Modernist Cuisine at Home

I loved my At Home Modernist Cuisine so much I got the whole series! The second one I got was At Home Modernist Bread! It came with a beautiful book and companion cook book! Then I got the large set Modernist Pizza/Modernist Cuisine (The Art Of Cooking) then I got Modernist Bread. The books are beautiful reads with plated cuisines. It has science/history/theory behind the JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNING RECIPES! Knowing now I would have gotten the 5 book/recipe book series. They are worth the money! Love the books! There are books and a spiritual bound recipe book that is so beautiful with the series. The books are very high quality, and the information is outstanding! I already read the book and I’m dyslexic. That says alot, great read, clearly written, and really kept my attention to all the information inside! The detail of each book explaining about the topic is next to none! IF YOU ARE GOING TO CULINARY COLLEGE IT IS WORTH THE MONEY! Thank you for such a beautiful, purchase

Modernist Cuisine at Home is a cookbook. As such, it shouldn't be read end-to-end, but should be reviewed for the recipes it contains. However, it's more than a cookbook, since it's also an advocate for a different approach towards cooking, which is ideally suited for engineers and other folks (mostly men) who have little patience for acquiring skills associated with traditional cooking. I am just such a person, so the Modernist approach does have great appeal to me. As far as I can see, modernist cooking has a few principles: Use of modern technology. This includes pressure cookers, sous vide machines, and blow torches Accurate temperature control. This could mean water baths, or simply an oven safe probe stuck into the thickest part of the meat. An emphasis on time efficiency. Minimum prep time, and "fire and forget" formulas. I, on the other hand, was looking for the following: Minimum skill required, as well as prep effort. I can barely flip an egg over to make eggs over-easy. Anything more is just too much. Precise prescriptions. "A dash of baking soda" means nothing to me. I'd rather hear, "10g of baking soda." To my mind, Modernist Cuisine at Home meets a lot of this criteria. Much has been made about sous vide, but I didn't have a sous vide set up, so I first tried the other recipes that were easy: Slow Baked Chicken with Onions (page 242). The first time I did this the results were amazing. The prep work is weird, using brine injectors and slicing onions thinly, but my wife (who usually hates chicken) liked it a lot so I tried again. The second time was a disaster. I had to throw it away. The inconsistency of the oven made me willing to buy a Sous Vide setup. Pressure Cooked Lamb Shank (page 234). The first time I did it the results were good, but marred by my pressure cooker being not up to spec. I splurged, upgrading to a $30 Presto pressure cooker, and the second time I made it it was nothing short of incredible. The meat just peeled off the bone when I lifted the bone up, and the resulting lamb curry tasted great. In fact, the store-bought sauce did not do the meat justice. Carrot Soup (page 178). Since my visits to Rosenlaui began, I've admired their soups. Since I had a pressure cooker now, I could use their recipe to see if I could emulate the creamy soups that Rosenlaui did. The resulting texture is nothing short of amazing. It's quite a bit of work, since you have to pressure cook the carrots, then blend them, and then add carrot juice. This is eliminating the final step. But the soup is incredibly smooth and generally good stuff. I liked it a lot, but Xiaoqin is in general not a fan of Western style soups, so I guess I won't be making this again. All this convinced me that I should experiment with sous vide for a more consistent experience. It took a bit to figure out what to buy, so I'll list it here, in case you want to try it yourself: Sous Vide Supreme Demi. You don't need anything bigger, so don't waste your time with the other stuff. I didn't opt for a circulating bath heater, because the resulting decor would not please my wife. If you're single and cheap, try a manual rice cooker or crockpot and the DorkFood temperature controller. Iwatani Torch Burner. It burns butane cartridges you can easily get at Ranch 99. Easy on, easy off, and it doesn't look like industrial equipment. Seal-a-Meal Vacuum Sealer. If all you do is short recipes you can use zip-loc bags. You can also buy a package including the Sous Vide Supreme sealer, but the difference between reviews of this unit and reviews of the Sous Vide Supreme unit is huge, so I recommend buying this one. With this, I experimented with the following receipes: Sous Vide Salmon (page 276). OMG. This is melt-in-your-mouth type salmon. I couldn't believe how good this was. Xiaoqin doesn't like cooked Salmon, but she found this acceptable. I'm going to have to try cod one of these days. Sous Vide Chicken (page 244). You know how baked chicken always tastes dry? The reason the Slow Baked chicken receipe works is because you inject the chicken with enough brine so it doesn't dry out. Well, by cooking sous vide, you don't have to do that and the results are amazing. Xiaoqin doesn't usually like chicken, but she liked this one so much she complained I didn't eat enough. Bowen doesn't usually eat meat, and he ate a third of a piece of chicken thigh by himself. This blew my mind. Sous Vide Prime Rib (page 194). This was relatively disappointing. Not because the result was bad, but because we'd had high hopes after the last two sous vide dishes. I didn't follow the instructions enough, and left the meat in the machine for 3+ hours instead of the recommended 50 minutes, because I read some other instructions on the internet. On the one hand, it was my loss, but on the other hand, it demonstrates the value of the book: the book's recipes so far out perform the internet, which is unusual. Sous Vide Duck Confit (pages 245-246). This was the most ambitious recipe that I tried from the book. It took about 18 hours of brining the duck legs in the refrigerator, and then about 27 hours in the Sous Vide machine. But it was excellent and better than some duck confit I've had in France! If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be able to make duck confit this good, I wouldn't have believed you. I'm not much of a foodie, and have eaten at Michelin 2-star restaurants that I considered terrible compared to say, Kabab & Curry's. I've also eaten at Google's cafetaria during the good years (2005-2007), and could taste the difference when I returned to Mountain View in 2008 after a stint in Europe. I would say that this book has revolutionized my approach and expectations for home cooking, and I cannot imagine not using the sous vide approach for meats cooked home if I can help it. I justified my purchase of my above set up based on the idea that I could easily return it to Amazon if I didn't like it. Well, I'm not going to return those machines. Furthermore, when I first heard about the 72 hour short-rib sous vide recipes, I thought, "3 days to cook dinner? That's ridiculous." I will now admit that my thoughts about the matter now are: "how could I do without my sous vide machine for 3 days?!!" I will now pay this book the greatest compliment I can: before I return this book to the library, I will either buy my own copy of Modernist Cuisine at Home, or the entire $530 6-volume set of Modernist Cuisine. Highly recommended. If you haven't tried it out, try it. If you're local and want to try it, talk to me and we'll work something out. And if you're an engineer who hates cooking and can't do anything right in the kitchen, you need this book.

