The science of food, in five volumes

One of the segments in the “food and flavor” episode of NovaScienceNow was about Nathan Myhrvold, a one-time chief technical officer for Microsoft who grew up with the Doctor Who-inspired ambition to be “every kind of scientist.” Upon discovering that no authoritative sourcebook existed for food science, he put together a big research team in a really fancy kitchen/laboratory to create one, and the result weighs over 40 lbs and is 2200+ pages long: Modernist Cuisine. D. and I looked it up on Amazon, and it costs $460, down from the original $625. The household-scale volume they created later is “only” $115. I bet it’s fascinating, though.

I’d always thought of cooking as being mostly a matter of chemistry, but there’s quite a lot of physics involved too, especially when it comes to things like cooking steaks evenly.