This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades.
In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people, it was narrowly focused and dated almost immediately. But some of the techniques and "moves" became genuinely mainstream and it's fairly reliable as a reference to them. And some of the others didn't, but could have and are useful, and unless you were cooking at one of a couple dozen restaurants from 2002-2008 you're unlikely to find another detailed guide to how to do them.
That said, for a lot of the detailed technical stuff, they generally chose to authoritatively select one specific approach to a technique, eliding details that can definitely be a big deal at this level of precision. Sometimes the "recipe" is really more of a demo, silently depending on details like a neutral pH, making it prone to failure if modified but too basic to be usable in its presented state.
Also some of the techniques simply don't work as written. Specifically the ones that are presented as novel simplifications for complex molecular gastronomy operations are really hit or miss. I suspect these are just really bad cases of the previous point, where there is a hidden variable they didn't document, that didn't come up in testing. But there is a replication crisis in cookbooks too, this is not out of the norm though it is frustrating.
It also raises the annoying question that's been in my head for 15 years now: wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?
I worked at the lab. “Modernist” was chosen from what I remember because he didn’t like “molecular gastronomy”, which is what everyone was calling texture manipulations and laboratory techniques applied to food at the time, and to differentiate it from “classical” cooking - the Escoffier through Marco Pierre White era basically.
We cooked a lot of dishes from the book for special events, but it was often the same lot of dishes over and over. Writing the recipes was an absolute pain in the ass (I was a cook, I was not used to documenting things in a lab manual), and I absolutely believe lots of hidden variables got lost - again, while there were lab-trained chefs there - Chris I believe had a background in biology or something - us grunts were line cooks beforehand.
i hated the era of foam, gel, and sous vide everything. as a home cook, i want the randomness that comes with hand technique, but if im paying for a 2/3 star meal i still also want the randomness and authenticity that comes with hand technique, not to be bored out of my mind or trying to show me some impressive lab grade "consistency".
in another 20 years, we'll look back on this like we did mayonnaise and meat aspics from the 1950s.
I mean the things you mentioned are deeply out of style in restaurant cooking right now. So we already do look back on this in a similar way. And they were never that common either. This trend had a short peak and the training, staffing, equipment, r&d costs were all sky high. The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless you were specifically seeking it out.
Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking.
> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking.
I was reading the first part of your response and my mind was immediately going "but sous-vide is everywhere" It's one of those things that's just really useful. However it has fallen off slightly, i didn't think anyone is cooking eggs sous vide anymore.
Circulator eggs never made a whole lot of sense, because you already have a reference temperature to work from and so cooking any number of them is just a matter of setting a timer (do what the Ideas in Food people do and steam them).
I can't remember the last time I circulated a steak. But we did a rib roast for Christmas, and I did that in the circulator, in advance, "for insurance purposes", and then cooked it off in a ripping (toaster) oven on the day.
There is no better way to prepare sausages. I would replace my Anova circulator immediately if it broke, simply so I can keep going to Paulina Market, buying a couple of every sausage, circulating them all, and keeping them in the fridge/freezer for ready-to-go meals.
I still poach eggs in the shell in my Anova Precision Oven often. The 13 minute egg is pretty unbeatable.
I think the decline in sous vide use in commercial kitchens is largely just because befuddled health regulators pushed everyone toward CVAPs, which do the same thing without the plastic.
Now that I’ve got the APO, I cook nearly everything in it. I wish I could get a regular oven-sized version.
I have an APO too and love it. While it’s possible to add a second phase to the cook with 0% steam, it isn’t enough to give you a crust on a steak. I still use a cast iron pan to sear it.
The main issue I have with SV, either bagged or bagless, is that the meat needs to be thoroughly dried before searing. So I normally cook it without steam but at 200F or so with a wireless thermometer telling me when it is 10F below my target doneness. A lot like sous vide and the APOs precise temp control still comes in handy.
You can just blot the meat with a paper towel really quickly. You don't want surface moisture of course, because evaporative cooling means anything with water in it basically only cooks at 100C, so basically you'll have to cook it longer to get the same sear and thus overcook more of the meat below the surface.
But you want the meat to be as moist as possible, it helps keep the seared portion shallower. Searing dries out the crust, so you want that all to happen as fast as possible, meaning you want it as hot as you can get without "torch taste". (Contrary to popular belief, torch taste comes not from torch fuel but compounds formed at too high heat, that just only happens with a torch.)
So full steam plus hit with a low power torch (Iwatani) is my daily driver and if I'm cooking for a lot of people I use the Searzall but that's like once a year. But it's fun for the whole family to finish the prime rib roast that way.
