Modernist Cuisine at Home

For those of you that don't want to read the silly-long review I wrote, scroll down to "BOTTOM LINE" for the important stuff.

I'll start with a disclaimer: Do not buy this book until you are familiar with the original "Modernist Cuisine." By that I do not mean you need to own that set first (quite the opposite, this is the stepping stone to the full set), but you should understand that it encompasses a style of cooking that can be crudely summarized as "cooking for scientists" or "how to make dinner in a laboratory." Once you know what you're getting into, decide if it's worth around $140 of your hard-earned cash.

Now, on to the good stuff. For those of you who salivated for a year, wishing you could justify buying "Modernist Cuisine" but knowing you wouldn't be able to use it to it's full potential (like me), your prayers have been answered! "Modernist Cuisine" made headlines (in the Food and Travel section) for:
1. Deconstructing the science of cooking rather than just listing recipes
2. Focusing on modern methods of preparing foods using tools such as combi ovens, sous vide setups, emulsifiers, etc
3. Including some rather stunning photography of the equipment and ingredients within

I am happy to say that all three are present in the "at Home" version. First, "Modernist Cuisine at Home" (MCAH hereafter) 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.

Much like Modernist Cuisine, MCAH explains some of the science behind the various cooking techniques, but at a beginner's level. Each recipe includes a blurb about what's going on inside the pot (so to speak), and almost all of them include multiple variations at the end, allowing for a wide variety of options. This is especially useful for people new to the idea of sous vide cooking, as MCAH does a great job explaining exactly how it works, and how to make it work for you.

How has it taken me this long to get to the photography? Stunning, just as in "Modernist Cuisine". I don't know how they did it, but every picture is suitable for framing. Equipment has been dissected to yield amazing looking cross-sections used in explaining how the various tools function. And get this: included in the back are four prints from MCAH you can frame. I had no idea until they fell out while I was reading, but they are every bit as beautiful as the photos inside, and I dare say will look better on the walls of a kitchen than the usual crap paintings of grapes or farms or cows that people seem obligated to put up these days.

If it seem like I'm gushing, it's because I am. Any home cook who has jumped into sous vide cooking has probably experienced the frustration I have with cookbooks dedicated to the style. You have Douglas Baldwin's "Sous Vide for the Home Chef," which, while great for it's temperature charts (and the fact it came out before anything else was available) is too simple for anyone looking to expand their horizons into restaurant-quality preparations (French Laundry, anyone?). And on the other end of the spectrum is Thomas Keller's "Under Pressure," which, while exquisite in creativity and detail, is geared completely towards the restaurant chef (which he warns in the forward), both in scale and complexity. Even the original "Modernist Cuisine", while featuring more accessible recipes than "Under Pressure", still excluded the home cook from about half of it's contents due to equipment or ingredient limitations. MCAH is the first book that features sous vide in a way that the home cook can learn and excel at, while also creating dishes that will blow the guests away. Seriously, the stuff you can make from this book looks like it belongs on the set of Iron Chef.

BOTTOM LINE:

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. But if you want to learn how modern cooking styles can produce amazing taste and presentation in your kitchen (while removing much of the uncertainty and variation that traditional high-heat methods entail), this is the book for you.

PROS:

- Currently the best book available for home sous vide setups
- Delicious recipes using accessible ingredients for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Meat, Poultry, Fish and Veggies. Even has a few vegan options inside.
- Teaches the "why" of cooking, not just the "how"
- Stunning photography, and great step-by-step images for most of the recipes
- Comes with a separate water-resistant "kitchen manual" with every recipe inside so you can keep the gorgeous main-book away from the messiness of the kitchen.
- Comes with 4 prints you can frame in your home. Or not.
- Even though the recipes are designed using ingredient weights, approximate volume measurements are included
- Well constructed. You could easily beat an intruder to death with this book if you caught him stealing your sous vide setup
- Even has the bookmark ribbon you see in bibles, which fits, since this has become my new kitchen bible.

CONS:

- Though it says "at Home" in the title, your average kitchen will most likely lack some of the basic tools used in many of the recipes. At a minimum, you will need a digital scale, Sous Vide setup, a pressure cooker, and a whipped cream siphon. MCAH will help you in your quest to acquire those tools, but you should commit to expanding your kitchen arsenal if you plan to use this book to it's full potential.
- There are no calorie counts on these recipes, and in some cases if there were, it would take scientific notation to fit on the page. This is not a diet book, this is a book dedicated purely to creating the most delicious food possible at home. When you get to the page about deep-frying a hamburger, you'll understand what I mean.
- $140 (or whatever they charge now) isn't chump change, and for most people the new equipment will add to the cost.
- The sandwich on the cover does not actually levitate when you make it at home.
- Does not mow the lawn while you aren't using it.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I am in no way affiliated with the producers of this book, though I would consider trading my first-born for a chance to work in their kitchen. Your Mileage May Vary.

