisine is this blending of art and science. It's about trying to
achieve intellectually interesting things with cooking, breaking rules, getting people's reaction
to food but empowered with knowing actually how it works. Modernism is a very old thing.
Modernism is a movement that has been in many parts of visual arts. This is a non-modernist
painting. This is the Gleaners by Jean-François Millet from 1857. It's very realistic. In the mid19th century that's the way all paintings were. This is the French academic style of painting.
You'd find similar things in other places. It was all meant to be very realistic. A few years later
you have people; this is Vincent van Gogh painting this. Now almost the same scene. It looks
totally different. It looks different because it's not trying to be realistic. It's trying to engage
your thoughts and emotions. It's trying to make a statement that is more nuanced than simply
saying here is gleaners in the field; here's the same kind of thing, but it looks different. Now
today, we accept that as one of the major steps in painting and visual arts. And today
impressionist paintings like this are some of the most popular paintings in the world, but it
wasn't always so. When you change people's idea of an aesthetic it sometimes upsets them.
So here are two cartoons from Paris newspapers in the late 19th century. One shows a
pregnant woman trying to enter an exposition of impressionist paintings and the guard is
saying, Madame, it is not safe for you to enter. The idea being that the paintings were so ugly
she would have a miscarriage. [laughter] Now, that seems almost impossible from our current
view of those paintings. This second picture, cartoon is similar. This was showing the Turks, the
Turkish army having bought impressionist canvasses to use them as a secret weapon of war.
And the canvasses are so ugly that the enemy is fleeing in retreat [laughter]. Well, when the
first chefs started cooking modernist dishes, the same kind of reaction happened. I get people,
you know, even now who will come up to me and say well, I don't know about this modernist
cooking stuff and they are, they have a visceral reaction that this challenged something that
was an important part of the aesthetic framework with which they view their lives. Now of
course, it wasn't just painting; there's also architecture. This is the Pioneer building in Seattle,
sort of a classic early 20th century building. And this is the MP. Architecture went through a
very similar phase of going from things that were very tradition bound to things that were not
tradition bound. And if you look at architecture like this from Frank Gehry's work it's partially
about breaking rules of the past and it's partially making us aware of those rules. You know, it's
much easier to make a building with right angles. Frank's buildings don't have right angles, but
that's part of what sets them apart and makes you say gee, that's very different and that's very
unusual and interesting. So Modernism is this idea of making a deliberate break with tradition,
celebrating aesthetic values beyond realism, embracing new tools, new techniques and new
media as a way to explore new harmonies. It's a different approach and in the mid-1980s a
number of chefs around the world started embarking on what I'm later now calling modernist
cooking. They started doing things like serving foams. And of course, whipped cream is a foam;
soufflés are a foam. Actually, if you think about it, bread is a foam; it's a set foam. So of course
foams were always there, but when they started putting foam on the plate out of the context of
whipped cream or a soufflé or Moose, these very narrow contexts, it shocked people. It was
deeply controversial in the same way that this impressionist art was. But that was its point, just
as the point of Impressionism was to shake things up. That was the point of having foam on the
plate or a bunch of things like that. One of the things that's interesting to me is that I
discovered that there's a lot of misinformation about what traditional cooking is. So use Italian
as an example. Italian cuisine is probably the most popular cuisine in the world as a second
cuisine. It's kind of hard to beat Chinese cuisine as the most popular cuisine if you do it by
headcount because they got a lot of heads, but in terms of a cuisine outside of its country of
origin, Italian food is probably number one. And Italian food has an aesthetic that's really about
celebrating tradition. But that's all bullshit. Okay? Contemporary Italian food -- I'm just going
to focus on three things. It features a lot of basil, not always, but mainly dishes have basil, lots
of tomatoes and lots of garlic, so surely that was always true, right? Actually, not at all. Roman
cooking featured large amounts of black pepper. It was very spicy. Of course, one reason for
that is because it was also very rotten. When you don't have refrigerators [laughter] things
spoil and in warm climates there is -- almost anywhere in the world you go with a warm climate
they love spices and in part that was to mask the fact that they didn't have fridges. The most
popular single herb in Roman cooking? It's right there in the middle. Anybody?