I have an APO as well, and use it extensively, but I'd note that a) they have never released an API as originally promised (and eventually scrubbed all mention of the promise) and b) as of August of last year, new purchases will be charged a subscription fee for using the mobile app, which is necessary for most of the things you'd get an APO for.
You wouldn't really brown it that way. It's basically a very large, very accurate wi-fi toaster oven. You could maybe open the door to let the steam out, put the top heating element on full, and broil it, but you'd probably end up overdone in the process. I just recommend a torch, a cast iron pan, or your oven's broiler for finishing most thiungs.
I also do the Paulina Noah's Ark, and it's a great move for a summer bbq, sending out one variety of sausage at a time and letting people try all that sound interesting.
Chicken breast is my favorite use for SV. I don't eat a lot of it, but my wife loves chicken salad, and it's nice for a green salad as well. Eating chicken breast that isn't dessicated is transformative. There's other ways to get there, but boy is SV easy.
Other assorted uses: pasteurizing eggs for cocktails, for the squeamish or immunocompromised; making N/A liquor replacements, in particular the Aviary's Campari replacer; Dave Arnold's mom's stuffing; not owning a smoker
I have my notes somewhere but I think I did this in an 85C bath for an hour or something, then put it in a 13x9 in a hot oven with the turkey breast on top of it. I asked Dave on cooking issues for time and temp right before Thanksgiving last year and those about the direction he gave me.
The Parker house rolls are also really good, which is a shame because I already have a family recipe for dinner rolls and I'll have a revolt if I change it, and Dave's are easier.
Yep! You'll need to buy half the spice shop, but it is really good. It's not quite as bitter and notably more vegetal, but it really hits the spot, especially in a spritz.
The Zero book from the Aviary is a lot more cookable than their original book, not as cookable as the summer or holiday books. The Campari replacement is really good, I've had less luck with the other liquor replacements.
There's a drink in there called the bramblin man that is probably my all time favorite N/A cocktail
They make a great deal of sense in professional kitchens. If you're expecting to do hundreds of brunch covers, or a giant breakfast buffet, poaching eggs sous vide ahead of time is a game changer
13-14 minutes at 75C (in shell), shock in ice water, crack into a slotted spoon to drain runny white. I realize this is not technically poaching, but the result is effectively a poached egg, and that's what people are referring to (afaik) when they're referring to poached sous vide eggs.
I’ve never tried sous vide eggs, but I imagine the biggest benefit is easy consistency. I have a pretty solid recipe for soft boiled eggs adapted from Heston Blumenthal but it still leaves some room for imperfections. Can you share more about the steam eggs? Tried to find the reference but no luck. Is it from their book?
Put a steamer basket in a pot, put some water in the pot, bring to a boil, put some eggs in the basket (how ever many you want to cook), set a timer for 7 minutes, cover. In 7 minutes, remove the soft-boiled eggs.
> I can't remember the last time I circulated a steak
I find the results gross. The fat does not render away completely at the sous-vide temps, and since the cooking time is so much shorter you end up with raw fat under the surface layer.
It's funny that you mention eggs because there's actually been a recent paper regarding sous vide, soft-boiling, and achieving the "ideal" egg texture through a novel boiling process (novel to me, anyway) which they've opted to call "periodic cooking": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00334-w
There's a lot of cool diagrams which I'd encourage skimming that link for, but here's the basic rundown: the goal of the described process is to achieve a creamy yolk like what would be produced via sous vide whilst eliminating the unpleasant jammy eggwhite texture characteristic of that process. The recipe involves 30 minutes of carefully transferring an egg back and forth between two vessels repeatedly: one boiling, one room-temperature. You do that 16 times in exact two-minute intervals in order to achieve the "perfect" egg -- very simple and convenient for the modern home-cook in a hurry!
> Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.
Yeah...what a weird derail. My sous vide has a small maybe 3"x0.5" plastic cap at the end and rest is stainless steel. I could have gotten a different one without the plastic I'm sure (maybe more expensive?), but I can read the science and be reasonably sure I'm not going to die horribly from that much exposure. Stainless steel or aluminum[1] pot and you're blissfully plastic-death free.
[1] I shouldn't have said that...the 'aluminum pots give you Alzheimers' crowd could descend at any moment.
It is hard to not use plastic vacuum bags for sous vide. Although there are re-usable silicon bags, such as stasher, they are — personal experience here — not very good for sous vide.
