30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE
The great work, slimmed down into something you can actually own and use. Nathan Myhrvold wrote this one together with Maxime Bilet, one of the three behind the original, and the whole idea is to keep the thinking while ditching the prerequisites. The recipes have been rewritten for kitchens that lack a centrifuge, a rotary evaporator and liquid nitrogen storage.
456 pages with the same photography that made the original so talked about, meaning pots and ovens sliced clean through to show what's actually happening inside during cooking. Add to that a separate 230-page kitchen manual with over 400 recipes, printed on waterproof material and bound so it lies flat on the counter. That detail is more thought-through than it sounds, since it's the only part you'll actually have out while you cook.
The book is also, in practice, a rehabilitation of the pressure cooker, treated here as a precision instrument rather than something your grandmother happened to own. The sections on stock and on caramelised vegetables under pressure are the ones people keep coming back to.
An honest objection: it isn't entirely equipment-free. In practice it assumes you have a sous vide circulator and a pressure cooker to really get the most out of it, which is two purchases, not zero. The book is upfront about that.
Awarded the IACP Cookbook Award 2013.
This is the way into the Modernist project for anyone who doesn't want to sacrifice a whole shelf or a whole month's salary, and the only one of them built to stand in a kitchen instead of next to it.
Format: Hardcover, with separate waterproof kitchen manual
Number of pages: 456
Language: English
First published: 2012
