Cooking from Cookbooks: Modernist Cuisine at Home

To kick off my this Cooking from Cookbooks project, I have decided to set the bar high and take on Nathan Myhrvold’s heafty tome, The Modernist Cuisine. While I admit to squandering money on expensive cookbooks that I never cook from, I do have enough thrifty sense about myself to resist spending $500 on his 5-volume set, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. It does, however, reside permanently in my “Kimi’s Expensive Stuff Wish List” in case one of you is a generous benefactor. (For the record, I would prefer the moto jeans, whiskey still or Tangine over the books though).

No, I satisfy my craving for owning a Modernist Cuisine by buying the still expensive, but not stupidly expensive, Modernist Cuisine at Home. A fifth of the number of books for a little more than a fifth of the price.

The Book.

It is still quite impressive. And by impressive, I mean it is sizable and imposing. The whole tome weighs in at over 10 pounds. At 17-inches tall, it towers over my other cookbooks. I bring up the size because, while impressive, it is ridiculous. It’s so tall it won’t fit on my cookbook shelf. I can’t casually browse this book sitting on the couch. I need a table in front of me. My cookbook stand can’t hold it. Note to the boys out there, bigger is NOT better. In this case, bigger renders this thing to mostly an artifact to gaze at carefully and not to use lovingly.

Of course, that’s all external appearances. It’s what’s inside that counts, right? As the former CTO of Microsoft, Myhrvold is a tech giant and his book reflects that. It is ripe with nerdiness. To start, it is actually two books. Housed in a protective cardboard box the a heafty, hardbound book and a smaller spiral bound workbook. The larger book is expertly designed with appealing layouts filled with perfectly cropped high-resolution photos. This book is for displaying and cherishing. The smaller book is an uninspiring, black-and-white, pamplet of recipes. It is called the “Kitchen Manual.” This book is for using while cooking.

In the context of the technoworld, whole thing is analogous to a shiny new electronic device and it’s boring manual wrapped inside a carefully staged package. It’s designed to make the user feel like they are unwrapping a precious gift each time it’s unboxed, but the manual is included for practical and legal purposes.

Inside, it reads like a textbook, cookbook, instruction manual hybrid with a periodic indulgences of flowery descriptions. Photos are annotated like an isometric view of n exploded assembly drawing. Recipes appear in tables which has hints of indented coding styles or tabulated problem sets in engineering textbooks. Admittedly, they are also similar to professional baking books. These techno-sensibilities make the books massively appealing to the techno-foodie sort, but it’s disorienting to the average cook familiar with the usual recipe format. As a former techie and current cooking instructor, I straddle these two types of cooks. Some things work. The massive number of color photos clearly depicting step-by-step procedures works well. But, I especially find the “procedure” column bad. It seems like a compromise for space in a book that gobbles up space.

That said, this cookbook is not for the novice cook. It’s also not for an experienced but casual cook. It is for either the nerdie cook or the cooking nerd who wants to spend hours hacking a technique while using multiple expensive tools only to complete a single dish. Cooking from Modernist Cuisine at Home requires a cook who is willing to study a recipe and its technique, someone who reads the diagrams closely, a cook who plans ahead, and procures all the components ingredients and lab kitchen tools before starting. Most days, I am just a cook with that uses basic tools and my instincts to make a great meal. However, I can still be a nerd, even if it’s infrequently.

The Cooking.

I find it hard to settle on a recipe for my first foray into Modernist Cuisine. Partly because the shear massiveness of information, but also because the book is largely technique driven and not meal driven. Every time I settle on a recipe, I see the ‘special requirements’ include preparing several other recipes first. Time for prepping these is not included in the main recipe’s “time estimate.” I just want something to dip my toes into the book first, not a multi-day project. This thing should include a “suggestions” section like a travel book: you know a “If you have two hours, two days or two weeks go here” section. A few sample menus combining recipes including total time would be an awesome addition.

The more time I spend with this, the more it feels like textbook. If a student goes through this page-by-page, by the time they are done they will be educated on Modernist Cuisine. Since I usually just want to feed myself, I am pretty sure, I won’t be using this often.

I settle on Sous Vide Buffalo Wings. The chicken wings page appears in promotional materials, so the writer and editor must like it. The Buffalo Sauce is a “special requirement,” but both recipes appear attainable in a few hours. The buffalo sauce can be made ahead, so I can also spread out this effort.

I start by sectioning the chicken wings. While they brine in the fridge, I start the sauce. The gist is to use an immersion blender to make a mayonnaise. An oil infused with garlic, onion and pepper replaces the plain oil which renders is buffalo style. Beware, the infused oil is a deep hue of red that soaks in and stains everything including my nice wood cutting boards. Although the recipes says it makes just 1 cup of sauce, I end up with around 3 cups. It only keeps for 3 days in the fridge. It isn’t used in any other recipes. So, I better want spicy mayo on everything for 3 days!

I finish the sauce long before the wings’ 3-hour brine completes, so I wait.  I warm the sous vide and then wait for it to warm. I dry the chicken wings, vacuum bag them and wait for the wings to cook.

All-in-all, I wait around 4 hours after the sauce is done before I can fry the wings. I spend the time flipping through the book wondering if I could start something else while I wait. Then, I stop myself. I want to focus on this one recipe and see it through to the end. So, I take a Netflix interlude. I started out with just the kitchen manual propped on my cookbook stand, but find myself constantly curious about the photos. So, I go back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room to look at the book splayed out on the dining room table. Not a problem for this recipe since there is so much waiting time.

The Taste.

After the wings complete their sous vide spa, I can finally get some action. Fully cooked through, the wings just need some pan-frying time to crisp them up. The technique is simple. The the wings, fully cooked through, need only color and crispness. It still takes longer than I expect to fry these and much longer than the suggest “about 3 minutes.” I set off the fire alarm twice. Lots of smoke. With the wings fried crispy, I start slathering sauce over them with a pastry brush. I barely make a dent in the 3-cups of sauce. Also, don’t forget, this stuff stains. It not only stains my wood cutting board, but it stains clothing, it stains dish towels, it stains t-shirts and it stains fingers.

The Summary.

Now, the taste test. For a 5-hour project, I am a little underwhelmed and so are my tastebuds. They are tasty. The mayonnaise-style sauce is creamier than the usual sticky buffalo sauce, but the infusion doesn’t provide deep flavorful notes. That is expected, infusions intentionally “hint” of flavor and not “layer” on flavor. I might make wings sous vide again. I would fall back on a simpler sticky sauce with more complex flavors. I take that back. I don’t really make wings at home. I also don’t really eat wings out. So, I probably won’t make them again.

My first foray into Modernist Cuisine at Home is a success, but it doesn’t leave me inspired to make another recipe. This one took 5 hours for just okay chicken wings. I wonder if a longer and more complex recipe would yield something better than just okay? Is it the excessive time and effort that made them just okay? If they were faster to make, would I think they were great? If I were a wing connoisseur, would I appreciate these more? I don’t know.  What I do know is that I am not ready to take a full day out to make anything else in this book just yet.

Has anyone out there made another recipe from Modernist Cuisine at Home? Any amazing successes that I should try out? I would love to hear about other people’s experience or get suggestions for what to try next.

Happy Cooking and Moderning!