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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?"
It is now.
... slow as Vista, we will starve to death.
In this field no matter how much you know, You still don't know anything.
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/
(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 :) :)
Thou shalt not brute-force cooking.
REAL chefs will have no interest in your stupid book.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
After you consume it, 2 ports will open spontaneously and you will be ejecting data for days.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This guy is treating food like he treats money -- something to play with instead of use for the benefit of Man.
All your roast-beefs are belong to us ?!?
Wasting giant gobs of money in useless and stupid ways!
It's not something you can teach. You're just born to be that stupid.
try to get his ingredients.. or he'll sue your under the DMCA.
If they program like they cook, it explains ME and Vista.
he's forcing ram to do preposterous things.
Their they're doing there hair.
For those who don't know, this is nothing new. Heston Blumenthal, who runs The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, for those of you with a few hundred euros to spend on dinner, has been doing this for years. Blumenthal uses laboratory equipment because it gives better, more consistent results than standard cooking equipment and is designed to stand up to the workloads of a commercial kitchen, but he has extended this a long way to develop new ideas. I'm assuming that this guy knows about him and his work and decided to try to go one better (possibly because of his connection to a company famous for doing precisely that?)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
For using your riches to advance society. This is a remarkable use of resources....you're of course free to do as you wish with your money, but why must I read of it?
...Heston Blumenthal's output. Who hasn't? The only reason the rest of us don't have kitchens filled with expensive gadgets (and experienced help) is lack of finance. :)
Has been doing this for years. I am unsurprised that the NYT doesn't even bother to acknowledge this.
Dr. Myhrvold gave a great talk about his book at the University of Washington
http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=842
I hope that this laboratory kitchen is not to cooking what windows is to software.
But I can't help thinking it is...
That's such a waste of resources (food, talent, machine, time)
... is to be the outcome.
Shades a new light on the idiom mischief is brewing.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease... attracting lightning, tunneling it into the autoclave... Frankenstein! Just like he did when he managed the Windows codebase.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
This is not a new idea. See wikipedia on molecular gastronomy. Mhyrvold will probably try to patent it though.
"The project has grown in size and scope. Originally planned as a 300-page discussion of sous vide, an increasingly popular restaurant technique of cooking food in vacuum-sealed bags in warm water baths, the book has swelled to 1,500 pages that will also cover microbiology, food safety, the physics of heat transfer on the stove and in the oven, formulas for turning fruit and vegetable juices into gels, and more."
Has gone from win 2000 to vista, how long before it cuts the bloat and comes to Win 7??
I very much want a copy of that cook book! Oh, and the kitchen to go with it.
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.
I know you hate him, c'mon he is long time microsoft. you gotta be able to hang some shit on him.
there were some pretty solid attempts, yeah! so he cooks/destroys food while the children in Africa are starving. So he has no moral highground or something? u serious?
guys, please!!
anyway, I only wish he would have chanelled more of his creativity and resourcefullness into making windows a bit more tasty, or at least digestable dish.
But after reading 'an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder'
and his quote 'It's very much like a review we would do at Microsoft."
everything makes suddenly so much sense now!
In any case, I wish Dr. Myhrvold a lot of fun and success with his technical cooking and hope that he will fight against world famine by giving the Africans his ultrasonic welder rather than his food.
After all, if you consider that they are building wind generators from scrap parts without a guide, it might be just the thing they need in order to built their ultrasonic heat propulsed canon to fry all the excess freons in the atmosphere and turn them into gummy bears.
This is why kitchen laboratories should not be taken so lightly.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
This stuff is seriously cool and eating at a restaurant specializing in this style, while expensive, is definitely an experience worth having.
I live in Chicago and we are proud to have several famous chefs from this school of cooking with great restaurants including Alinea, Graham Elliot and Moto (along with its sister restaurant Otom). I only wish some of the ingredients and techniques were less expensive and more accessible although you can buy some of the things online easily enough.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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.
.. using the wrong tools for the job.
640 calories a day is enough for anyone.
Is he going to write it in Chef?
This has already been done before, and been done much better. This guy is just throwing random shit into random industrial equipment. Yeah, i guess it is a lot like MS code. Throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick. This isn't cooking, this is brute force mutilation of food.