>>: Lovage?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Lovage, yes, lovage, which has an intense celery like flavor. It's -- you can
find it at whole foods if you want to try it, or it's a little bit like the leaves, the top of celery. But
their number one condiment was something called liquamen; garum was a variant of it and
liquamen is made by taking anchovies or other fish and sealing them in a terra-cotta jar and
putting it in the sun for a month, which sounds disgusting, but in fact, it's almost exactly the
recipe for Thai fish sauce or Vietnamese fish sauce. Roman cuisine was about black pepper,
lovage and lots of fish sauce, in everything by the way including dessert items [laughter]. It
sounds gross but in fact there's actually a traditional British food that is a direct lineal
descendent called Worchester sauce and if you look at the ingredients it will say anchovies and
that's kind of what they do to them first. Not only was Roman cuisine nothing like
contemporary Italian cuisine, the cuisine of the Italian Middle Ages wasn't either. In fact, Italian
cuisine in the Middle Ages was virtually identical to British cuisine of the Middle Ages or
German. The Middle Ages actually had a tremendous amount of uniformity of what people ate
for a variety of different cultural factors. Also, a lot of dishes that you would think our Italian
aren't. The first recipe for lasagna comes from a book called The Form of Curry. It's the first
cookbook in English, 1437. Lasagna is an English dish and the recipe, although it's very different
from the lasagna of today, is totally recognizable as lasagna. You roll out flat noodles and you
put in meat sauce in between them and bake them. So people don't, when you say I love
tradition, the answer is well tradition is actually the wrong thing to say you love. You have to
say which tradition? When? Now Michael Pollan is a great food writer, terrific guy, fantastic
writer, but I have to poke at this a little bit. He's got something that he calls the greatgrandmother rule. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Now I understand where he's coming from. His idea is to come up with a common sense simple
easy to say way to reject the sort of industrialized food that fills supermarket shelves. That's
really what he's after here. But I will never follow the great-grandmother rule and here's why.
Before we do the great grandma, my grandma was not big on sushi [laughter]. My grandma
was not big on hummus. Those are foods that would be completely alien to her but they are
really good. Now there are other grandmas who were totally into hummus. If you're from
Lebanon or the Mideast you may be totally into that, but probably not so much into sushi. Now
if you go back to the great grandma, well no more hamburgers and no more pizza. Pizza as we
know it wasn't even invented then. Pizza is not a dish that has a long tradition. The simplest
kind of pizzas called pizza margarita it's made to celebrate Queen Margaret I think of the
Netherlands visiting Naples in the 1850s, I think. Maybe I've got the dates slightly right but in
the late 19th century. So pizza is a brand-new dish and pizza in the United States is even newer
than that, of course. Now if you keep doing this, you keep going further back in time, well
great, great grandma you gotta get rid of your ice cream, because people don't have fridges and
stuff so you don't have any ice cream, but even things that seem very traditional. At Salumi in
Seattle you can get these fabulous fermented sausages, cured sausages. Great, great grandma
didn't have them even in Italy. The technique of doing what seems like traditional sausage
curing was unknown in Europe. It was actually a Chinese technique that came to Europe in the
1700s. While we're on it, espresso, espresso was invented in 1911 and it was invented, by the
way, as fast food because what does espresso mean in Italian? It was literally a fast food
invention that at the time had purists upset that it was not traditional brewed coffee; it was this
fast food abomination. I kind of like it. So I'm going to keep drinking it irrespective of what
Pollan would say. We have a high-speed camera [laughter] and it turns out once you have a
high-speed camera you can find amusement in almost anything [laughter]. Okay. So that's a
little bit about the background of modernism. The other thing with a high-speed camera is you
become sloppy at everything you do because it's much more attractive [laughter]. So I'm going
to highlight a couple of examples of things that we have done that would count as modernist.
This is our watermelon chips. We were doing a thing on doing potato chips and of course
potato chips are quite interesting from a perspective of solid-state physics because what
happens to make a potato chip crispy is that the starch becomes a glass. To a physicist glass is a
very specific type of matter. It's not crystalline; it's a frustrated crystal and it typically is
crunchy. Window glass is crunchy. You wouldn't want to eat it, but it's crunchy. A starch forms
a glass in an analogous way and a lot of techniques for making potato chips are about how you
can make this starch glass. I wanted to make chips out of other things and I decided at one
point to hit on watermelon because I figured if you can make chips out of watermelon you can
make chips out of anything. So how could you make a starch glass with watermelon? Well, the
answer is you have to have a lot of starch, so we came up with a way. You slice the watermelon
very thin. You put it in a sous vide bag with a little bit of starch, potato starch works pretty well
not surprisingly. And you infuse it for a little bit and then you can fry it up and get a
watermelon chip. Now why make a watermelon chip? Well, first of all they're kind of cool to
eat. It also hurts people's heads [laughter] because they say how did you do this? And there's
some interesting science. First lots of little vacuoles full of water; there are air filled vacuoles in
fruits and vegetables. An apple, for example is 50% air, which seems almost impossible to
