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Nathan Myhrvold's $500 Cookbook Now an $80 iPhone App
Nathan Myhrvold's six-volume foodie encyclopedia, Modernist Cuisine, writes reader SmartAboutThings, is one of the most expensive cooking encyclopedias, the original six-volume version retailing for $500, with the two-volume addition that followed after that selling for $115. "Now, Nathan and his team have transformed their huge food encyclopedia into
an iPhone/iPad app. It's not just a digital book, but rather an expensive $80 interactive app that can do more than just provide recipes. The interactive digital cookbook is the fruit of a development team of 10-15 people that have worked over nine months on the project. The app contains 37 technique videos, 416 recipes and 1,683 photos."
you could just mirror recipesource.com and dump it on an old notebook. Made the missus well happy, that did.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You know you can just type the name of any dish into google and get dozens of recipes, videos and pictures, right?
But I like the advertisment, your PR team is awesome to have submitted this to slashdot!
Another slashvertizement all right.
And so continues the once noble /.'s slip into undignified obscurity, one tepid and irrelevant sponsored submission at a time.
Were you here for the scientology clambake/xenu thing like 13 years ago? Scientology sued Slashdot to get an embarrassing copyrighted comment deleted and Slashdot was coerced into compliance. The subsequent Slashdot story about the comment being deleted was in the old Slashdot faq (or maybe hall-of-fame or something) that used to be in the left navbar but now seems to be missing.
There also may have been a time when a link to windows 2000 source code within a comment was deleted but I don't remember if it actually was. I think CmdrTaco et al may have fought and won to keep the comment but my memory on Slashdot lore isn't that good any more.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Looking at the app, this isn't the voluminous $500 set that's been digitized. It's the ~$110 watered down version for home chefs. The home version is a bit more than just a "two-volume addition" tacked onto the original. It's a compendium of simpler recipes taken from the original volumes with preparations that gel well with what regular chefs can get their hands on.
It's still a fantastic book for wannabe kitchen scientists but it seems the author got a little too excited in writing his sensational headline.
Update: here's a picture of Myhrvold's "ultimate modernist burger".
In addition to the loads of suet, it also uses fish sauce.
I can just about guarantee that if you knew how genuine fish sauce was made, you wouldn't put it in your mouth.
If that's "modernist" cuisine, I probably don't want any.
This is a "modern" (or Modernist) cookbook, so the recipes inside are going to be closer to what you'd find in a restaurant that uses an obscure adjective for it's title rather than what you'd see in your grandmother's kitchen. If the idea of cooking a beautiful cut of salmon in a Ziploc bag seems blasphemous, or using a digital scale instead of an elephant-shaped measuring cup is akin to high treason, you may not be ready to make the jump.
Modernist Cuisine at Home introduces a consolidated set of kitchen tools and gadgets that the home chef can reasonably afford. Don't have the funds for the laboratory-grade centrifuge featured in "Modernist Cuisine?" No problem. Not only does MCAH omit the prohibitively expensive tools from its recipes, but many of them are the same recipes found in the original, redone for the home cook. MCAH even goes as far as offering several options at varying price ranges for the equipment used within.
The same goes for the ingredients. MCAH mostly does away with the laundry list of exotic spices and chemicals featured in many "modernist" cookbooks and instead relies on ingredients you can find either at the local grocery store, or in reasonable quantities online. For the ingredients you are probably less familiar with (malic acid? agar agar?) there is a two-page spread detailing what each does, where it comes from, and what it costs. In many cases, the recipes will list alternatives if you choose not to add their recommendations to your shopping list.
[purchaser review]
It is made by fermenting small whole fish in brine and drawing off the liquid, which is then bottled. I've got no problem with that.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I'm not sure where you learned science, but fermentation *IS* decomposition.
Fermentation is part of decomposition, but you referred to it previously as rotting. Rotting involves all three decomposition processes, not just the break down of carbohydrates (fermentation), but of the proteins (putrefaction) and fats (rancidification). In salty environments, like that used in making fish sauce, you can stop the breakdown of proteins and fats, and are left with just fermentation.
By the way: there are several kinds of "fermentation", and the kinds that happen with bread and beer do not even remotely apply in this case.
What happens in bread and beer are very similar to what happens in fish sauce. There are different possible outcomes of fermentation, which can be alcohols or lactic acid related things for example. The latter is still used plenty in foods most people have no problem with eating, everything from pickles to cured meats. There are plenty of highly valued meats and cheeses aged for years, just similar treatment to seafood in the west is a little less common. But for the same reason your metabolism and bread rising is not rotting, fermentation of things like meats and fish are also not rotting. If you had actual rotting, the smell and taste would be quite different for fish sauce, and it would be unusable.