Have you ever read a book that changed your life? Coincidentally, I was asked that question last week and my answer was "no". Two days I ago, I received my copy of Modernist Cuisine at Home, and now my answer is a resounding "yes". It is so hard to review this book without invoking hyperbole, but I tell you this in complete honestly, it is the best book purchase I have ever made. If you are put off by the price, don't be. After you begin paging through it, you will realize that it is grossly UNDER-priced. Prior to reading this book -- and that's all I've been doing for the last two days -- I fancied myself a bit of a gourmet home chef. Friends and relatives would tell me that I should open a restaurant and that my dishes were as good as anything they had ever eaten. After reading MCaH, I realize that I was just a primitive, fumbling my way through the kitchen with the wrong tools and methods. I felt like a caveman who was so proud of his wall drawings suddenly exposed to the work of Da Vinci or Salvador Dali. The wonderful thing is that this book showed me the path to achieve that same level of artistry. MCaH doesn't make you feel bad about where you currently are as a cook, but rather fills you with excitement about what you will soon be capable of. MCaH is not simply a cookbook. It is an "at home" PhD course in how cooking and food actually work. By understanding this, you will understand how so much of what you thought you knew about food and preparation is wrong and how that has held you back from your true potential in the kitchen. The writing style is extremely accessible, with just the subtlest hint of humor, and I have never seen such a wonderful use of photography. For my "real life" job, I do a lot of teaching and deployment of Lean Manufacturing and I can say without hesitation that MCaH sets the bar for what any visual operating procedure or standard work should look like. In layman's term's, that means this is the best "how to" book you'll ever lay your hands on.