believe until you think about bobbing for apples, because they wouldn't float if they didn't have
a lot of air in them [laughter]. Why would apples float? And it turns out that one of the
reasons apples float and a lot of fruits float, which is also interesting, it's to help get distributed
because if there's an area with a lot of rain, one of the ways that you can get distributed is by
getting carried away with a flood. So anyway, under the vacuum we can break those vacuoles
and we can suck the starch in and so we can take a non-starchy fruit like watermelon and we
can suck in starch and make chips out of it. Well, once you are making, once you start doing
this for potato chips, then you can do it for French fries or as the Britts would say no these are
the chips. We set out to try to make the ultimate French fries. And one of the reasons is that
we think that any kind of food deserves attention in terms of trying to figure out what its
ultimate expression is. It doesn't have to be fancy or have lots of ingredients. So we set out to
make the ultimate French fry. We did lots of different things and ultimately we hit upon
dumping them into an ultrasonic bath [laughter]. Now ultrasonic baths are used for cleaning
jewelry, contact lenses, scientific equipment. They work by having very high frequency very
powerful sound waves in the water. They are powerful enough that when you put in something
with a different density in the water and different elastic modulus little cavitation bubbles will
form and those cavitation bubbles will effectively scrub the surface no matter how intricate it
is. By putting the potato into the cavitation bath we scrubbed the outsides of our potatoes
enough to microscopically put lots of fissures and cracks in them. We then soaked them in
more starch, so now we take the potato and we add a lot more potato starch to the outside of
the potato then we would and we put a lot more surface area and we make the crispiest French
fries I've ever had. I'll just go quickly through this because I said all of it. The idea here is that if
you understand how a French fry, or how a potato chip works, well then you quickly get, you
know, it leads to all of these other innovations. This is a cool thing. This is a droplet of liquid
nitrogen, but you can do a very similar thing with a droplet of water on a really hot skillet. If
you ever drop a little bit of water and you see how they race all over the place. This is
something called the Leidenfrost effect. In fact, little bubble here is floating on gas because
every time it sort of bounces down on the hot surface it vaporizes some. Now, this is, liquid
nitrogen will do this on any surface. It will do it on a, on this table. We should've brought
some, Scott. But it's also really important because it lets you do all kinds of interesting things
including because of the Leidenfrost effect you can stick your hand in the liquid nitrogen. You
can stick your hand actually into molten lead the same way because in both cases you, your
hand is protected by a thin layer of gas in the same way that these gas bubbles are floating. We
love liquid nitrogen. We cook with it in lots of ways. This, by the way, is not in our home book.
The home book doesn't have liquid nitrogen. We -- there actually is a service in the east side
here that will deliver liquid nitrogen. And when the guy comes to my house he always says, you
know, there aren't any other houses on my route [laughter]. I say, God, really? [laughter]
Nobody else in Medina buys liquid nitrogen? [laughter] God! The thing that is great about
liquid nitrogen is that you can make things really cold without making them wet and you can
make them cold so quickly that they do really interesting things. If you put droplets of a liquid
and you let them drop, usually by about this much into the liquid nitrogen they form perfect
spheres. The reason you drop need to them by a certain height is that's the amount of time it
takes for the surface tension in the liquid to pull it into a nice little drop. Otherwise it will be
kind of splashy. But if you have liquid nitrogen and a high-speed camera [laughter], you know,
pretty soon you start doing things like this. One variation of this actually used for cooking is if
you take raspberries or blackberries and freeze them, you can break them into individual little
segments. Does anyone know what need to those are called? Drooplets, okay, so you can say
that you learned something today. Each tiny little individual fruit that makes this sort of cluster
combined fruit is called a drooplet. Liquid nitrogen is one of the things that you can boil, but of
course, more cooking is about boiling water so watch closely here. There is something done
here. I'll explain what it is a moment. Okay. So that's popcorn. Popcorn works because when
water boils into steam it expands in volume by around a factor of about 1600, so let me go back
and then back again. Okay. So what's happening is that the water in here is changed into
steam. A tiny crack opens. This is a steam powered rocket effectively. You can watch it expand
and try to relieve the pressure and then boom it opens all the way up. That's really important
for cooking because it takes a lot of energy to expand that water by a factor of 1600. Boiling is
incredibly important and so we've got a ton of things on that in the books. I'm going to go a
little bit quicker now. We've got a lot of stuff on boiling and char broiling. This is from the new
cookbook. It turns out that most of the flavor that you get from char broiling or barbecuing,
grilling comes from fat that drips down onto the coals and that fat flares up. You can see it
flaring here from the shish kebab. People wonder why they're grilled zucchini doesn't taste like
their other grilled food. There's no fat in a zucchini [laughter]. So dribble some olive oil in the
fire or just put it in a spritzer; it works great. And then if you really want the fire from hell, use
a hair dryer. You can, if improperly applied you can melt a hole in the side of your Weber.
