Popular Science recently published a revealing article on Dr. Nathan Myhrvold's lab. Myhrvold, as you know, is the ex-Microsoft CTO and genius whose current project is an epic cookbook called Modernist Cuisine, the much-anticipated work some regard as the next Escoffier.
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While the article is great, the slideshow's pictures are worth the proverbial thousand words. Looking inside the sterile lab where his Frankenstein-like experiments result in stuff such as foie gras bon bons (think Ferrero Rocher, but with a goose-liver center instead of chocolate), you think of nuclear fuel rods, not food.
Centrifuges and ultrasonic baths are standard equipment, and the tour kinda proves to its naysayers that the still-unreleased $625 book will just become an insanely expensive coffee table book that no normal mortal will be able to use as an actual cookbook.
Myhrvold doesn't seem to care. He's not out to make your mom a better cook; he's out to inspire the professional chefs who will eventually cook for him. He's self-publishing the 50-pound volumes himself and was quoted in the article as saying, “I'm hoping, for the rest of my damn life, I go to restaurants, look at the menu, and I say, 'Aha, I know where that came from!'”
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.