EDIT - 6 Oct 2015: Three years later and I still love this book. I not own the full-fledged [[ASIN:0982761007 Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking]], but I'm always going back to this one. Take the leap!

First: A disclaimer. I have no connection with the authors of this book or the publishers. As a matter of full disclosure, I have been a cook for over thirty years, and I majored in Biology, so scientific terms don't scare me. My motto is: if someone else can do it, so can I.

Now for the review: The problem with most cookbooks is they do not provide the cook with a reasonable starting point from which to make excellent cuisine. I remember the days when I used to struggle to try to make recipes from Larousse Gastronomique and Joy of Cooking that were spectacular, but that end always seemed to elude me. I never felt as though I prepared a meal- ANY meal which rivaled or surpassed that of my favorite restaurants. Those cooks in the high end restaurants knew things that I didn't know, and used equipment I had never seen, let alone used. Well, that is no longer the case. I picked up the original tome (Modernist Cuisine) and extracted from it the recipes I could do in my kitchen at home, and at once realized that there was a whole world of phenomenal food out there, waiting to be tasted.

I cooked chicken breast sous vide (using a Rube Goldberg contraption I have since replaced with the SousVide Supreme) and the breasts were done perfectly, with all the delicate tastes intact. Wild duck breasts that had been lying in the back of my freezer because I knew they would taste like cardboard? They were the best poultry I had ever tasted. With those two successes under my belt, it was on to fish! I live in Florida, and so am fussy about my fish. My first foray was into cobia, and that dish, on that day, was the best fish I have ever tried, let alone made. And so on. Best green beans. Best carrots. Best risotto. Best salmon. You get the idea...

After getting sous vide under my belt, then I started playing with other techniques. Spherification is a blast, and I modified a technique from Thomas Keller's Under Pressure to make watermelon and mango 'egg yolk' "Steak Tartare", which was a huge hit with my guests. I just had the best carrot soup of my life, with the recipe taken from MCAH, which uses caramelization techniques well known to pros, but heretofore unknown to me (it involves a pressure cooker). Making classic sauces takes an hour or so, instead of many, many hours.

This is not a book for everyone, because not everyone really, really likes food. Or likes being able to create things in their own kitchen that far surpass their local restaurants. If food is just fuel, forget about MCAH. If, on the other hand, you have a part of your mind that remembers special meals, remembers certain dishes of their past with pleasure, and likes to savor their food, rather than gulping it down so you can watch the 7:00 Seinfeld reruns, this is the book for you. It is the first book that goes beyond- far beyond- what Erma Rombauer started all those years ago with The Joy of Cooking. The new millenium put self publishing in our hands (faceBook) and video distributing (YouTube) and reporting (Twitter), and now, in this age of paradigm shifts, we have world-class cuisine in our own homes. It's crazy, but it's cool.

The first thing I thought when this book appeared on my doorstep was that I better be careful not to stub my toe on this. I had high expectations and planned to have the book around for a while as I explored new ways to prepare food. Since then I moved first in the direction of cutting out useful pages with a razor blade for future reference. After all, who wants to lug around a ten pound book. I then abandoned that and decided to just keep the recipe book. Now I think I'm just going to throw the whole mess out.

Looking at the big picture (no pun intended) this book has way too many pictures. This alerted me to the notion that they were just added to give bulk. After all, are you really going to learn anything useful from those giant pictures of appliances cut in half? They're kind of cool to glance at, but that's about it. Pssht! Pssht! (Razor blade sounds).

The title of the book is puzzling. OK is this just a better sounding term than Molecular Gastronomy or is this guy just arrogant? When I looked in my cookbook library I found a book entitled Molecular Gastronomy by Herve This published in 2006. The first part of the introduction goes into detail about cooking eggs slowly, not very different than what you find here. Much of MC at Home is borrowed and very old.

It's also true that to cook eggs as recommended in the book, you need some sort of a sous vide setup. This could set you back a couple grand. Too bad he doesn't know about egg cookers. You could get one like the one I have been using for decades with similar results for 20 bucks or so.

Since this is going to be a long review, wrap a cheese sandwich in foil and lay it in your car's running engine. When you're finished reading this you'll at least have something interesting to eat while you think it over and also have a new idea on how to get fed with warm food while traveling. If you want to add a meat course, put a quarter sheet of plywood down on your garage floor, place a steak in the middle and another quarter sheet on top. Drive over it and stop with the front wheel over the center while the cheese melts in your sandwich on the running engine. To be sure that your steak Diane prep is appropriately received, make sure that females are not witnessing this.