[laughter] here’s that fat dripping phenomenon with a high-speed camera. Actually it takes
surprisingly long to catch fire and again it's because it takes a lot of energy into vaporization but
then ultimately it goes. Here is a close-up of the fat dripping and flames firing up. One of the
things we set up as a goal in the first book was to make the book visually interesting. You
know, if you say you're going to read about science, to some people that's a turn on, but to
more people it might seem a little bit intimidating. If you say you're going to right lots of
technical cooking things, a lot of people who love foods still aren't into really technical cooking,
so again it seems a little off putting. But if you have really cool pictures you can kind of grab
people and pull them in. At least that was the idea, so we've gone over all of this. It turns out
that the briquettes don't matter. People say oh, I use mesquite charcoal. You turned it into
charcoal. The process of turning it into charcoal takes essentially all of the original flavor out.
Now there are some charcoals and some briquettes that may burn a little bit hotter than
others, so hardwood charcoal will burn a little bit hotter but charcoal is pretty much charcoal.
It's the combination of fats and other juices dripping onto the flame and then burning or
partially burning that makes the flavor. Now I'll quickly go through a few other topics here. We
love eggs. Eggs are a great thing to cook. They're particularly interesting because there's
different proteins in the yoke and in the white and they coagulate at different temperatures.
So here we've cooked eggs at lots of different temperatures and broke them open so you can
see what happens. It turns out the yoke sets well before the white ever sets. And, of course, if
you have a high-speed camera [laughter] and do you see these? These are bubbles of steam.
In fact, what happens all of the bubbling, all of the sizzling that you hear when you put a steak
in the pan those are from little volcanoes of steam coming out of the steak or in this case little
pockets of steam coming out from the egg. The reason is because there's water in there and
when it hits the pan at maybe 400 degrees it starts to boil, and as soon as it starts to boil it
expands and it bubbles up. This is our custard table. So this just shows what nerds we are
[laughter]. Custard is a mixture of a liquid and egg and you can either do whole egg and over
there there is egg yolk. Well, depending on the concentration of the egg within the mixture,
you'll get a different texture, but also depending on how hard you cook it you get a different
texture. So we did hundreds of experiments to map out what's the ideal texture that you can
get with a particular combination. And so then using that you can make things like this. This is
crème on glaze, which is basically melted vanilla ice cream. But you can also do things like this.
This is our striped omelet. Our favorite way to make an omelet isn't on top of the stove; it's in
an oven, because once you understand the right temperature to get the right texture and the
right mixture of egg to other things, you can make an omelet much more accurately in the oven
where you can control the temperature than you can on the top of the stove. Traditional
French chefs say oh, it's a measure of the chef to see if you can make a perfect omelet. Well
sure, that's because you have a 400° heat source and you're trying to make the omelet roughly
158 degrees, so you've got to work really quickly to basically, just long enough to get enough of
the egg to 158 that it will set without overcooking it. If you want that challenge in life, that's
great, [laughter] but otherwise put it in the… Then it turns out that after you learn how to do
that, once you make them in an oven, you can make them striped and we've got a recipe for
that in both books actually, the big book and the little book. Here's our scrambled eggs. We
tend to be messy with how we do things. And again, if you have a high-speed camera
[laughter] you know, pretty soon someone says will hey, my friend’s got a rifle [laughter]. And I
can't say that there is any real cooking purpose to that but God it was fun [laughter]. One of
the popular recipes in our first cookbook was a technique for making carrot soup that we
expanded into a whole chapter in the new book. The new book is basically all-new recipes. In
some cases there is something inspired by something in the old book but we simplified it. We
changed some -- and the idea here was interesting. Does anyone know why pretzels are
brown? Right. It turns out that in order to make pretzels brown, you dunk them in a highly
alkaline bath, a solution of lye or some other very alkaline substance. So I was reading about
that and I thought well, why does it make a brown? Well it makes it brown because browning
reactions, Maillard reactions, caramelization occur at a much lower temperature if you've got
an alkaline environment, so by treating the outside of the pretzels, if you put them in an
ordinary oven and they get super dark without burning the inside because the inside of a
pretzel is generally pretty white. Well, people started doing that. Besides pretzels they do it to
pretzel buns now and things like that because of course it will work there to. Well hey, if it
works on pretzels, how about carrots? So we started making carrot soup by putting carrots into
a pressure cooker and a pressure cooker is a fascinating device. It allows you to cheat the fact
that water has a relatively low boiling point, because the boiling point is a function of pressure.
