Looking for a fantastic expansion to your home library? Authors Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet have one of the hottest items on the market right now - not a book, but a set of books that manages to summarize with encyclopedic professionalism all the changes the culinary world has gone through in the last few years.Pairing with beautiful photography and countless hours of research, these books logically base themselves with an exploration of the traditional cooking methods we are familiar with, and help us understand why these techniques have developed over centuries into their present forms. If you don't learn something here, you should be writing a book yourself!
With a solid foundation set, the authors then launch themselves into the exciting realm of the recent "modernist" movement in cooking - often referred to as "Molecular Gastronomy". Much of this information has until only recently been largely "secrets" of the industry - only explored by a handful of books and websites, recipes cherished and protected by cooks who have learned them first hand. What is truly great here is that even if you have played with some of the new products out there, and learned a few of the techniques, chances are you might not fully understand why they work and why they are better than more traditional methods. If modernist cooking is new to you, don't worry, you don't have to start practicing your spherification techniques for when the neighbours come over, much of the modernist movement's goal is simply to understand how food cooks and to explore ways to cook it better, tastier, and more nutritious. Sous-vide cooking may sound intimidating, but it is often a far superior way to prepare a meal, and surprisingly makes it easier. With a little planning, you can create elaborate multi-course meals with the same effort as the after school special.
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