All of the recipes in the book are given in two formats. First a non standard do this, do that layout with these ingredients. Then a mostly unnecessary pictorial rendition of same. Pssht! Pssht!

I also decided I didn't need to know more about how to cook things in a pressure cooker since that's already been old hat for a century or so! Pssht! Pssht! Ditto for microwave ovens.

A lot of the recipes are also nearly nonsense. Take tomato leather, for example. Why all this fooling around when you could get a tastier product with no chemicals by just buying some sun dried tomatoes and preparing a julienne. It's not the same, of course, it's better! Pssht! Pssht! The striped omelet recipe is also nonsense. First of all it's an enormous amount of effort for very little bang for the buck. The two textures also don't adhere well to each other and it will look like something that came out of a sick chicken if you don't follow the recipe exactly.

Related to nonsense is wasteful. Let's suppose you are going to make a vegetable stock from carrots, onions, celery and maybe some mushrooms. In this book you keep the stock and throw the vegetables out. In our house there is often a mouth nearby that has a different use. We're not poor, but we don't just throw out perfectly good food. Often it can be combined with something else like a soup or stew.

A recipe that's supposed to surely drive you to your chemistry set is Pistachio Gelato. I can't imagine getting out all those appliances to make this get fat quick mess when I can make a variety of ice creams and fruit ice substances in minutes in my Vita Mix Blender. Pssht! Pssht!

On the plus side I did learn some new uses for my whipping siphon, mostly because there is so little on line and almost nothing comes with the device. There were also some useful bits and pieces about microwaves.

The sous vide information was interesting since I haven't explored this much as yet. But these concepts lead to another set of questions I had about the integrity of the book. When sous vide first burst on the scene I was taking a French bread course at the French Culinary Institute in New York. The discussion of this new concept immediately telescoped to food safety since the temperatures used are often less than 140, the temperature at which most pathogens are thought to die. Food poisoning is no joke and this book treats this concept a little too lightly for me.

Along the same line there is a recipe for a frothy milk concoction. It calls for unpasteurized milk. That's fine unless, of course, the cow happens to have an infection in its milk apparatus. Pssht! Pssht!

Another failure in the food safety area has to do with cooking in zip lock plastic bags. As you may know there is much discussion in the food press about the safety of cooking food in plastic. I looked on the internet and found that the manufacturer feels that microwave cooking is generally safe. But they don't say much about very long sous vide processes. I don't think I'd be willing to cook in zip lock bags at all. But that's just me being overprotective of my reproductive apparatus from estrogenic type compounds for extended use.

A lot of the advanced concepts in Modernist Cuisine involve apparatus that few people or even serious chefs will ever buy. The price for such things as centrifuges and combi ovens approach the prices of expensive cars. And they require maintenance contracts for clogged water jets and other things involved in their use. There are scant references as to where you can purchase scaled down home versions, even though some exist. Cuisinart, for example makes a steam toaster oven that is marketed exclusively through Williams Sonoma. It produces excellent steam cooked meat, vegetable and bread dishes.

Not only wasn't this useful toaster oven mentioned, there is a curious array of products named throughout the book that aren't particularly hard to find- Knox Gelatin, Turbo Torch blow torches and many other ingredients and devices. We do have Google, you know.

Given this, why is it that 4 out of 5 of his sources of meat are in Washington? Is this a joke? There are hundreds of outstanding meat purveyors in this country. This list and the entire appendix of sources is an insult to the reader.

In summary this bloated tome appears to be little more than an ad for his real ego piece, Modernist Cuisine. It lacks balance between effort expended, expense and final result. Instead of the combi oven and all of the other apparatus needed to make the MC recipes come to life, I think I'll just stick to a new Porsche. It won't press the meat as well as my pickup, but even my spouse will agree it has greater utility.

As a postscript, perhaps you will notice as we have that thinking people can almost always make better food at home than they can find in a restaurant. Love, a little know how and fine ingredients make all the difference. I'm sorry this book didn't advance that theme very much for me.

The content of the book is wonderful. However, the quality of the materials they used is not. The spine on the main book is broken, and I'm worried about some of the pages letting loose. And the second book with just the recipes is made of a material that is supposedly easy to clean and wipe off if you get something on it in the kitchen. Mine got wet with water, and nearly all of the pages are stuck together like concrete. I cannot pull them apart without damaging the pages.

Also, the book comes with some additional photos that are separate from the book. When I pulled the book out of the sleeve, the photos had only been partially inserted into the book at the factory, and they are all crushed and damaged.

I tried 3 times to get someone at this company so I could figure out how to get a replacement, no response. I emailed them, I filled out a contact form on their website, and I left a voicemail. Zero response.

