Book Review: Modernist Cuisine
I love soft-boiled eggs. Yet I had been avoiding them for years. I worried the undercooked eggs contained salmonella. I also worried about cholesterols in the yolk. Within the first volume of Modernist Cuisine, my concerns turned out to be misplaced: 1. Dietary cholesterol has little to no effect on blood cholesterol. 2. If cooking temperature and cooking time are carefully controlled, the yolk can stay runny with practically no chance for salmonella to survive.
The name gives people the impression that this is a cookbook of exotic recipes made with exotic equipment and material beyond the average home cook’s reach. However, calling it a cookbook is like calling Cruyff a footballer. They don’t just redefine the role; they redefine the game.
First things first, it’s not one book. It’s five huge books. It costs hundreds of dollars. But the real cost is the time it takes to read them. It took me three months of reading 1 to 2 hours every day to go through the almost 2000 pages in the first four volumes. There are about another 300 pages of recipes in volume 5.
What are on those pages? According to the book’s authors: “Modernist Cuisine aims to be a resource for … anyone interested in understanding the science behind cooking…We believe if you’re armed with the science behind the phenomena of different cooking techniques … you will be able to go beyond a recipe and truly innovate in your kitchen.”
Whether you will enjoy these books comes down to why you cook. Are you a busy person who doesn’t want to always eat out? Your best bet is to search Youtube for “15-minute meals”. Do you cook to eat healthy? Be careful there are a lot of misinformation and well-intended but unsubstantiated health claims out there. I recommend this non-nonsense diet and follow the recipes in an uncomplicated vegetarian cookbook like this one.
If you cook to make fine cuisine, you should stop and consider your priorities. It will take years of hard work and dedication, and you will not get there by reading a few cookbooks. If you decide that is what you want to do, your first action should be to enroll in a professional cooking school.
To me, cooking is a vehicle to express a philosophy. Think of every meal as a project over which you have total artistic, technical, and operational control. And the wife approves. Now, how often can a middle age man say that?
To be in control, you need to know what you are doing. It’s frustrating if the food doesn’t turn out the way you expect, and you don’t even know how to begin to improve it. Conventional wisdom abounds in cooking — Hervé This collected more than 25000 dictums. They come in three flavors: wrong, right, and right for the wrong reasons. You will find information in this book to help you decide which is which: Washing the bones more thoroughly will not keep your stock clear if you boil it: the turbulent boiling water emulsifies the fat. The oil droplets scatter the light and turn the stock cloudy. The same reason clouds are white instead of clear, though it’s the water vapor doing the scattering in that case. If you want to minimize damage to frozen food, the final temperature matters much less than how fast the temperature drops. Charcoal grill dumps more heat on the food, even though charcoal burns less hot than propane. Why does thawing take so long? Because water is a poorer heat conductor than ice. When the ice on the outside melts into water, it slows down heat transfer into the interior of the food.
But these books are more than just a disjointed collection of food trivia. They provide the cook with the foundational knowledge to be creative. Being creative is not the same as being different. It’s a much more deliberate process:
- Define the problem space.
- Formulate your questions. You may not know what you want to create, but you should know what you need to study.
- Study the science and technology in this space. You should learn not only the knowledge but also the method. So that if you want to challenge/improve the existing body of knowledge, you are not wasting everybody’s time by repeating previously made mistakes/discoveries. Scientists make mistakes. But if you want to challenge a scientific theory, your justification can not be just “science is often wrong.”
- Practice your craft. Knowing is no good without doing.
- Use your imagination. Experiment and create something new. People who skip the previous steps will never be truly creative.
I don’t know if it’s the author’s intention, but this book is an excellent demonstration of the creative process. Let’s examine the structure of the book:
Volume 1. History and Fundamentals. This volume includes information on the fundamental physics of heat and water, and the principles of microbiology related to food safety.
Volume 2: Techniques and Equipment. This volume deep dives into the science behind traditional cooking techniques such as grilling, sautéing, frying, etc. The same scientific principles are then applied to analyze modern techniques like sous-vide and cryogenic frying, and modern equipment like combi ovens.
Volume 3: Animal and Plants. This volume studies the biology of various ingredients and the chemical changes they undergo during cooking.
Volume 4: Ingredients and Preparations. This volume goes into considerable scientific detail about gelling, thickening, emulsions, and foaming. The book draws on the chemical industry’s extensive research on emulation and thickening. I suspect haute cuisine is too small a market to justify serious scientific research funding. Even in food science, most of the research serves commercial food manufacturing. Harold Mcgee found that the original research about gas caused by eating beans was done by NASA, which was researching food for astronauts.
