So you remember Modernist Cuisine, the $625 multi-volume cookbook that weighs in at 50 pounds? They recently released an equally formidable list of corrections, fessing up to the mistakes with:
“Modernist Cuisine is the product of human beings. And like all human creations, it contains imperfections. Despite our best efforts to find and eliminate every error before the book went to press, some mistakes slipped through. In a few cases the instructions or discussions in the book just aren't as clear as they ought to be. Some readers have sent in corrections, for which we are grateful. One reader, Larry Lofthouse, checked all our temperature conversions and scaling percentages, and identified quite a few errors.”
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To their credit, most are innocuous grammatical corrections and spelling
mistakes like mistyping Monet for Manet, “minuscule” for “miniscule”.
But then there are others that seem more, um, important? Like this one:
“The recipe for Halibut Cheek Gel Base should call for 0.36%
of sodium citrate with a scaling of 0.1% and a special scaling of
0.25%, 0.36% of high-acyl gellan with a scaling of 0.1% and a special
scaling of 0.25%, and 150 g of fish stock mixture with a scaling of
37.5%.”
So, hey, now when you totally screw up your Halibut Cheek Gel Base, you have no one to blame but yourself!
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.
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