Modernist cuisine

Consider hollandaise, that unctuous mixture of warm egg yolks and butter. The sauce is so fragile because butter congeals and separates as soon as it cools. And it’s all too easy to overheat the eggs and curdle the sauce. But we show you how to avoid these problems by cooking the eggs sous vide by […]

One of the most important flavor-producing reactions in cooking is the Maillard reaction. In discussions of cooking, it is sometimes called "the browning reaction," but that description is incomplete at best. Indeed, it really ought to be called "the flavor reaction," not "the browning reaction."

In Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet--scientists, inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own right--have created a six-volume, 2,400-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and…

We’ve taken the photos, tested the recipes, written the text, and shipped our files off to the printer. But there’s one element of Modernist Cuisine at Home we can’t do without you: we need your help selecting images for the four 8 x 10 prints we will be including with MCAH! To vote, post one […]

By the Numbers In Modernist Bread, you will discover innovative recipes and techniques developed by the Modernist Cuisine team that have not been published anywhere else. Housed in a sleek stainless-steel case, this five-volume set contains more than 1,500 traditional and avant-garde recipes, as well as a wire-bound kitchen manual so that you can easily […]

Gluten, the protein complex in wheat that becomes tangled into sticky, stretchy dough when you knead flour with water, is crucial to a great crust. Bread flours need a large fraction of high-quality gluten to act as a binder. The more gluten in the flour, the more elastic the dough, and the firmer the baked […]

Dashi is elegantly simple yet incredibly important to Japanese cuisine. Literally translating to ‘broth’, dashi is full of umami goodness, which makes it both delicious alone and as an indispensable tool for layering and developing flavors in countless Japanese recipes. In fact, the distinct reaction of taste receptors with glutamate was first identified after slurping […]

By the Numbers Spanning 2,438 pages, Modernist Cuisine explores the history of cuisine and explains the science of cooking in a way that’s accessible to both professional chefs and home cooks. Created by a team of scientists, chefs, editors, and writers, these volumes explore research spanning the field of culinary science with careful attention to […]