Just received it tonight, and I am blown away. I have two 6 foot book shelves full of cookbooks (about ~250) and this definitely has a special place among them. I have looked through the full version, and wanted to get it, but the price was a bit prohibitive. This is an excellent compromise. Everything about the book is what I wanted, and the few typos are not that big of a deal. I have most of the equipment already, so I will be cooking from this a lot. I will try to post results as I make them. My biggest criticism is that the book smells terribly of paint. I can barely stand to read it for long as it smells so bad. The manual that comes with it smells even worse, and the last 40 or so pages of it are stuck together at the bottom. Hopefully letting it air out overnight will help. If it weren't for these issues, a definite 5 star (Edit: bumped up to 5star due to the smell dissipating and awesome customer service). EDIT: I contacted MC about the stuck/torn pages and they kindly offered a replacement. I'm guessing if you find yourself in a similar situation contact them. As for the smell it has mostly dissipated. If you can, leave the book out of the box overnight, and most of the smell should go away. EDIT 2: I tested the Sous Vide Chicken (only breast), Mac n Cheese, Modernist Mayonaise, Romaine Dressing Salad, and Sweet onion slaw. -Sous Vide Chicken: Awesome, moist, nothing too crazy here, but it was nice to have the time/temp. -Mac n Cheese: Very cool, and really easy to make. Have to experiment with the cheese though. We tried a 50/50 of white new zealand cheddar and Emmi Gruyere. The first few bites were good, then it became overwhelming. -Modernist Mayonaise: Love it. Totally going to make this all the time. -Romaine Dressing: I really liked using a soft boiled egg instead of all the oil to thicken it. That said, I used a 12month parm, and that and the anchovies were pretty much all I tasted. It was still really good, but the flavors need some balancing. I will try again with a younger parm. -Sweet Onion Slaw: I really like this. Its sweet, spicy, and has an awesome crunch. I mixed some with my sous vide chicken and made a chicken salad sandwich. Overall, the recipes were really easy to follow, and I was surprised at how little time they took to prepare. EDIT 3: Added to the tested list are: -Pressure cooked caramelized banana puree: So awesomely flavorful, although the grams per banana is quite a bit off. The book specifies 2 bananas should equal 500 grams. It took roughly 4 for me to get to 500 grams. -Pressure infused Sous Vide Coffee Pastry cream: The method was far, far easier then a traditional pastry cream, and it turned out amazing. I used this and the banana puree to make the banana creme pie. It was loved by everyone who tried it. -Flaky pastry crust (regular version): Method was good, but baking time seemed a bit off. Will try again tonight and see if I get better results. It seemed to be more "sandy" then flaky". That said, the crust is great. -Stilton slices: followed the directions exactly, but it turned out to be more the consistency of a "spread" rather then a slice. I will try again using the standard cheeses just in case I missed something technique wise (although it was pretty simple). Hopefully it will work out better next time. Still happy with the book, but a little irked that two weeks after I bought it, the price has dropped $30. Also, the pages in the reference guide seem to be breaking down or something. More and more become stuck together, and have a shiny substance that appears on them. I have tried to wipe it off to no avail. Will most likely need to contact MC for a replacement.

A very large book. It is what it says it is. Excited to read about these methods.

