A Modern Approach

In the six-volume set of cookbooks that modern chef Ferran Adrià has said “will change the way we understand the kitchen,” Modernist Cuisine documents food in all shapes and forms through its vivid photography, illustrative stories and progressive recipes. The detailed 2,438-page, $625 US anthology provides how-to guides for cooking just about anything and everything you can imagine. Ranging from soup to steak to an omelette, readers can learn about innovative cooking methods and molecular gastronomy techniques such as sous vide, push the boundaries with texture by using foams, gels and thickeners, and experiment with temperature.

The books include a step-by-step guide that takes readers through the cooking process, beginning with food as it is prepared and cooked, to plated and consumed. It is Modernist Cuisine’s decadent design that truly brings the food to life. 

The books are divided into six volumes: History and Fundamentals, Techniques and Equipment, Animals and Plants, Ingredients and Preparations, Plated-Dish Recipes and Kitchen Manual. It can help anyone from amateur home cooks to all-star professional chefs refine their techniques and gain new knowledge about modern cooking.

Lifestylerspoke with the head chef for Modernist Cuisine, Maxime Bilet, about the books and his experience working at The Fat Duck.  

Tell me how the concept for Modernist Cuisine came about.
Nathan [Myhrvold] had the idea several years before the project ever came together. He had always had a vision for how science and the art of cooking really made sense together, really informed each other. Four years ago, the platform for the book was sous vide cooking. That was his first insight into where information was missing and where he had a very clean, clear set of ideas to inform professional chefs and home chefs alike about all of the interesting aspects of sous vide cooking. That’s when we came on. When I look at the five volumes, it was only meant to be maybe half of one of those volumes. It really expanded very quickly when everyone came together. From one idea came hundreds and it was a pretty amazing process.

Tell me about your role with the books.
Nathan really oversaw all aspects of the books. Chris [Young] was one of the writers, he wrote several of the chapters and he really did an amazing job. My job was to, on a daily basis, do all of the development of the food, do all of the research and development on the experiments, and also design all of the food for the photography… For the first few months, it was a question of honing a style, learning how to develop all of these ideas and really making them visually appealing through the photos, through the cutaways, and really communicating. Communicating every insight, every element that would be important for someone who would want to reproduce these things and get to the heart of it. It was challenging and amazing at the same time. It was interesting because the basis of Modernist Cuisine really is that perfect merging — understanding that creativity and taste, all of the spontaneous aspects of cooking are thoroughly informed by understanding the chemistry, the physics, all on a very basic level, and that’s fascinating.

What made you interested in molecular gastronomy?
When I was younger, my first chef job after college was at Jack’s [Luxury Oyster Bar] in New York. That was just before The Fat Duck, and I was really anchored in traditional cooking. I said, “Oh, I’ve learned all of this now. I can make delicious food. I don’t need to understand these things.” Clearly, delicious food has been happening for hundreds of years now without necessarily having a clear understanding of why things are the way they are — without asking these questions. When I went to The Fat Duck — I started downstairs and then I ended up upstairs in the development lab. I had access to Heston [Blumenthal], and worked with Chris, and Kyle [Connaughton] was the head chef there. The full team there, we developed recipes there all day and we were really pushing the boundaries. It was from Heston that I really learned how important it is to just ask the most basic questions, to look at all of the perspectives. It was very enriching to just witness that open-mindedness and then to absorb it. That’s the interesting aspect of that transition from when I worked with the chef at Jack’s, to moving to London and honing my skills there [at The Fat Duck]. I remember when I was at Jack’s, I remember several young chefs, maybe a few years older than me, started cooking with sous vide, started adding lots of things, like foam. They started to use that and I didn’t understand why. The problem with the term “molecular gastronomy” and the perspectives on the entire movement is very shortsighted. A lot of these things are done for the sake of themselves — they are gimmicks. That bothered me and I understand why it bothered other people’s minds, that it’s a very temporary, fad issue. It doesn’t really have a meaning to food. It was a fortuitist thing where when I went to Europe, I said, “I’m going to do all of these internships in these big restaurants, learn from the best, and really hone all of these disconnections that I have with food. I only ended up going to The Fat Duck and for me, The Fat Duck’s food and Heston’s food is exactly what I needed to see and what I think is the ideal version for learning why these innovations—thickeners, foaming agents, precise cooking — why all of this makes sense. The food at The Fat Duck is really anchored — the textures and the flavours — are quite traditional, but all of these modernist tools and modernist ingredients really enhance and refine that food. There’s no question that it does when you taste it, when you witness it. For me, that really shifted my perception of it. Still, I understand why all of these modernist things are intimidating to people. Eating and cooking are such emotional and personal experiences, so the idea of change is always met with a little bit of resistance. If you have the purpose, and I think the purpose is very wide and very potent, then there’s no doubt that people will embrace it once they realize what it actually means.