So if you seal it up in this pressure vessel water won't boil in till 250 degrees instead of 212
degrees. And that extra 38 degrees is actually pretty interesting because that takes you up into
a range where lots of interesting things happen. Pressure cookers by far are our favorite way of
making stock, for example. The higher temperature extracts flavors from whatever you're
making stock just much better. But could we actually brown in it? And the answer is, yes we
could. If in fact -- here we go. You get up to 248 to 251 depending on your pressure cooker and
exactly how hot it gets. They maintain 100% relative humidity so that means things don't dry
out. Normally if you want to caramelize a carrot or brown a carrot, you've got to cook it pretty
hard because what you are doing is first drying out the top layer of the carrot until it gets hot
enough that it can brown because normally it won't brown until above the boiling point of
water. But carrots are mostly water. They are about 80% water, so you're going to get an
awful lot of heat that has to be applied not inside the pressure cooker. As I said, the pretzel
trick lets you brown at lower temperature. The other interesting thing is that once you do this
the browning occurs throughout the food; it's not just on the surface. Normally we brown the
surface because the inside is wet and it will never get to that temperature because it's still got
too much water in it. So here's our caramelized carrot soup and it turns this lovely color of
brown and it tastes intensely of caramelized carrot. There is a shot of us pouring it. Well then
of course we got carried away, so we do mushrooms and squash and artichoke and broccoli
with Briere and so forth. All of those things benefit enormously from the idea of this trick that
originally started with pretzels. But it goes back to this idea I said earlier, if you know how
something works it can be inspiration for something else. In this case pretzels have been
around for a really long time but nobody thought to try to do this. Roast chicken is another dish
that we really love. It's a simple dish. But it's also really complicated in another way because
roast chicken is a contradiction in terms. To roast a chicken perfectly you want the outside to
be brown and crispy and you want the flesh to not be dried out, but they are in contact. That's
like burning my shirt off without burning me [laughter]. It's very tough to do that. So we set
out to figure out how we could do that and it turns out that the answer is get chickens that are
junkies [laughter]. One of the things that people do to try to make a good roast chicken is they
brine it and brining works for an interesting chemical reason. The sodium ions will modify
proteins and complex proteins and make them hold water more, so brined chicken really is
juicier and it will really stay juicier than unbrined chicken. It absolutely works. There's just one
problem. It turns out the skin is protein also, so when you brine the chicken you make the flesh
juicy but you also make the skin juicy and when it comes to skin, what we call juicy skin is
rubbery skin because if it's juicy that's the texture it has. Skin is rubbery by nature. It stretches,
that's why we can smile. So we came up with the idea of saying let's injection brine it. We take
a salt solution. We inject it into the meat being careful not to get any on the actual skin. Well
that takes care of the inside. I'm going to skip through this. It says the, what I previously said.
We hang the chicken inside the refrigerator uncovered with kind of a plate at the bottom to
catch if anything drips. Now there's two reasons to do that. One is stuff that drips out of the
body cavity doesn't get on the skin this way. The other thing is it starts to dry out the outside.
Now that's a technique that's very, very old in China for making Peking duck, because the more
we can dry the skin out the more we can get a head start on browning. There's a couple of
other things you have to do. You then roast it for about four and a half hours in a really low
oven and then you crank your oven up really hot to sear it and you get chicken that not only
looks really good, but is really good. Although we love to have modernist food, we also are very
happy to take something like this which is comfort food and serve it in a context that doesn't
look modernist at all. In fact we serve it on these plates because if we say it's grandma's roast
chicken we may as well use grandma's plates. We have a whole chapter on macaroni and
cheese. The reason for that is twofold. One is this interesting science and interesting insights
on cheese. The second is we wanted a book that had very accessible recipes. Our first book
has recipes from many of the best restaurants in the world, but most people don't eat that way
every night so we thought hey, mac and cheese would be a cool thing. It turns out that there is
an interesting science to melting cheese. Probably everybody has had a pizza at one point or
another that had like a lake of oil and grease on top and when that occurs usually the cheese
underneath is kind of gritty and grainy or stringy. That occurs because milk products are an
emulsion. And emulsion is a mixture of oil and water basically. In this case butterfat and water
stabilized normally with some casein proteins. That stabilization of the milk emulsion works
great while it's milk. You turn it into cheese and then you melt it and it fails. The emulsion fails
and the fat separates. In 1911 a cheese merchant in Chicago discovered a way around that. He
patented it and it made his little cheese shop take off and his name was James L. Kraft and that
was fundamentally the first Velveeta. The problem with Velveeta is that it tastes like Velveeta
[laughter]. So is there a way you can do this and the answer is yes. So here we take some
melted cheese and we put in a magic ingredient. The magic ingredient is sodium citrate;
phosphates will also work. Sodium citrate may sound like it's a real chemical, awful thing, but
in fact it's in almost every grocery store. Among other things it's used in Passover called sour
salt. So anywhere where there is a Passover section of the grocery store you can find it. And
what it does is it changes the ions once they dissolve in the cheese, change the balance of
electrostatic charges and they actually stabilize the emulsion up to a much higher temperature.