Volume 5: Plated-Dish Recipes. Having laid down the framework, the authors let their creative energy rip. Dozens of innovative recipes with gorgeous photos and detailed instructions are presented. Having taken the journey of discovery, the reader will be able to appreciate the thoughts and creativity that go into creating these recipes.
Now, what is this process of discovery? Let’s take the example of the first recipe of volume 5: Beef Rib Steak. You can find many videos of cooking steaks on Youtube. Some even work very well. However, the story of the steak begins much earlier — it begins on the ranch.
The animals’ diet affects the quality of the meat. Feeding an animal a high-calorie diet accelerates the typically slow replacement of mature, stiff collagen with new, weak collagen. Making such a change to the animal’s diet just before slaughter thus produces more tender meat. That’s why so many cooks swear by corn-fed beef.
Even if you have a perfect specimen, much can still go wrong with the slaughtering. Dead muscle goes through a complicated biochemical process to become meat. After death, no oxygen is delivered to the muscle tissues because there is no blood flow. The cells burn through their energy reserve like anaerobic exercise burns energy. In turn, the pH of the muscle tissue drops, the same way you feel sore after intense exercise. If the cows are left in cold rain right before slaughter, the animals use up their energy reserve in the muscle. After slaughtering, not enough lactic acid is produced to drop the pH value. This causes too much water to be retained, and the meat appears darker. It’s a quality defect known as Dark Firm Dry (DFD).
On the other hand, if the animal experiences acute stress before slaughter, a different quality defect ensues. The surge of adrenaline accelerates the consumption of energy reserve in the muscle. The pH value drops rapidly before the temperature of the muscle has the opportunity to drop. The low pH and high temperature combination causes the muscle protein to denature and exude water. This is known as Pale soft exudative (PSE). The book tells the story of Dr. Grandin, an American scientist who advocates for humane treatment of animals. Sheep become stressed if they are separated from the herd. Yet, for sheep to be slaughtered, it eventually needs to be funneled individually down a chute. Dr. Grandin equipped the sides of the chute with fluffy, pillow-like padding to make the animal feel as if it is accompanied by other sheep.
Quality beef can be easily ruined if not stored and cooked correctly. To freeze it properly, you need to understand the science of water. To cook a steak right, you should know the science of heat transfer. It’s all in the books. Can you cook a nice meal without taking science classes? Yes, with a few rules and a lot of practice. But why would you trade knowledge and enlightenment for repetitive, menial labor?
In cooking, like any other hobby, the purest form of joy is the pursuit of the truth behind it all. New techniques, equipment, and ingredients are not the end, just the inevitable consequence of understanding. I wish you all the joy of cooking and, more importantly, the joy of a lifetime of discovery and creativity.
Finally, I would like to address some of the questions about the book:
1.Does it have all the information I need?
No book can have all the information, but I suspect it will take you substantially much more time and effort to gather all the information presented in this book on your own. I would prefer the author to go into more quantitative analysis like the book “Science and Cooking: Physics meets food, from home made to haute cuisine” based on the popular Harvard lectures.
However, this is probably the most comprehensive book about the science behind cooking. There are several excellent books on the chemistry of cooking, but cooking is so much more than chemical experiments. The only book comparable in motivation and ambition is “On Food and Cooking” by Harold Mcgee (I highly recommend that book at a much lower price). But this book has gorgeous photos and, I think, more original research.
2. Is “Modernist Cuisine at Home” a good low-cost alternative to this book?
No.“Modernist Cuisine at Home” has some information and recipes. However, it’s missing much good information like the PSE and DFD quality defects of meat mentioned above. More importantly, you will have missed the thrill of discovery and the fun of creating something new.
3. Why does this book have to make cooking so complicated? I cook with inspiration/tradition/love/soul.
If that’s how you feel, you shouldn’t get the book. There are books with better anecdotes, more interesting culinary history, and written with more sentimental and flowery prose. For the right reader, all that exploration of the science behind cooking is the point. You will not enjoy this book if you don’t think it’s fun. However, if you are the kind of data-driven, science-oriented reader, you should not just take the author’s words. Do your own research. It will be even more fun.
4. I will never buy all the esoteric ingredients/equipment necessary to follow the recipes in this book. Why should I read it?
Don’t buy this book for the recipes. There is too much sugar in the recipes of at least a couple of desserts for my taste. Many recipes have artificial ingredients. They are more like experiments to illustrate the underlying scientific principles. Besides, many recipes do require special equipment. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where real estate is grossly overpriced, the big problem is not that I need more equipment but a bigger kitchen, which only comes with a bigger house.
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