Modernist Cuisine
For three years, Nathan has been directing and funding a team here at the Lab dedicated to culinary sciences. Chemists and chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world working on the cutting edge of applying scientific knowledge to the way we prepare food. They are just about to ship the cookbook they’ve created – Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking is a 2400 page tome (in six volumes) on the science of cooking, available to pre-order from Amazon. Check out the 20-page excerpt for a preview. The Lab kitchen has a drill press, a bandsaw, a rotary evaporator, a homogenizer and a pharmaceutical freeze dryer. They cook with liquid nitrogen and most of the rest of the periodic table. They’ve kept our machine shop busy with requests like “can you cut this microwave in half?” to make cross sectional images of cooking processes so cool that kitchenware companies have started sending us their products in hopes that we will cut them in half too.
We’re proud of this team, some of the hardest working people in the lab. Hopefully they can take a good break and then come back to work to help us invent the future of food.