Now the thing that's great about this when you make mac and cheese is that most mac and
cheese sauces use a lot of starch to try to keep the cheese bound. In classic French cooking
that's called a Béchamel. You take a flour-based sauce and then you fold cheese in and the
trouble as it gets really kind of gloopy and it doesn't taste that much like cheese because the
starch molecules inhibit the flavor. This only has cheese and a tiny amount of the emulsifying
salt, so it just is cheese and it makes wonderful mac and cheese, but if you cast it into little
sheets, it makes wonderful Velveeta-like stuff but out of whatever cheese you want. So then
we kind of went crazy making grilled cheese sandwiches [laughter] and then we decided that
make them for the astronauts on the shuttle, so let's suspend gravity. It makes for a much
better shot so that's our grilled cheese sandwich section. I can't go through everything in the
book, but will just touch on a few things. We have a big chapter on steak including a cool way
to do sous vide steak for camping or for a picnic where you fill a cooler full of hot water. Hot
water out of most taps actually would be hot enough if you like medium rare steak. Put the
steak in Ziploc bags and throw it in there. A couple of hours later it's all set. You just want to
grill the outside or sear it with a blowtorch [laughter]. Carnitas, braised short ribs. If that
picture does not make you hungry then you are a vegan [laughter]. And actually I think even
some vegans that converted late in life may be made hungry by that [laughter]. Chicken wings,
we have a whole chapter on chicken wings because, again, we wanted to have a less formal
style of food, but then we got carried away, so after chicken wings we started doing yakitori
and then we did sauté and shish kebab and so it's kind of a little things on a stick chapter, but
chicken wings sounded like a better chapter title. We love ingredients. One of the interesting
and false perceptions of modernist cooking is people say well, I prefer the farm to table
movement, as if that's a different thing. All food, great food comes from great ingredients and
we love great ingredients as much as anybody, so we have a whole chapter on great
ingredients, how to find them, how to shop for them, how to find unusual ingredients. Many of
the modern techniques are really about unlocking what is really in an ingredient already but
doing so with technique, and much of traditional cooking is too. I had somebody say I prefer
simple natural foods like a bowl of pasta with cheese and wine. I said you're kidding right?
Because pasta doesn't grow on trees. Pasta is a whole technology and cheese, oh my God, is
cheese making intricate. And look at wine. Wine is even more intricate and yet over a period
of 1000 years people figured out how to make wine, but wine isn't grape juice. Wine is its own
unique wonderful thing and bread is. Pastries are. Ice cream is. This idea that everything has
to be a simple carrot on a plate. Hey, a great carrot on a plate can be a wonderful dish and if
people want to serve that, I'm fine with it. But don't criticize foods that have technique to
them unless you want to give up bread, cheese, wine and so forth. A lot of people ask how you
get a picture like this. This is our picture on cold soups. We have a raspberry soup and the
answer is you start with about 5 pounds of raspberries [laughter] dropping them two at a time
with high-speed flash and after that many pounds you will eventually get a shot that looks like
that. Of course, we are here in Seattle so we had to have a chapter on salmon. We have a
chapter on corn and corn meal, on dessert. This is our lab. This is where we do all of our
cooking. It's in Bellevue. It is great fun working there, I have to say. Besides making the book
there -- after our first books got finished, we decided to do a set of dinners because cooking, it's
interesting. It's fundamentally a sharing thing. People cook so someone else will eat it and
while we made the book we mostly cook for ourselves and each other or the cameras. We
didn't cook for other people. So we started doing a set of special dinners where we would
invite chefs from around the world, chefs and food writers to come. Here is the venue from
one of the dinners. You might think, boy, that's a lot of dishes, but that's actually side one
[laughter]. It sort of goes on. There's usually about 35 courses. And here's a time lapse of
what it takes us to set one of these things up. I should say that last year around this time I hired
Scott Heimendinger. Scott was a program manager on Excel who had also had a passion for
modernist cooking, in fact, had his alter ego as a Seattle food geek, so Scott made the video and
Scott is there in the back of the room. In real life they don't eat quite this fast. Usually we get
through about 35 courses in three hours. One of the really important things about a big meal is
pacing. If things keep happening, you can keep people's attention, but if you like but a 5 or 10
minute gap occur, like around course 15 or 20, they're gone. Then it's like, oh God, when is the
next thing going to come and it's really important to do that. So we've had all kinds of famous
folks, Martha Stewart, Chris Campbell from America's Test Kitchen, Thomas Keller. They've all
come to eat. Wolfgang Puck’s down over there. And that's what I have. So if there's time for
questions, we will take some. [applause]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Yes?
