Former Microsoft CTO Builds Kitchen Laboratory 127
circletimessquare writes "Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is self-publishing a cook book with scientific underpinnings. The man who presided over the original iterations of Windows has built a laboratory kitchen, hired 5 chefs, and plays with misplaced lab equipment: using an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder for... he's not sure yet. The article includes a video on how to cryosear and cryorender duck. 'It's basically like a software project,' Dr. Myhrvold said. 'It's very much like a review we would do at Microsoft.' Is it possible to BSoD food?"
Re:Dear Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Who said he wants chefs to read it?
maybe it's aimed at engineers, scientists and programmers, and people who like reading interesting things written by interesting people...
Besides, any fool can cook ordinary food in an ordinary kitchen. It's the mad food scientists like Heston Blumenthal and presumably this bloke (would help if it was actually possible to RTFA...) that are doing interesting and different things (they might be pointless and daft, but they're interesting and definitely book-worthy)
Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first (Score:3, Insightful)
Same thought here - sounds a lot like Heston Blumenthal's approach to cooking... ...and in a true Microsoft way, Nathan Myhrvold will now 'innovate' this as the new way, long after others have 'paved the way'... ;-)
Though, I doubt Myhrvold will pick up 3 Michelin stars along the way, like Blumenthal has.
Molecular gastronomy (Score:3, Insightful)
Been done before... and better (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't just take a random piece of equipment and say "hey, let's throw all sorts of food into this and see if it makes it taste good". You think about what you can use the equipment for, then what you need done to food. You look for how these two things coincide. Yeah, there's a bit of experimentation involved, but it's not random shit. You don't take a damn ultrasonic welder and say "LOLOL LET'S USE THIS ON FOODSTUFFS AND CALL IT COOKING!!!"
Typical MS nonsense.
REAL chefs use rotovaps for distilling marinades and such. Things that the equiptment is good for. They use temperature controlled baths to control the temperature of things that need to be temperature controlled. They don't use 10 ton presses at all. Ten tons is good for just about nothing except obliterating your food.
Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first (Score:3, Insightful)
Flamebait, but I'll bite.
Oh yes let's do crap dishes and make people pay oodles of money for it.
So what? You pay money for crappy food, don't you? Or do you eat Kobe steaks all the time? In any case, crappiness is purely a subjective thing. Lots of people don't seem to find it crappy at all.
I have seen and heard about the Fat Duck and while the elite cuisine establishment can be quite anal, we don't need to go to molecular chemistry. For if we go to molecular chemistry why are we even using real food in the first place? Why not just synthesize everything in the first place? Would make life a lot easier for the Fat Duck....
Sure, it could. However, why is the field of culinary fine dining suddenly beholden to your fancies? Fat Duck is doing what it wants to, and this is obviously working for them.
In any case, this so-called molecular gastronomy has been going on for a long long time. What do you think makes your cola sweet? Where do you think the colorings, preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers etc. come from? Real food?? Molecular gastronomy is only an effort to understand the nature of food, how cooking transforms food, and how ingredients affect food.
What's wrong if these ingredients are artificial instead of being natural. Just because something is "natural" doesn't make it any less toxic or more safe than an artificial ingredient. We've evolved way beyond the days when we would see an animal eat a fruit and hence know that it is safe to eat (the fruit, not the animal).
What bothers me with people like Nathan and in fact the entire freaken generation like him is that they feel did something really big in one thing then they are God's gift to the world and can do everything else. I wish these folks would just sit on the sidelines and let people come up with real solutions. For if this nut job had real skills he would invent a way to grow an artificial piece of steak! Imagine how much better our planet would be if we could grow artificial steaks? We could eat meat and not have the side effects of screwing up our planet. But hey that would require real work and I doubt his generation wants to do that...
Nobody has claimed that molecular gastronomy (or this guy for that matter) has the solution to world hunger. Your comment is no different from all the comments that routinely put down people doing something innovative just because "it has already been done before", "it is not perfect enough", "it really won't solve the problem", "it may create a blackhole and destroy us all", "the money could have been better used to feed the poor in Africa", or some such reason.
This guy is just a geek who has the money to play with expensive lab toys for heaven's sake. Wouldn't you like to have your own 100 ton press to play around with??
Re:"Is it possible to BSoD food?" (Score:3, Insightful)
That and Alton Brown throws in a little Python-esqe humor with his stuff.