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?

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

[Hogwash McFly]

The phrase 'core dump' springs to mind.

Method

[supernova_hq]

If they program like they cook, it explains ME and 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

[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: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.

A Kitchen huh?

[dontPanik]

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