>>: One of the hardest things for me to do is cook something and then keep it warm for a
period of time so we can plate and serve. Do you have any technique on that?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Well, it's one of the reasons we love sous vide cooking. Sous vide
cooking at its essence isn't about plastic bags or vacuums or anything else. At its essence, sous
vide cooking is about cooking at low temperature, so if you cook a steak and you want it
medium rare, you want the inside about 130°F. But if you cook it in a pan, your pan is probably
4 to 500 degrees. If you are charbroiling, you are probably putting it on something that is 1000
degree flame. So you are in this wicked thing of trying to get the timing just right and then
trying to keep it warm afterwards is really problematic. With sous vide cooking what you'd
typical do is you cook at almost the same temperature, so we would cook -- to get a steak to
130 we would cook it at 132. Now it takes some patience. An inch thick steak at that
temperature is probably going to take an hour to cook. But if you sear the outsides first so that
they are nice and brown and then you put them in the sous vide bag and you cook them or
there are other appliances. They're not common home appliances but something called a
combi oven will let you cook at that temperature even without doing the sous vide thing. Well
if you cook at 132 and you let it sit for a few hours, it's fine. Or if you bring it out 20 minutes
early, it's probably fine also because you're cooking at a very low gradient with time, so that's
why the single best thing -- other than that, the trick would be try to get the food, heat it with a
heat source that's at about the temperature you want. So if the thing is medium rare, it's about
130 degrees. The trouble is most ovens won't accurately go to 130 degrees. You can try
propping them open and doing stuff like that but it's -- that's why combi ovens will go to that
temperature or sous vide are really useful. Yes?
>>: [inaudible] your comments on the ink. So obviously we reproduce red tomatoes in
magazines or any other using normal ink. What's missing? Yours was grayed out. What…
>> Nathan Myhrvold: The color. What you wind up doing is you have to do something called
color management. And another thing where I will sound like your grandpas, I put color
management in Windows myself. I did actually. Scalable fonts too. What you do is you take
the whole range of colors and then you try to squish it down so that it will fit within the range
of the output device and there's a couple of heuristic algorithms; none of them work perfectly,
but where they try to make the relative difference between those colors and other colors work
well. If you've got a red tomato on a perfectly black background, it'll work. If you have it with
lots of other things that are highly colored, it will be less successful and it will be some
compromise and one of the things that good prepress people do if they are adjusting a picture,
or digital photographers, although ink jet printers that photographers use have a wider gamut
then printing inks do, mass-market printing. You try to squish the color range in a way that is
not too unattractive. We just bought the better ink.
>>: [inaudible] about accuracy?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Well, and not having to fuss with it and -- we had a strong point of view
that we should have, books are a valuable thing and having a book that had a quality job to it
would be interesting to people. Most cookbooks, by the time we published our first book,
there wasn't a single cookbook published in the United States for more than fifty dollars. The
analogy I like to use is if publishers made restaurants, they would all want Marie Callenders.
Maybe a really high-end art book is more like Ruth's Chris, which are fine places, but it's not like
French Laundry, Per Se, Danielle, Robuchon; it's not like these great restaurants. I love the fact
that there is mass-market products, but people also will pay something for quality. So I said
let's make something that's really quality. Let's try to have as much quality in our ink as we
want people to have in our carrots and everything else they serve. Yes?
>>: So how many inks are used in the printing?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Once you use the chroma centric inks, you don't have to go to too many
more colors. I think we used six with that ink setting. It's more than four, but it's mostly the
formulation that matters for the really high saturationings. Yes?
>>: So how would you compare yourself to America's Test Kitchen since you have a Christopher
Kendall? So how do you kind of compare?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Yes so, he came out to visit our lab a few weeks ago and then I, it
happened that I was in Boston so I went to visit his place. I love his stuff and I've been a
subscriber since like 1992. I think there's a couple of differences. One is that theirs is
relentlessly focused on home cooking and home things in a very narrow context. They have a
rule for Cook's Illustrated that they can't use a pressure cooker. It's too weird. Now it happens
that they are in the middle of making a book on pressure cooker cooking, so they're going to
get over it [laughter]. That kind of arbitrary rule wasn't that interesting to us. One of the ways I
like to say it is when they are getting ready to call the recipe done is right when I really want to
start getting going. You are well into it and I say now let's really go further. Another thing is
just in the presentation, you know; they don't have photos of any kind. We have, we decided
to go with this incredibly visual thing. They try to go for very homey, accessible recipes. And
they said that they, that it was a huge breakthrough for them when they finally after bitter
arguing decided that they could put a stirfry dish in the magazine, because they have this idea
that this is sort of Vermont country cooking, whereas, we love doing things that are eclectic and
all over the place, so it's basically a question of degree. We are kind of like them with the knobs
all turned to the max.
