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Dave Arnold has a degree in philosophy from Yale and a master's in performance sculpture from Columbia, which explains quite a lot about why this book looks the way it does. He went on to work with technical cooking at the French Culinary Institute and in 2012 opened Booker & Dax at the back of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, named after his two sons and run, in practice, as a laboratory.
The book applies measurable physics to drinks. Ice and how it actually cools, clarification with enzymes and a centrifuge, carbonation, rapid infusion, liquid nitrogen and red-hot iron, meaning the technique of plunging a red-hot iron into a drink to caramelise the sugar in an instant. There are 120 recipes and nearly 450 photographs, but it is the reasoning between the recipes that makes the book.
It won both the James Beard Award for best beverage book and the IACP's Jane Grigson Award. Parts of the book require equipment you probably do not have at home, and Arnold is completely open about that.
But it also teaches you how to make crystal-clear ice in an ordinary freezer and clarify cloudy lime juice with enzymes. Basil pounded with liquid nitrogen so that it does not blacken can wait until the day you acquire some liquid nitrogen.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 416
Language: English
First published: 2014
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Walk into a good bar today and there is equipment behind the counter that was not there ten years ago. Carbonation systems, a centrifuge, sometimes a rotary evaporator. That is to a large extent this book's doing.
Arnold did not come from bars himself but from culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, and that is probably precisely why. He did not know the rules and procedures; he started from technique and natural science. Thanks to that, the bar world stepped into a new chapter.
