Former Microsoft CTO Builds Kitchen Laboratory

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?"

Patent troll or genuis (or both ?)

[iMaple]

The was an article on him a few years ago which seemed to suggest that he was being a patent troll and his 'inventions' just a cover (though to be fair he is a real super genius... worked with Stephen Hawking, publications in Nature and Science and even a paper on paleontology !!! ):

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380798/ [cnn.com]

(Who's afraid of Nathan Myhrvold?
The giants of tech, that's who. And they have a nasty name for the former Microsoft honcho: "patent troll."
FORTUNE Magazine
By Nicholas Varchaver, FORTUNE senior writer
June 26 2006: 1:20 PM EDT)

Patent troll or not, I have to admit that kitchen would have any tech savy cook drooling :) :)

Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first

[SerpentMage]

Oh yes let's do crap dishes and make people pay oodles of money for it.

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....

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...

What the world needs...is vegan cheese.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that he's experimenting with beef jerky and cryoseared duck, I doubt he'd go in such a direction but what I'd like to see is a good vegan cheese.

Those of you you have never tried the existing vegan cheese products will no doubt be puzzled - but those of you who have will either see the need or are hard-core masochists (the ethical problem with cheese is that to keep the cows producing milk the cows have to keep having calves and the calves get turned into veal which is quite unpleasant for the calves).

Anyway, it turns out that vegan cheese is a surprisingly difficult problem. Vegan milk isn't that hard (e.g. soy-milk) but vegan cheese is a tough problem. One school of thought is that milk is has evolved for young animals whose digestive systems are ultimately most suited to solid food but who lack the coordination to eat solid food without choking: milk forms a solid "clot" in the stomach in response to the acids and enzymes that exist in the stomach.

So, anyway, milk is capable of forming a complex gel/clot structure of protein and fat in response to cleavage by certain enzymes ("rennet") and acid. This gel has some fairly specific properties - such as melting at relatively low temperature (in general, protein precipitates don't melt) - that are very difficult to replicate with plant proteins.

The problem is probably solvable but finding the right combination of plant proteins to replicate the gelling properties of milk proteins will require a substantial amount of research into protein structure and bioinformatics.

Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first

[RMH101]

I'm assuming you've not eaten at the Fat Duck? It's not won the "world's best restaurant" title for nothing. Whilst you can take this too far and create some truly out-there dishes (HB's famous "Sound of the Sea" for example, the idea of taking a scientific approach to cooking, rather than the Mrs Beaton hand-me-down-old-wives-tales, isn't a bad one. You can use great, natural ingredients but cook them in accurate, innovative methods. Much like military/aeronautic technology trickles down to the consumer eventually, so might this: e.g. sous vide cooking in the home, etc.

Chef Blows Off His Own Hands in Cooking Accident

[initialE]

This [sky.com] is why kitchen laboratories should not be taken so lightly.

Re:Bloat...

[RMH101]

sous vide rocks. probably not enough to warrant 300 pages discussing it, but it's great. you cook at sub-boiling temperatures, with food sealed in an evacuated plastic bag and placed under hot water for long periods. kills all bacteria, so the result doesn't need refridgerating and has a very long shelf life (I've started seeing sous-vide-cooked lamb in my local supermarket: might give the impression it's junk food as it's on the shelf next to the beans rather than in the chilled section but the taste is amazing), and the meat just melts off the bone. seriously good food. once sous vide waterbath cookers are more widespread, they'll get cheaper and you can try it at home.

Autoclaved Turkey

[Rollgunner]

We did this once for a lab Christmas party. Frozen solid to cooked in about 25 minutes.

Problem is, with normal oven cooking, a lot of the liquids boil out and evaporate. Not so with the autoclave.

It was so juicy you could almost *drink* it.

Re:Bloat...

[sed quid in infernos]

it's great. you cook at sub-boiling temperatures, with food sealed in an evacuated plastic bag and placed under hot water for long periods. kills all bacteria, so the result doesn't need refridgerating

This is not only wrong, but incredibly dangerous. While you can pasteurize food to kill bacteria (allowing you to safely cook chicken to only 141 degrees, for example, by keeping it at that temperature for a long enough time), sub-boiling temperatures do not kill botulism spores. Those spores are temporarily deactivated at cooking or refrigeration temperatures, but will survive the process. And, since they thrive in an anaerobic environment, the vacuum packing makes it more dangerous, not less, to store the results at room temperature.

There are industrial processes that cook sous-vide food in pressure cookers long enough to kill the spores. It's essentially canning in a different container. But that's most definitely not done at sub-boiling temperatures.

Sous vide cooking, done right, is safe. And it's more precisely repeatable than many other forms of cooking. I store sous vide meals in their packaging in my freezer indefinitely, and the fridge for a week or so. But unless you cook the food under to boiling under at least 15 PSI pressure for a long enough period of time, which you cannot do in the bags used for home vacuum sealers, it is life-threatening to store a sous vide meal at room temperature for more than a few hours.