>>: Sort of like Alton Brown meets myth busters and [laughter] [inaudible] recipes.
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Okay [laughter]. I've been called worse [laughter]. Yes?
>>: Do you guys come up with a lot of patents on processes or devices in your test kitchen?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: My company, Intellectual Ventures, invents new things. Most things that
you'd come up with for food you've got two problems with patenting. One is very few things
are new. So it's not at all clear we could patent the pretzel techniques since pretzels were wellknown. Now it hadn't been applied to carrots, but it's very unclear that that would be
patentable subject matter for a whole bunch of reasons. The other overwhelming reason is
patenting food only makes sense if you are going to make it by the ton. Patenting a technique
that would be useful for home cooking or useful for a high-end restaurant is a totally moneylosing proposition. So we did file a patent on our ultrasonic French fries because French fries
are made by the ton by God. And we've got a few other ideas like that where it's something
that you could make a ready-to-eat food. You could pretreat all of the French fries and then
freeze them raw or partially cooked and then send them out to restaurants to make crispier
French fries, so that's an example of something where it might make sense. An interesting
intellectual property thing is that recipes can't be copywritten. It's kind of a weird thing. When
I was here at Microsoft one of the things that I was involved in many years ago was putting
fonts into Windows, scalable fonts actually, vector oriented fonts, true type and so forth. I was
very surprised to discover then that fonts can't be, have no intellectual property protection.
The names do and that's why there's Ariel, because the real font is called Helvetica but they
want an awful lot of money to call it Helvetica and particularly back then we were really cheap
so we went with a guy who had a made up name for it. That's why there's so many things like
that that have different names for what looks like the same font because the name is covered
by copyright but the digital data is not. Now with recipes, if you copy, if you photocopied a
cookbook, that would be wrong. That would be a copyright violation. If you literally didn't
photocopy it but you word for word stole it, but if you took a recipe and you took all of the
ingredients and proportions and steps but put it in your own words, probably not protectable.
It freaks chefs out because chefs think well surely this is mine. And the answer is well yes it is
yours in a strong sense, but not in a legally strong sense.
>> Kevin Kutz: We've got time for about two more.
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Okay.
>>: Have you read Harold [inaudible]'s book?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Oh, yes.
>>: And I have a question. Did you in your research find any fundamental flaws in his food
science that has changed over the years?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: I loved Harold's book when it first came out in 1984. And then the
second addition I think in 2003; it's a fantastic resource, a fantastic book. He's a personal
friend. The main differences between his approach and ours is he's got a couple of pictures but
they’re black-and-white and they’re little. We kind of went all visual. And Harold's book has no
recipes. It's really only about food science. It's not about food science in a really applied way. I
think those are the main differences. I can't think off the top of my head of something that was
particularly wrong in Harold's book, but food science moves on and there's a whole lot of things
that have moved on so I wouldn't be surprised if there's something wrong here. I wouldn't be
surprised if there's something wrong in one of my books too just because as science moves on,
or more likely than wrong, may be incomplete, you know, there will be a story where people
say oh, well this happens because of this and then someone does more research and says well,
that's sort of it, but there's also this other factor that you didn't consider. Okay. Last question.
Well, okay, there will be two last questions [laughter]. You back there and then you.
>>: Where would we be now to find ingredients [inaudible]?
>> Nathan Myhrvold: Here? Bellevue farmers market is fantastic. We do a lot of shopping for
the lab there. Pikes Place market is great too, but Pikes Place has been around so long and it is
so famous with tourist that there's lots of fantastic farmers that can't possibly get a stall there,
so the Bellevue farmers market is great. Uwajimaya, we buy lots of produce at Uwajimaya.
We have a section in our new book urging people to go to ethnic markets. No matter what
ethnicity you are, there is some other ethnicity you are not [laughter]. Just in Seattle, there's
West African markets. There's Mexican and Central American markets. There's Korean
markets, Indian markets, Chinese markets, Vietnamese markets and they have lots of cool stuff.
And you have to have a sense of adventure because -- and it won't all be your tastes; I
guarantee, but that's -- they also tend to have lots of really good fresh stuff that you don't find
other places because it isn't -- the problem with a lot of produce is that it's such a mass-market
that it's shipped in from all over the place. Well if you have something a little local ethnic
market typically it isn't. They're buying stuff from much more local farmers. Okay, last. I'll be
quick.
>>: What did you have for lunch? [laughter]
>> Nathan Myhrvold: For lunch I actually had Indian food and it was great. In our cookbooks
we have a smattering of foods from around the world in part because our cooking team is from
around the world. We've got people from several different ethnicities plus there's lots of great
food almost anywhere on earth. [applause]