Microsoft’s Former CTO Takes On Modernist Cuisine
- By Mark McClusky
- February 24, 2011 |
- 5:08 pm |
- Wired March 2011
Whether he's searching for a malaria cure, a cloaking device, or the perfect french fry, Nathan Myhrvold pursues his goals with magnificent obsession.
Photo: Art Streiber
The perfect french fry—golden brown, surpassingly crispy on the outside, with a light and fluffy interior that tastes intensely of potato—is not easy to cook.
Here’s how most people do it at home: Cut some potatoes into fry shapes—classic 3/8-inch batons—and toss them into 375-degree oil until they’re golden brown. This is a mediocre fry. The center will be raw.
Here’s how most restaurants do it: Dunk the potatoes in oil twice, once at 325 degrees for about four minutes until they’re cooked through and then again at 375 degrees to brown them. This is a pretty great fry.
But let’s get serious. The chef Heston Blumenthal—owner of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, holder of three Michelin stars—created what he calls triple-cooked chips. (He’s English.) The raw batons are simmered in water until they almost fall apart and then placed on a wire rack inside a vacuum machine that pulls out the moisture. The batons then get the traditional double fry. You need an hour and a $2,000 vacuum chamber, but these are the best fries in the world. Or rather, they used to be.
The new contender was created by Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. Myhrvold cuts his potatoes into batons and rinses them to get rid of surface starch. Then he vacuum-seals them in a plastic bag, in one even layer, with water. He heats the bag to 212 degrees for 15 minutes, steaming the batons. Then he hits the bag with ultrasound to cavitate the water—45 minutes on each side. He reheats the bag in an oven to 212 degrees for five minutes, puts the hot fries on a rack in a vacuum chamber, and then blanches them in 338-degree oil for three minutes. When they’re cool, Myhrvold deep-fries the potatoes in oil at 375 degrees until they’re crisp, about three more minutes, and then drains them on paper towels. Total preparation time: two hours.
The result is amazing. The outside nearly shatters when you bite into it, yielding to a creamy center that’s perfectly smooth. The key is the cavitation caused by the ultrasonic bath—it creates thousands of tiny fissures on the potato’s surface, all of which become crunchy when it’s fried. When Plato saw the shadow of a french fry on the wall of his cave, the guy standing behind him was snacking on these.
The recipe is one of 1,600 in Myhrvold’s new cookbook, Modernist Cuisine. It’s a big book—2,400 pages big. Six volumes big. Big like the original slipcase failed Amazon .com’s shipping tests and had to be replaced with acrylic. Big like it weighs nearly 50 pounds and costs $625.
This is the way Myhrvold operates. After leaving Microsoft with all the money in the world, he started a company called, immodestly, Intellectual Ventures and turned his attention to busting some of the biggest problems in science and technology. And he dove into a few hobbies. Now most of us, if we were to get interested in cooking, might start to putter around the kitchen at home or do a little reading. Maybe we’d take a class. Because cooking is primarily a craft, dominated by artisans—or artists, if that’s how you view what a chef does. Every once in a while, a chemist drops in to take a look or heads for the world of industrial-scale food.
But Myhrvold—a theoretical physicist and computer scientist—has the lifestyle flexibility of a multimillionaire and the mental discipline of a world-class researcher. To him, cooking is about fundamental interactions in the material world: How heat enters food. How you mix two separate materials most effectively. How water molecules interact in a solution. You see a pork chop and some mashed potatoes; he sees a mesh of proteins that coagulate at a specific temperature next to an emulsion of starch and fat. “Chefs think about what it’s like to make food,” Myhrvold says. “Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.” To him, a kitchen is really just a laboratory that everyone has in their house. And when you have that attitude with that brain and those resources, well, you might not be the best cook in the world, but you just might put together the best cookbook.
If Modernist Cuisine lives up to Myhrvold’s hopes when it’s published this March, it’ll be the definitive book about the science of cooking—the Principia of the kitchen. It’s dense and beautiful and inspired, and even though Myhrvold assembled a team of 50 chefs, writers, photographers, designers, scientists, and editors to create it, the final product is in fact an eerily accurate recapitulation of how Nathan Myhrvold thinks.
Which is to say, the man thinks big about nearly everything. And he wants his french fries to be perfect.
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