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.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
And now, they can make potato chips at EXACTY 204.6 C. And, perfect cooked rice
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
(obviously you can not impregnate a man. fuckings.)
how about throwing some of it my way?
Woops. I forget myself. I don't want money stained by Microsoft. Can't imagine how to cut loose all the strings that it comes attached with. Carry on, I guess. This is one way to pump money back into the economy, anyway.
Is it pure coincidence that the restaurant "Moto" is in the same city as a similarly titled mobile phone & network infrastructure company?
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
Dr. Myhrvold has long pursued a Renaissance man portfolio of interests.
Renaissance man? More like Toad from the "Wind and the Willows".
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Microsoft : overkill.
http://www.fatduck.co.uk/
"We embrace innovation—new ingredients, techniques, appliances, information, and ideas—whenever it can make a real contribution to our cooking.
We do not pursue novelty for its own sake. We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration, and other nontraditional means, but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.
Similarly, the disciplines of food chemistry and food technology are valuable sources of information and ideas for all cooks. Even the most straightforward traditional preparation can be strengthened by an understanding of its ingredients and methods, and chemists have been helping cooks for hundreds of years. The fashionable term “molecular gastronomy” was introduced relatively recently, in 1992, to name a particular academic workshop for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes. That workshop did not influence our approach, and the term “molecular gastronomy” does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking." - Heston Blumethal
Accept that and play the game I just lost.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"Having money should never be confused for a license to be a fuckwit." - eg
Nathan Myhrvold should stick to what he does best.
Retirement.
Ehud
"If nobody can beat Linux and Apache with commercial products, then shame on all of us in the industry!
"Even if Linux is on a path that ultimately bumps against economic realities, it might take years, or even a decade for that to occur. In the meantime it could be an important competitor, wreaking havoc with established OS providers. There are several ways to look at Linux as a competitor"
"As a desktop phenomenon, I don't think that Linux is very important. The application set is too limited, and they are too far behind. The place where Unix is very important (i.e. dangerous) is on the server "
"This happens at an interesting time, because server based computing is exploding. The Internet creates a vast need for new servers at every level"
Are you in a manic phase?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Myhrvold is one of Microsoft's biggest and most active patent trolls. Technically, blogging for pay is a legal business model. If slashdot is getting paid to market him, then fine, but at least disclose it.
Growing up with a mom working as a chef or cook in various kitchens the whole way, I'd often be baffled by how awkward and backwards the tech involved was. Tons of stuff was clearly considered way obsolete by standards in non-food engineering. Like many fields (like cells having features you'd never see on a cordless or a car having features a house rarely has) cooking sticks to tradition for no particular reason. It's of course ok to treat it as an art, but while painting in oil has it's place it's also useful to have photoshop and an inkjet printer for when you need speed, flexibility and consistent results.
"He hired 15 people, including 5 professional chefs, a photographer, an art director and writers and editors, to create it. They included Christopher Young, a biochemistry-graduate-student-turned-chef who headed the research kitchen at the Fat Duck near London, one of the most innovative restaurants in the world."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are kitchen machines that work better than traditional technology. Panasonic breadmakers, microwave ovens, fan ovens, force-sensing food processors. But traditional technology has generally evolved around human factors and has taken thousands of years to do it. There is a lot of knowledge hidden in those apparently simple tools.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What's molecular chemistry? More to the point, what's nonmolecular chemistry?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Blue food it typically toxic, so yes in the kitchen, blue screen (sieve) is death.
But non-toxic blue food makes you immortal. Eat some every day and you will live forever.
Bleu cheese? Closer to grey neurotoxin.
Blueberries? Blue on the bush; but purple on the plate.
Blue Meat? Run away, run away.
I don't know about you, but I feel WAY SAFER now that Nathan Myhrvold is staying away from Microsoft and spending his time having fun with his molecular gastronomy investigation venture. I mean, this is the guy who was going to take over the world with a micropayments scheme. He could mess up your world if he really was a black hat. But if you want to you just don't have to eat his cooking... well unless it's THAT good. ;)
Of course, if you consider how much El Bulli's cookbook cost, if he could release it on the net for free he would really make friends.
I'd also like to know how he is organizing the whole project. What software does he use to handle the data? Don't tell me it's SourceSafe!