Yes, I too have used a couple of different silicon bags as alternates. The stashers are barely usable, and the cheaper but more sous vide friendly are ok but are hard to clean if you're trying to reuse them. But is it about the heat transfer and stable temp, so anything that keeps what your cooking completely in liquid and can tolerate thermal expansion should work, right?
Or think they're fine, and then their attempts at having kids decades later take longer or fail completely, and they never connect the two. Hard to know which.
> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations
Problem is, Sous vide is good for certain proteins. For example, I cannot stand chicken breast Sous vide, as it, yes, more tender than "classical" chicken breast, but has very specific unpleasant texture. And now it is everywhere. Last time I had dinner in Indian restaurant which was new to me (this specific venue, not Indian cuisine as whole) and I got chicken breast sous vide in a souse as a carry. Not braised or stewed or simmered in souse. It was BAD.
> The backlash was very disproportionate imo; it was never my kind of thing either but you weren't going to run into it unless you were specifically seeking it out.
I'm not sure what the backlash was (I'm nowhere near that scene), but as a tactic, it could be that the reason for the disproportionate backlash was to prevent this style of cooking from becoming more widespread, rather than in reaction to its presence.
I'm with you: Meat aspics and horrifying fruit jello concoctions endemic to the South was exactly what I thought of the first time I went to a Modernist restaurant.
Mayonnaise on the other hand...that didn't exactly fall out of fashion.
And, as a home cook, I find a sous vide very convenient. For example, I can do a little prep in the morning, drop some meat in, come home, do a quick sear and drop in on the plate. It's another kind of slow cooker. It only becomes a 'consistency' fetish if you let it.
My uneducated guess is that Myhrvold was just trying to avoid, with "modernist", all the freight that came with "molecular gastronomy", a term that made literally no sense and invokes for many in the industry the specter of Herve This.
This comment is gold, and helps me contextualize a “book” which has always intrigued me. What are your takes on the later additions, Modernist Bread and Modernist Pizza? I have the Bread tome, and some of the base recipes have worked out.
I have no experience with the pizza one at all. I liked the information in the bread books a lot, about the history of wheat cultivation and the enzyme processes during fermentation and baking. I only ever did one recipe out of it (brioche) and it wasn't better or worse than the more traditional recipe I normally use. Seems fine if you like their recipe format, though there are a lot of great bread books out there.
Thanks! Yeah, so far the main value I'm getting out of it is learning the "why" behind some of the recipes in other books. It's helping me narrow down which variables I should tweak to achieve certain outcomes. But all of that info could probably be condensed to a normal 200 page book without all the glossy photos.
Interesting. I was a chef for 17 years, 11 in restaurants and 6 as a private yacht chef. How did you end up on Hacker News? For me, I found joy in opening new restaurants which is engineering and followed that path to software.
I’m curious what did you find to not work as written? I’ve had no problems making any recipes out of it, but I’ve also not done so exhaustively.
The Modernist Cuisine At Home book was pretty practical for muggles and would probably be where I’d recommend people start if they’re just looking to make some stuff for sure though, the full series is more something you read.
I know what you're talking about and it's been a while but I remember it being kind of a headscratcher. He says some stuff about innovation and then mentions bauhaus but (in my memory at least) failed to connect the book or his approach to cooking to the modernist movement in a compelling way. And also failed to convince me that he knew anything about modernism except the name and a vague association with mid-20th-century aesthetics.
I always thought he would have said "smart" if he thought he could get away with it. Or maybe "bright", in that particularly smug edge.org sense of the word. "Clever" might be another, but I don't think it captures the gestalt.
In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people, it was narrowly focused and dated almost immediately. But some of the techniques and "moves" became genuinely mainstream and it's fairly reliable as a reference to them. And some of the others didn't, but could have and are useful, and unless you were cooking at one of a couple dozen restaurants from 2002-2008 you're unlikely to find another detailed guide to how to do them.
That said, for a lot of the detailed technical stuff, they generally chose to authoritatively select one specific approach to a technique, eliding details that can definitely be a big deal at this level of precision. Sometimes the "recipe" is really more of a demo, silently depending on details like a neutral pH, making it prone to failure if modified but too basic to be usable in its presented state.
Also some of the techniques simply don't work as written. Specifically the ones that are presented as novel simplifications for complex molecular gastronomy operations are really hit or miss. I suspect these are just really bad cases of the previous point, where there is a hidden variable they didn't document, that didn't come up in testing. But there is a replication crisis in cookbooks too, this is not out of the norm though it is frustrating.
It also raises the annoying question that's been in my head for 15 years now: wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?