Tell me about the making of the books.
From nothing being done, to just the book being printed, it took about three and a half years. I came on close to the beginning, Chris had come on from the start as co-author, one of the writers, and then called me and said, “I need someone to prepare all the food and be the chef on the project.” I had no idea what I was getting myself into. No one here had any idea what it was going to become. But it was very promising and the possibilities seemed incredible. For the first three to four months, it was a study and a learning approach. I was with Ryan [Matthew Smith], he’s the photographer of the book, and we would spend our days researching, going to the markets, getting ingredients, testing out new ways of looking at the food, photos, then I started [working] with a couple of chefs and started experimenting a lot — mostly with sous vide in the beginning — documenting, and then really, really, really taking our own, original experiments to the next level. Trying to approach food on a very new basis. At the same time, Chris and the team, at one point, I think was 48 people including writers, editors, copy-editors, researchers, and we had many, many chefs contributing. A lot of research being done, a lot of writing being done. We were all developing this, very rich, hopefully complete, aspects of cooking. Little by little, we really had a very refined process for that. I mean, in one day, we could have an idea, experiment with it, shift the experiment, write the recipe, take the photos — step-by-step because everything had to be very visual — do a final plate-up and have it copy-edited and be done. We have about 2,100 recipes in the book and originally, the books weren’t going to have very many recipes at all. With the team that we built, all of the different information, the contextual information, the study of the history of cooking, actually formed our modernist approach. What I really liked is that it’s very connected to traditional cooking. It’s very connected to all of the aspects that people love about food. It’s very much continuing.

The food in the books looks phenomenal. Tell me about that.

Four full-time chefs worked in the kitchen, other than me: Grant Crilly, Johnny Zhu, Sam Fahey-Burke,an Shanker, they worked so hard and made all of the recipes. I would give them the experiments and the recipes, we would do tastings and they would make the magic happen. These four chefs have all worked in the top restaurants in the cities they have lived in. Grant worked in different restaurants in France, Anjana in India, Johnny worked at Alinea and Jean-Georges, he was the head of every modernist restaurant in Seattle. Sam worked with me at The Fat Duck, he was actually the sous chef in the development lab at The Fat Duck when I was there and he was the sous chef on this project too. He’s an amazing, amazing chef.

How did you coordinate the recipes for the books?
My official title is head chef of the project — I was doing all of the food, all of the magic, all of the creative aspects. Thinking up and brainstorming these ideas, and having access to this very cool, very exciting environment, where we work in the lab, the Intellectual Ventures Lab. Our kitchen has every technology that you can imagine, from the most basic, the microwave and the pressure cookers, to freeze-dry straight dryers, ultrasonic baths, fusers, it was a playground for a chef. We had an incredible window of creative possibility. At the same time, everything had to be meaningful because we were trying to teach these things. My job, a lot of the time, was to really find a purpose for some of these technologies, some of the ingredients, that we had access to, that made it interesting for someone, who didn’t have that experience, to embrace it, to be curious, to want to explore it a little further. There were two different types of recipes that are in the book. One that we call example recipes, those are the shorter recipes that you see interspersed throughout the second, third and fourth volumes. Each of those highlight one particular aspect, whether it’s one technique, one ingredient, one precise temperature. There is always a very distinct set of example recipes that is specific to one thing, sometimes it’s a couple. Then in volume five, the plated-dishes, which are far more elaborate dishes, are usually composed of anywhere from five to 15 elements. Those were meant to bring all of the insights from the entire books together. In a very recognizable dish, we used traditional dishes as a vehicle to explain those insights. Things like a cheeseburger, a braised stew, a mushroom omelet, a tagine dish. We went across all of the cultures and used very, very iconic dishes, like paella, to highlight how these can be refined. That was really the process we had to go through, quite a bit, was selecting and staying day and night and researching and figuring out what would have the most impact. What really would be the best driver for connecting people to these ideas.

