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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."
Now I look forward to the .IPA!
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
here http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/7153205/Modernist_Cuisine_-_The_Art_and_Science_of_Cooking_%5BVol_1-6%5D_(HQ
I wonder how the culinary specialists that first developed the techniques in his book are getting compensated for their innovations.
Among the top features that the Modernist Cuisine app comes with are the high-resolutions pictures and the ability to search within the app's own information which will also fetch extra data from Wikipedia and other web services.
Wow, an app that can search its own information! And use that cool web resources like Wikipedia!
As someone who admired the photography from the original book, though, the high-res photography is awesome.
Unfortunately, that's about all the book was good for, at least unless you're some professional chef with a large budget and a bunch of fancy equipment. I find it hilarious that TFA makes it sound like a regular cooking and recipe app:
the recipe cards dynamically adjust the measure of ingredients you'll need to yield a given number of servings, then add these items to a shopping list.
Have people even looked at the book? The exotic ingredients used in many recipes aren't exactly the sort of things you can find at your typical supermarket. Even if you have the centrifuge and other fancy equipment needed to prepare some things, you're going to have to special order a lot of ingredients... not just pack your iPhone in your purse and head off to the grocery store.
The hype for this book was huge, with people claiming that it revolutionize the way we would cook and introduce a whole new "scientific" approach to cooking. That was complete nonsense -- it's more about fancy technology and fancy ingredients, with lots of fun pictures. If you like $600 coffee-table books, by all means, get a copy... or maybe get the photos for a steal in an $80 iPad app.
I know I'm a dissenting voice on this book, but all the blather about using "science" in cooking really bothered me. I'm actually the scientific type of cook -- I have many digital thermometers, scales, a pH meter, and many other precision devices, along with a "lab notebook" (journal) of my kitchen "experiments."
But this book is more about presenting pretentious culinary "culture" that uses lots of technology as if it were "science." That's not science. It's just somebody's wacky cooking vision. I'm not saying the food is bad, but claiming that their approach is "better" is rarely backed up by any data... therefore, it's hardly "scientific."
Anyhow, I could go on about this for some time, and already have here. But from my experience with this book, I'm a little hesitant about recommending the $80 app, unless you just like paying that much for a lot of pretty pictures.
Much like books on technical/theoretical software topics, even though the information is out there and relatively accessible sometimes it's nice to have it all together in a consistent and well thought out collection. Yes there's a tonne of easily available perl resources on the net, but the camel book guides you from start to finish at a consistent pace, using consistent terminology, etc..
I have the two volume set, and it's nice (posting AC, so by all means assume I'm a paid shill).
I do agree that this isn't really newsworthy from a technical perspective and probably doesn't belong here.
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.
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]
Just use lots of butter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They're gonna sell 6.25 times more anyway, thanks to iPhones and the like.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
1) You wouldn't, obviously.
2) People cook for lots of reasons, not all of them are based on your argument.
3) Home cooking can be cheaper than anything you buy pre-cooked elsewhere - or else restaurants wouldn't be able to make a profit selling it.
4) Not everyone is a dolt in the kitchen. Home cooking is rarely a "dozen attempts" kind of thing if you have anywhere near half a brain and have done it a few times before. Those that are dolts need recipes to follow to become "non-dolts".
5) Home cooking can be prepared when you like, how you like, without having to try a dozen restaurants that are open when you want and where the cook is one that you happen to like (how many attempts would that take you, trying all your local restaurants?) - there isn't a "professional chef" in the world that will cook to you exact preferences, or else there's no point being a chef. You get what you're given, and the modifications you can make apply to the removal of certain ingredients and choosing how well done you want it.
6) Cooking, in itself, is a hobby.
More to the point, the argument I would propose, is why do you need to pay someone to tell you approximate proportions of ingredients when the web is full of millions of free recipes (many of them reviewed, and even ripped directly from recipe books without attribution) and you can't really "copyright" a recipe - you can copyright the exact text, the arrangement of them within a book, the photos of the dishes, etc. but there's not much to stop people sharing recipes and their own variations of your recipes.
My girlfriend's "recipe shelf" is full of more scrap cut out from newspapers, handwritten notebooks of recipes from friends/family, and photocopies of single recipes that she happened to like than anything else.
The vast number of those free recipes are pretty terrible. My personal favourites are ones which claim to teach you to make a recipe and then the main ingredient is a pre-made sauce from the supermarket. Even the ones that are basically right need usually need a fair amount of adjustment because the poster doesn't know how to use herbs and spices or how to blend flavours.
They are however pretty good if you are just looking for the basic way to make simple dishes and don't mind a bit of experimenting. I usually find 3-4 of the same recipe and try and work out a method based on all of them since most omit something important.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.