It sounds like he's having fun and if he discovers new things that's great. In case people don't know it, real chefs do know a bit of molecular gastronomy though not as equations maybe. Probably most chefs don't think of the intentional molecular gastronomists as so relevant to everyday customers but I'd like to try it some time. Of course the cheapest result of this field I expect could be found at McDonalds. He sounds like he is having fun but a dedicated chef goes about fun by working in the kitchen, a billionaire chef creates a whole documentary with cooking staff he supervises, I guess! I'd like to see one of his recipes without the gastronomy. Slow food style. Maybe Nathan's next project?
That's it? At my previous job those were the SMALL ones. If you really wanted to have fun the 500 Ton was sitting around idle a lot. Not sure how well it would make beef jerky though - kinda oily & not a lot of heat.
Of course, I'm a mechanical engineer - what do I know?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Just waiting (actually not, I know how Myhrvold looks like) for the sex tape to hit Youtube.
Is it possible to BSOD food?
The article includes a video on how to cyanosear and cyanorender duck, doesn't it?
(blink)
Never mind.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I think we may be getting an insight into the reason for the underlying problems windows has had since the beginning ... are there discarded code modules from 1980? Altair code?
Can we have a Windows 7 release party in his kitchen?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Hmm...all his food has a slight hint of apples.
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No, that's why liquid nitrogen shouldn't be taken lightly:
He's not highlighted in the article, but the crazy-haired guy in the little picture on the first page of the article is "Head Chef" there. He's the former executive chef at Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar in NYC and has worked/studied at crazy places like the Fat Duck. He's also my brother-in-law, so I'm kind of biased, but MAN can this guy cook! He started out as "self-tought" during college, after which he went to CIA (I think) - dinner at the in-laws' has gotten better and better as he's learned/developed new skills. Sadly for me, this book has taken longer than originally planned to put together as he's on the West coast instead of the East - I CAN'T WAIT for Thanksgiving and Christmas, though!
So if you cooked food in the autoclave you'd never really have to worry about it going bad. You'd be eating sterile food! Although if food already went bad before, would toxins still be present? I think I remember reading something about E. Coli and similar bacterias getting people sick because of the immune response to LPS--a component of their cell walls. Maybe some of the biologists in the room can correct me.
Reminds me this old joke parodying Microsoft business practice and FUD strategies :
Microsoft Cuisine.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The troll will try to patent every god damn "dish" he and his chefs would cook up, both literally and figuratively.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Sprinkle a bit of a cyanide compound on it - and avoid acidic ingredients so it doesn't convert to Hydrogen Cyanide until it hits the stomach.
Death and turning a nice solid blue is two out of three. I suppose you could use a "screen" (the draining and sprinkling tool) to evenly distribute the "seasoning" in powdered form.
Gives the dish a nice Almond smell. It's tempting to use it on an almond pie for desert but that's not authentic: It should be something that's eaten at some point mid-meal so the timing is unexpected.
Call it "almond blue surprise".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I personally do not have a problem with vegans. I understand (but don't totally agree with) you because I am a fan of biodiversity, and because I love our Somerset and Wiltshire (UK) landscape which has been formed by dairy and sheep farming. But I completely agree that anyone who calls themselves a vegetarian and drinks milk or eats cheese is either self-deluding or is turning a dietary preference into an ethic. (I am also very much against mass consumption of beef from intensive farms - we are careful to eat a "sustainable" level of meat from local sources, which is once every couple of weeks for beef/veal.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The article is wrong. Mhyrvold just hired one of Blumenthal's staff, not the man himself. It doesn't properly credit Blumenthal or explain the extent to which Mhyrvold is just copying someone else's work, by, in effect, hiring one of his developers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...because they might have equipment which could possibly be used to make drugs. Whether or not the equipment would actually be used for that purpose is irrelevant, only that there exists a remote possible ability for such equipment to be used that way. Even better when a rich person owns the home & kitchen lab since there's more money and property that can be seized for "civil forfeiture".
There's already a very good book along those lines (affiliate link to "On Food And Cooking").
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Typical microsoft approach. Take an everyday activity (cooking, writing a letter) and add bells and whistles to the point where you need a serious hardware upgrade to even get started any more..
Molecular gastronomy - it's been around for years.
It looks like you're trying to bring meaning to your empty life by filling the hole in your stomach!
Would you like to...
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Have they finally included a kitchen sink to windows?