What are some of your favourite recipes from the books?
Every single one of them has a little story for me. Each of them is like my baby. It’s such a process but I definitely have some favourites. One that we have shared a lot is the striped omelet, we have served that to a lot of people. It’s a mushroom omelet, one of the plated dishes in volume five. What I love about it is not only the results but also the process. We have something called the combi oven, it’s a steam oven that allows you to cook in both a dry environment like any regular oven or in as much humidity as you want. You can inject humidity to bake, you can have it be on full-steam so it’s a steaming chamber, but you can also set the temperature to whatever you want... you can also make omelets for a professional chef has always been one of these standards… it’s such a simple thing, but it’s such a simple thing to make badly. When I really grasped the idea that everything had an ideal temperature. I love an omelet when it’s just soft, there’s no colour in it, it hasn’t been dried out — people ruin omelets all the time — I made an omelet in the combi oven and it’s a combination of eggs — we had an extra egg yolk because we wanted it richer — a little bit of cream, a little bit of butter. Steam it in a thin sheet on a non-stick pan, then we filled it with scrambled eggs that were also cooked in a sous vide bath, at another temperature. Put in a whipping siphon, and aerate it. You can do this very, very light. Add in the scrambled egg filling, a little mushroom marmalade.
    It combines deliciousness and it’s anchored in tradition but it takes precision and temperature to take it exactly where it should be.

What are some key things that readers should take away from the books?
There’s so much going on. You can be a history buff and really get involved in this first volume; all that we owe to all of these incredible food figures, documenting how we got here. For science buffs, if you just want to understand the chemistry and the physics of heat and water. It’s fascinating stuff, so I know a lot of people would buy it for that. An art book, some people don’t really care; they don’t necessarily cook, they don’t necessarily intend to ever cook from it, but because it is such a visual thing and informative thing, we really wanted it to be beautiful. Some people just love it for the visual appeal. For the most part, our intention was for it to be for home and professional chefs alike. When you take it from that perspective, it’s to understand the spectrum of what modernist cuisine means, and why we developed this. Why we spent all this time and energy in developing it. It’s really not at all to create something unattainable. It’s to show the spectrum of how the heart of science and the heart of the art of cooking really inform each other. When you look at something as simple as one of our example recipes like a carrot soup, the carrot soup that is in recipe book is something that we have served a lot. It’s one of the simpler recipes and it’s also one of the more delicious ones. It’s very heartwarming, very intense. The two aspects of it that make it part of the book is that we make it in a pressure cooker, so it’s very fast to make the carrots very tender. Also, because in a pressure cooker, the food is under the law of physics because it’s under pressure. You can cook, in most environments, at a much higher temperature than the boiling point. Boiling temperature is 212 F; you can actually cook up to 260 F. In theory, it’s like, “OK, that’s cool.” But when you taste it, you realize you can actually caramelize the carrots, making them really tender. Then we have a little bit of physics that we add in where we add baking soda. The baking soda makes the carrots alkaline. It actually increases the ability of the carrots to caramelize. We do those two things, then we cook the carrots for 15 minutes in butter. Once they are cooked and pureed, with a little bit of carrot juice to make the soup, it tastes so good. It’s the essence of carrots; it’s so caramelized. It’s a very recognizable flavour but also a very new interpretation of it. People really get it when we share something like that. On the other spectrum, a recipe where we take a high-speed centrifuge, it’s actually quite large, it looks like a laundry machine. This is something that is not in kitchens right now. It’s our baby, we think centrifuges will be the next KitchenAid or Cuisinart one of these days — maybe in 10 years — but it’s such an amazing tool for a kitchen. It’s very much a part of a laboratory room, it’s not at all a kitchen tool. We take peas and we spin them at 17,000g [to make] pea puree. You discover three incredibly distinct layers, all the starch of the peas get separated out, all of the juice gets separated out, then you get a thin layer of the fat of the peas, it’s like butter. By using this very highly technical tool, you take a natural ingredient and you discover three very distinct ingredients that you could never have if you hadn’t approached it that way. When we show this to people who are very traditional, who don’t really care for science or for modernist cuisine in general, when they taste just the layers — we’ve done nothing except spin it very quickly and separate it by density — people get it. It’s amazing. Right now, that’s not attainable in a home environment or even a restaurant environment, for the most part, but it’s fascinating and it makes a lot of sense.

