The Marvelous World of Modernist Cuisine

I have Modernist Bread, the second five-book series, because I am a full-on grain geek, and these books are the pinnacle of flour power. The world history of bread, our most basic and beloved food, has been gathered in such detail, and bread itself tested in so many ways. It's really the definitive series of books, and that's why I was so excited to tour author/photographer Nathan Myhrvold's lab and meet the man himself. 

The Cooking Lab, his culinary research laboratory, photo studio, and publishing company, is the culmination of Myhrvold's many endeavors over a lifetime in science, including his doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics, his master's degrees in mathematical economics from Princeton and geophysics and space physics from UCLA, postdoctoral research at Cambridge with Steven Hawking, and a stint as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft. Just outside bustling Seattle, across the expanse of Lake Washington in an unassuming area of Bellevue, Myhrvold's technological Wonka factory hums away, researching and photographing the cutting-edge science of food. 

When I walk in, the welcoming hallway is delightfully covered with dots of shadow and lights that could just be an interior design choice or-- more likely--Newton's Laws of Physics illuminated from the ceiling. 

I am spilled out into a room dominated by a Tesla Coil, a large hoop of metal that's an electrical transformer suspended in air like a tech geek chandelier. Grounded to the stairwell, the amount of electricity it produces is visible as light crackling and jumping. This electric dance has recently been harnessed by junior engineers to the epic theme music of Star Wars. 

But it’s the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2, a 1820s prototype computer, that dominates the room. The machine is a collection of number wheels that, when turned with a hand crank, can solve complex equations. Made of mechanical parts that haven’t been in production since the 1800s, it's one of only two in the world. The other sits in the London Science Museum, the museum that commissioned Myhrvold to build Charles Babbage's great unfinished machine. Originally intended to help figure out shipping routes, its blueprints instead have inspired almost all modern-day computing. 

His machine room is a world of wonder. Here the most advanced 3-D printers that can print car parts sit side by side with machines that cut metal via vibrations or streams of water. As Myhrvold's team shows me invention after invention that have revolutionized a broad spectrum of industries, I realize all this is possible because Myhrvold has the team and technology to discover whatever he imagines and build whatever he needs. 

Upstairs, in the famous kitchen, I see machines that have been custom-tailored to spit out data never before collected on food. My favorite is an apparatus that looks like a rubber finger, busy poking a teacake and measuring its density into an elaborate data set in the computer behind it. Alongside these highly specialized computation machines are the building blocks of a world class kitchen, including multiple kinds of specialized ovens and speed racks overflowing with muffins, cookies, and biscuits. Myhrvold's team is now busy on its fourth opus, another five-volume series on all things Pastry. 

When I finally sit down with Myhrvold himself, it’s like chatting with Santa Claus about his workshop. Enthusiasm infuses every word.  

“Design is the beginning of everything,” he says. “And there are two ways to approach it: make what everyone else wants or make what you want and hope someone agrees with you. The latter is how most artists work.” 

For the next hour and half, I'm in awe just as much as I'm belly laughing over our shared love and occasional irreverence for food.  

Edible LA:  How did you decide on Pastry as the subject for your next publication, and what were some of its unique challenges?

Myhrvold:  We went from a very broad approach to modern cuisine with the first book, and then I thought let's try bread. Bread was meant to move the conversation on bread forward, (and) the best way for it to get better is to innovate. Pizza is a subset of bread that has become a whole meal. Pizza wouldn’t exist (as we know it) if it hadn’t left its home country and come to the United States, and then infected the world including its home country again with its popularity. Modernist Cuisine: Pizza was meant to show this dialogue. By the way, we also discovered tons of traditions, almost all of them false.  

The challenge of Pastry has been finding out what is the canon. There is just so much! And often different regions can’t agree on the definition of a pastry. Like scones. Scones are an odd thing, the word itself is often used and abused to mean many different things. Likewise, what is a black forest cake? What is a red velvet cake? There are some culinary traditions you can look to, but it’s not always clear. Is a donut a yeast-risen donut, cake donut or a cruller? What’s the difference between a chocolate cake and a devil’s food cake? In an appeal to authenticity, people like to say, ‘This is the real...’ but often the answer is ‘No, it isn’t.' I like our books to explain this nuance to people... For instance, Viennese Streusel is in fact the Austrian version of baklava, due to Austria being run by the Turks for so long as part of the Ottoman Empire. The Pastry book will also be exploring other sugar sources beyond sucrose-- I’m really excited about that -- as well as gluten-free and vegan as it makes sense. 

Edible LA: What are some other traditions or rules of food that are false?

Myhrvold: There are lots of lore, legend, and conventional wisdom, and most of it is wrong. In the books, we try to say here’s why we think it’s wrong; here’s a simple experiment we did and look how it turned out; if you don’t believe me experiment yourself! ...It’s interesting to play across the whole range of options and allow people to understand that you don’t have to do something a specific way; you can find the way you want. One of my favorites is the idea that you must never have a drop of yolk in anything with egg whites, like an Angel Food Cake. This is not true! A little yolk or oil will take a little longer to whip and the volume isn’t quite as high, but it still works great! But the coolest thing is we found a recipe from 1930s of a very popular cake called the Golden Angel Food Cake using only egg yolks. And it turns out you can whip pure yolks, and it makes a great cake.  

Edible LA:  What’s the importance of your own library at Modernist Cuisine?

Myhrvold: Cookbooks are a great way to communicate culinary ideas across time and space. For historical things in particular, cookbooks become truly important, because the internet only goes back so far. For recipes in 2022, the internet makes more sense as a source but, for older recipes, old cookbooks and old periodicals make the most sense. You can only find the historical by having access to the past...Right now, we're using Artificial Intelligence to help us analyze recipes along with a lot of statistical software to figure out what the world is doing. But, beyond research, it’s still not very useful... If you ask it to make a recipe, it can’t because of the technical details, like all the directions out of order or odd ingredients are paired together... To do well at cooking, you must have more domain expertise. You must have someone who is obsessed.  

Edible LA: As someone on the cutting edge of cuisine, what do you see on the horizon for food?

Myhrvold: There is a greater variety of different ethnicities, cultures, and styles of cuisines now than at any other point in human history.  For a long time, this variety came from importing cuisines to new areas. At this point, however, we have imported almost all the cuisines on planet earth. The other way to gain variety is to invent new things, and a lot of that is driven by technology – like ice cream.  Ice cream didn’t get off the ground till we all had freezers. Another example is Korean Fried Chicken, which is a mash up of Korean traditions and the breaded fried traditions which aren’t from Asia. You see this a lot in pastry, like the Cronut or, in the late 1980s, the Molten Chocolate Cake. So, going forward to get the variety and nutrition goals we want, we must keep inventing new foods. And I think we will.