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."

Comments

Another slashvertizement!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I look forward to the .IPA!

alternatively

[ihtoit]

you could just mirror recipesource.com and dump it on an old notebook. Made the missus well happy, that did.

Re:alternatively

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Ever since coming down with stage 4 kidney failure, I've had to do a lot of cooking of my own food, and that was starting from basically knowing nothing. I've learned the vast majority of my technique from youtube, which offers not just one person's technique but many. I'd be quite surprised if this cookbook or even the app had any information that couldn't be found on youtube.

For example, there are tons of videos that show you how to properly choose a chef's knife (word to the wise, most people have very dull knives in their kitchen - very dangerous and makes food preparation so much slower, but they don't know the difference as they've never actually had a good sharp knife) and how to properly cut different types of foods. It may sound elementary, but try going on youtube and looking up how to dice an onion, you may find a technique that is much better than what you've been doing which will save you time.

(By the way, Victorinox 40520 is easily the best starter knife you can get, has a lifetime warranty, and even well seasoned chefs tend to love it and it is cheap if you buy it as part of a kit.)

Re:alternatively

[master_kaos]

The thing about this book, is it isn't so much about the recipes but the SCIENCE and techniques of food. This set of books is meant for an upcoming professional chef. I bet 3/4 the recipes use either equipment or techniques that no home cook would have/know about
Sure you get a basic recipe from allrecipes.com (most of them just mediocre, I bet there are only a few gems that would be just as good/better than a 5 star restuarant). It is one thing reading a recipe and following, but do you know WHY they use the method they choose, why one food reacts with a different one the way it does.
Proper technique also makes a huge difference. I could put a handful ingredients along with a recipe on your counter, and exact same ingredients with exact same recipe on a professional chefs, and I pretty much guarantee you the professional chefs will taste better.

Also, how many typical home cooks are using sous vide technique to cook their meat, using liquid nitrogen for desserts, using a centrifuge to make beef stock. This set of books also use a ton of ingredients that you would not find at your local grocery store, or even a local specialty store, I bet quite a few need to be special ordered.

I am not saying you need to be a professional chef to make good food, of course not, nor do you need to know all of the techniques, or have all the crazy equipment. I was just stating this volume of books is not just your typical $10 recipe book that you find on amazon.

Re: alternatively

[Rational]

Every Slashdot thread of sufficient length degenerates into a pissing contest.

So innovative

[hugg]

I wonder how the culinary specialists that first developed the techniques in his book are getting compensated for their innovations.

Re:So innovative

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

More hype?

[AthanasiusKircher]

From TFA:

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.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its free over

[glavenoid]

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.

Wrong book, SmartAboutThings.

[qXUSrfebDy]

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.

Misleading summary, as usual.

[westlake]

The app is based on "Modernist Cuisine at Home" not the $500 50 pound reference set for the professional chef.

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]

Save your money

[PopeRatzo]

Just use lots of butter.