How has this encouraged you to become more creative as a chef?
I live for this. Since I was a kid, I was very literary but I had hundreds of cookbooks and I can’t go anywhere without a few in my bag. I’m just fascinated by studying flavour, studying texture, studying why people compose a dish the way they do, whether it’s the engineering of a plate or combining a certain set of flavours that in your mind don’t make sense but when you taste it, it absolutely makes sense. Reinvigorating and challenging [food], while also creating a wonderful experience for people, I have always been driven by that. Making awesome food to make people really happy. With all of these ideas, and having access to Nathan, he is always pushing the boundaries, always asking the right questions, and really challenging us on challenging ourselves. It has been a constant learning process. For the most part, I have let go of any projections that you tend to have when you have a basis of knowledge, you tend to project everything based on what you already know. When you are where we are, you learn to let go. Just absorb what’s there and be willing to make mistakes and be willing to try (laughs)several flavours and several textures. There’s a will there. You have to be self-motivating, to be curious and passionate. Create something meaningful.

What do you think of molecular gastronomy around the world?
Just the term molecular gastronomy right now, that term is kind of a tricky one. The chefs who were the basis for it at the beginning, even they don’t believe it. It’s a family of things. It was a term that was coined by scientists, by Nicholas Kurti and Hervé This. What they wanted it to be was just the idea that the science of food, from a scientist perspective, is from a molecular vision. Then, Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, then you have Wylie Dufresne in New York, and many other chefs across the world. A lot of these people are modern chefs. Their understanding of what modern cooking means is actually very, very different. Categorizing them… when people think of molecular gastronomy, they think of hot jellies and foam — something like that — it’s so much bigger than that. Those are great, those have a purpose. Soufflés, meringues, foams, and jellies have been around forever. They are not the heart of modern cooking at all. You have lots of chefs interpreting, that’s the wonderful thing about creativity and art, you have lots of chefs interpreting what it means to have precise understanding. A huge array of ingredients, not only modern ingredients like thickeners, filling agents and emulsifiers, but also, you have every cultural ingredient you can imagine. There’s so much… so much access to cultural diversity. The chefs you see in Canada, in France, in Denmark, and in South Africa, what you witness is that there is more and more of a reliance on local, seasonal ingredients for a purity of cooking. Embracing the natural setting. Then there is a wonderful ownership of their food, because they bring in these insights. The techniques are shared.
    Some people don’t give it a chance; they aren’t willing to taste. Once they are willing to try and taste with an open mind, and experience food as it can be, as an art. Something very personal but also very dependent on the person who is creating it, then it can be a wonderful experience. Otherwise, most people will end up just eating the same thing over and over again, and never really discovering.

What do you think of it becoming mainstream?
It’s so mainstream now… it’s becoming more and more accessible. Lots of chefs who don’t necessarily yet grasp how it can enhance their food are having fun with it. They are experimenting, creating and having fun with food and being curious, that’s good. Sometimes, the problem with it becoming so trendy, so prevalent, so accessible, is people just do it for the sake of itself, they don’t necessarily know why they are doing it. This is what turns people off from it. If a chef is used to making his food and he suddenly adds a cube of weird hot jelly on it, and it makes no sense for it to be there but it’s cool because he’s having fun with it. The customer, who wants to have good food, interprets that as being experimented on. They don’t get it; it doesn’t taste good. The validity of the meaning of modern cooking is lost on them. The cycle can be really good if the chefs who are interpreting these things are using these ideas and using these ingredients well. Using them subtly, there’s a huge degree of subtly that is involved with using these things. They are responsible for encouraging people to be open.

What advice do you have for readers who want to try these techniques?
For home cooks, I would say it’s about precision. It doesn’t mean taking the heart out of cooking. If you use a thermometer and you understand what temperature means for food, like in sous vide, for example. Understand that, if you just grasp the simple idea that precise cooking is really valuable, and then most of the book is accessible. A lot of these ideas really come to life. But you have to test it on your own and you have to witness the quality that it manifests. Tasting it is the ultimate component. For professional chefs, really be willing to challenge the way you do things, because you are in a service industry not only to feed people, but to feed them well. As a chef, it is such a repetitive thing to make the same menu, to make the same food. If you just let go and embrace some of these ideas, you can enjoy cooking so much more and you can discover many things that actually make sense to your way of cooking. It’s not like it’s going to change your way of cooking, it will just enhance it and refine it. • 


Photo Courtesy: Ryan Matthew Smith