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?"

Comments

"Is it possible to BSoD food?"

[yttrstein]

It is now.

Re:"Is it possible to BSoD food?"

[palegray.net]

Bad Soup of Death?

Re:"Is it possible to BSoD food?"

[Jurily]

So they hired my mother-in-law?

Re:"Is it possible to BSoD food?"

[cayenne8]

Hmm...I kinda like this idea of science and cooking/food better the first time I heard about it when it was called Good Eats.

That and Alton Brown throws in a little Python-esqe humor with his stuff.

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/

(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 :) :)

MS food

[AHuxley]

After you consume it, 2 ports will open spontaneously and you will be ejecting data for days.

Re:MS food

[asliarun]

Only if you eat spaghetti code.

Re:MS food

[Hogwash McFly]

The phrase 'core dump' springs to mind.

Re:Dear Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Method

[supernova_hq]

If they program like they cook, it explains ME and Vista.

Re:Method

[bobdotorg]

If they program like they cook, it explains ME and Vista.

I was thinking more along the lines of they ate too much of a bad batch of Win 98 and barfed up ME.

After snacking on that XP that had been left out of the refrigerator too long, barfed up Vista.

Heston Blumenthal got there first

[Kupfernigk]

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?)

Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first

[beh]

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.

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.

Re:Heston Blumenthal got there first

[asliarun]

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??

Molecular gastronomy

[martin-boundary]

This is not a new idea. See wikipedia on molecular gastronomy. Mhyrvold will probably try to patent it though.

Re:Molecular gastronomy

[Mark_in_Brazil]

This is not a new idea. See wikipedia on molecular gastronomy. Mhyrvold will probably try to patent it though.

Color me shocked that a Microsoftie is doing something unoriginal.

Now, if Microsoft-style food makes your stomach unstable, that's just because you can't expect the creator of the food to test it in every possible stomach, and I'm sure they'll fix it in one of the service packs.

And the fact that Myhrvold doesn't yet know about things like pasteurization, filtering, and qualification of suppliers, used to deal with physical, chemical, and biological threats in the food does not mean that any food-borne pathogens, poisons, hormones, rocks or glass shards are his fault. He wants to dominate the market, and making lots of food for lots of people (he's working on deals with schools so kids won't be able to eat any kind of food but Myhrvold Food) means that there will be more of it in which pathogens, dangerous chemicals, and solid debris can hide. That's not Myhrvold's fault, and you fanbois who insist on eating food whose ingredients have been properly qualified, inspected, and treated to remove possible threats, well, the only reason your food is not being attacked is because Myhrvold's food presents a much more high-profile target for biological, chemical, and physical threats, so the threats don't even bother showing up in other food.

Plus, Myhrvold paid a company a bunch of money and they did a study showing that if you ignore hospital bills, funeral expenses, cleaning bills to remove spewed vomit, violently ejected diarrhea, and squirted blood from clothes, personal belongings, homes, places of work, car interiors, stores, schools, etc., and the permanent damage done to the digestive systems of those who have eaten Myhrvold Food and survived, then despite the fact that Myhrvold food is cheaper than what you get at those fancy restaurants that obey the safety and inspection laws, and even cheaper in total overall cost than the food you buy inexpensively at grocery stores and farmers' markets.

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.

Chef Blows Off His Own Hands in Cooking Accident

[initialE]

This 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:Dear Microsoft

[JohnBailey]

Thou shalt not brute-force cooking. REAL chefs will have no interest in your stupid book.

Never heard of Heston Blumenthal then...

Been done before... and better

[Mr. Freeman]

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.

Re:Dear Microsoft

[gstoddart]

"Thou shalt not brute-force cooking. REAL chefs will have no interest in your stupid book."

Never heard of Heston Blumenthal then...

Or Wylie Dufresne, or Homaro Cantu, or the field of Molecular Gastronomy.

Lots of chefs are using cutting edge technology to do really exotic things with food both in technique and results. And, they've been doing it for a long time.

Cheers

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.

A Kitchen huh?

[dontPanik]

Can we have a Windows 7 release party in his kitchen?

Microsoft Cuisine !!!

[DrYak]

Reminds me this old joke parodying Microsoft business practice and FUD strategies :
Microsoft Cuisine.