The geek revolution

First, take your centrifuge, your canisters of liquid nitrogen and your sous-vide supreme demi water oven. Make sure you have sufficient quantities of tapioca maltodextrin, kappa carageenan, sodium citrate, sodium alginate, calcium lactate gluconate and xantham gum at hand. The blowtorch may be used sparingly, but keep your dehydrator and a stock of Ziploc bags handy.

At first glance, everything about Modernist Cuisine — Nathan Myhrvold’s gamechanging cookbook, as well as the movement itself — is intimidating. When Ferrian Adria at El Bulli, followed by restaurants like Per Se and El Celler de Can Roca, began turning the kitchen into what looked like a chemistry lab, few of us assumed that you would be able to try Adria’s techniques at home.

El Bulli’s famed menu created classics of this genre, from “frozen air of Parmesano” to melon caviar, a chicken curry where the chicken is liquid, the curry solid, putting molecular gastronomy on the map.

It is perhaps fitting that Nathan Myrhvold’s Modernist Cuisine, all six volumes and 2,438 pages of it, would come out in the same year that El Bulli shut down. Myhrvold’s cookbook, if it can be called that, is extraordinary. In a presentation at TED, he demonstrated how the Modernist Cuisine took the gorgeous, cutaway pictures of food in different stages of preparation — by literally cutting dishes and kitchen equipment in half. This, Myhrvold warned, was not for the faint-hearted — cooking in half a wok turned out to be the perfect way to start kitchen fires.

But while the list of ingredients and the equipment set out at the start of this column may sound intimidating, the appeal of modernist cuisine has less to do with the bells and whistles and more to do with the integrity of food. The sous-vide technique, somewhat uncharitably described by some food critics as a method of cooking food in plastic bags, actually allows for superior control over texture and an intensity of flavour that you might not get on the stove. (In one of the simpler and more effective demonstrations, the Modernist Cuisine team offers its recipe for salmon “cooked” in a Ziploc bag using the kitchen sink and a bath of warm water as utensils.)

Myhrvold’s cookbook functions like a combination of an encyclopaedia and a Bible and the excitement surrounding Modernist Cuisine has been intense — this promises to be the most influential book on food of its generation. Myhrvold was formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer and is probably one of the best French chefs of his generation.

Because Modernist Cuisine covers so much — basic techniques, the science behind cooking, the use of specialised gadgets and ways in which to run kitchen hacks if you don’t have a freeze dryer handy, recipes and a philosophy of food — it can be intimidating. My first reaction, looking at the photographs, was probably the same as most newbies to modernist cuisine: this is wond-erful, but I couldn’t do this in my kitchen.

Myhrvold’s quest is to demonstrate that this book is for the home chef as much as for the professional chef: “My reply is, I am a home chef! And yes, I have used almost all of the techniques we discuss in my home kitchen… The word ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin root amare, which means to love. Anyone who loves food will find much to like in this book, regardless of whether or not they cook for a living.”

And there you have it: a manifesto for gourmands and geeks alike. I don’t know, despite Myhrvold’s enthusiasm, how often I’ll be using the recipes — but if there is one contemporary book that will challenge your idea of what cooking is, that would be Modernist Cuisine.

Nilanajana S Roy is a Delhi-based writer