At the price I paid for this book, I should get better customer service than this.

This book is for the very few. Much of the book has recipes that require using a hot water bath for cooking. Nothing practical. I do not think there are any recipes in the book using an oven. Perhaps Great for people ahead of the curve with an inordinate amount of time on their hands.

Love the book content; great photography, good recipes, etc. But the build of the book al has much to be desired. We've only paged through it, carefully (almost with white gloves) a couple of times and the pages are already coming detached and falling out. For the price of this book, I expect a lot better craftsmanship!

Love this book. Great photos, accessible equipment, awesome techniques and recipes.

However, avoid Momox as the shipper. Also Amazon did absolutely ZERO to help me get resolution. The 1st pic is what it's supposed to look like, with a neat box to hold the main book. The shipper tossed the book/box into a shipping box, with a single thin layer of bubble wrap. All but useless.

Now I get to see if a local bookbinder can help with a fix, because the binding and glue were damaged in shipping. Caveat Emptor!

I received as a gift (some great gift!) the original Modernist Cuisine -- the full 5 volume set. I loved reading it, but never really got to cook from it. For me it functions as a reference book and I love it. Modernist Cuisine at Home is a whole other thing. This really is a book for home cooks who want to know the hows and whys of cooking and who enjoy trying new techniques. While there are some way-out-there recipes involving special ingredients and equipment, there is so much that is really for making home cooking wonderful. The price of the book is worth it just for the directions for pressure cooking stock -- veggie, meat & poultry! I followed the recipe for the pressure cooked chicken stock, also made a pot using the techniques used by my Grandmother and a third pot using a mix of the two ( needed a lot of stock for the holidays). Then I held a blind tasting for my family. Unanimous and enthusiastic agreement: the pressure cooking method won hands down. AND it was easier and faster than the traditional method. The directions are clear, the explanations enable you to be able to riff on recipes with your own variations if you enjoy doing that. So my feeling is that although there are recipes that are way more involved than most home cooks will want to use, there are so many that can enhance and elevate even our everyday cooking. And did I mention all the information about sous vide that makes me feel it really is worth doing at home?! Fantastic.

One more thing which I am adding a day later to this review: The Modernist Cuisine at Home does one more thing which is VERY helpful and which I wish would become the standard for cookbooks from now on: measurements are given in weight, volume and scaling percentages! Yeah! Weighing is much easier and more efficient. The scaling method is very useful when wanting to make a recipe for 2 or for 12 or even 20. Digital scales are so cheap and useful that I believe that every kitchen should have one sitting on the counter. If you haven't used one when baking, borrow one from a friend and try it -- once you do, you'll be a convert, and you'll thank Myhrvold and Bilet and all the team at The Cooking Lab for this extra measure of help and usefulness. Now if only other cookbook writers and their publishers would take their cue and provide us with this help. I no longer buy books on baking which don't provide measurements weights -- if I want to guess at how much of an ingredient to use, I don't need to pay for a recipe, and that if what it amounts to using volume measurements when baking.

Also, don't let the size and weight of the book put you off -- that is just for reading and reference even though it has the recipes in it. What you will use in the kitchen is the smaller spiral bound plasticized pages book with just the recipes. Splattered? The pages wipe clean. Open it up to a recipe and the pages lie flat. Easy to use in kitchen while cooking. But wait, there's more: there are charts giving guidance on various cooking methods for various cuts of meat, etc., such as best cooking methods for tough cuts of meat and then listing the various ways -- pressure cooker, braising, sous vide, etc for different cuts of meat. And excellent overview. As I say, this book is useful for all skill levels.

This cookbook, while beautifully put together, is not a cookbook for anyone except top chefs who happen to have a kitchen full of top line equipment. Almost every recipe seems to be cooked sous vide, so have a nice $500 machine in your kitchen, as well as a vacuum sealer. French scrambled eggs, for example, look to take over an hour to make. They look fabulous, but who has that amount of time? Let's put it this way, if you've had professional training, or worked at Citronelle for example, then go for this book. Otherwise, your going to be disappointed and your attempts will likely be less than what's seen in the beautiful photos.

This is a really interesting book. The pictures are vivid and beautiful and it's pretty fascinating reading. If you want interesting reading - great. I question it's value as a practical cookbook, however. This book is a coffee table book in the traditional sense of the word. If you put legs on it you could use it as a coffee table. It's huge. And its heavy. Frankly I found it awkward to handle even to read. I can't imagine using it for an actual cookbook. It's too big. I would have found it way more useful as a multi volume set of smaller books. I don't want to discourage anyone from buying it, but I would say get it from the library or look at it in a store first.