This book truly embodies the "modernist" part in its title and is very comprehensive and very technical. It uses all modern appliances to their fullest (which is also partially the problem with this book). And partially because of that I don't believe it would be good for someone who have never cooked before, even if it does give a comprehensive overview of many kitchen appliances, techniques and foods. It contains a variety of dishes you will likely cook at home and for me personally, I like the selection of different marinades, sauces and gravies. However, this book is way to complex for your everyday home cooking. A basic example is your normal sunny-side-up fried eggs. To cook them according to this book, you would need to break out a blender, a sous vide set up, foil, a few pots, a cookie cutter and spend about 30 minutes cooking them. The same with the basic omelette. It takes more than 30 minutes to make it and you need multiple appliances. Which brings me to my biggest issue with the book. Yes, it is titled "modernist", but it is essentially a sous vide cookbook as at least 50% of the recipes, even if they don't have sous vide in the title, use souse vide to cook or prep the food. They also use pressure cookers instead of pots whenever possible, so all soups, stocks, anything you cook for a bit goes into the pressure cooker. Which makes this book very hard to follow if you don't have those appliances. Sure, in some cases you can adjust and wait for whatever is cooking to be done, just wait a bit longer than the pressure cooker. But not all recipes can be changed in this way. Especially since quite a lot of "grilled" and "fried" dishes are made in sous vide before being finished on the grill or in the pan. It also makes extensive use of blenders and mixes, which is actually great, but in some cases it makes a very simple dish more complicated than it needs to be (like with the basic fried eggs). Maybe it would good to impress your date (if said date can even appreciate the technique and the difference), but if you are cooking for a family, and you need the food asap, this might not be the best book to choose from. On the flip side, I want to reiterate that this book does contain a lot of information and a lot of modern techniques that utilize all your modern kitchen appliances. There are some very cool things that you can make and maybe if your blender is just sitting there collecting dust in-between smoothies, then maybe you can try this book out and liven up your cooking routine a bit. Also, if you do own a pressure cooker and/or sous vide machine, then this book is definitely for you.

For those of you that don't want to read the silly-long review I wrote, scroll down to "BOTTOM LINE" for the important stuff. I'll start with a disclaimer: Do not buy this book until you are familiar with the original "Modernist Cuisine." By that I do not mean you need to own that set first (quite the opposite, this is the stepping stone to the full set), but you should understand that it encompasses a style of cooking that can be crudely summarized as "cooking for scientists" or "how to make dinner in a laboratory." Once you know what you're getting into, decide if it's worth around $140 of your hard-earned cash. Now, on to the good stuff. For those of you who salivated for a year, wishing you could justify buying "Modernist Cuisine" but knowing you wouldn't be able to use it to it's full potential (like me), your prayers have been answered! "Modernist Cuisine" made headlines (in the Food and Travel section) for: 1. Deconstructing the science of cooking rather than just listing recipes 2. Focusing on modern methods of preparing foods using tools such as combi ovens, sous vide setups, emulsifiers, etc 3. Including some rather stunning photography of the equipment and ingredients within I am happy to say that all three are present in the "at Home" version. First, "Modernist Cuisine at Home" (MCAH hereafter) introduces a consolidated set of kitchen tools and gadgets that the home chef can reasonably afford. Don't have the funds for the laboratory-grade centrifuge featured in "Modernist Cuisine?" No problem. Not only does MCAH omit the prohibitively expensive tools from its recipes, but many of them are the same recipes found in the original, redone for the home cook. MCAH even goes as far as offering several options at varying price ranges for the equipment used within. The same goes for the ingredients. MCAH mostly does away with the laundry list of exotic spices and chemicals featured in many "modernist" cookbooks and instead relies on ingredients you can find either at the local grocery store, or in reasonable quantities online. For the ingredients you are probably less familiar with (malic acid? agar agar?) there is a two-page spread detailing what each does, where it comes from, and what it costs. In many cases, the recipes will list alternatives if you choose not to add their recommendations to your shopping list. Much like Modernist Cuisine, MCAH explains some of the science behind the various cooking techniques, but at a beginner's level. Each recipe includes a blurb about what's going on inside the pot (so to speak), and almost all of them include multiple variations at the end, allowing for a wide variety of options. This is especially useful for people new to the idea of sous vide cooking, as MCAH does a great job explaining exactly how it works, and how to make it work for you. How has it taken me this long to get to the photography? Stunning, just as in "Modernist Cuisine". I don't know how they did it, but every picture is suitable for framing. Equipment has been dissected to yield amazing looking cross-sections used in explaining how the various tools function. And get this: included in the back are four prints from MCAH you can frame. I had no idea until they fell out while I was reading, but they are every bit as beautiful as the photos inside, and I dare say will look better on the walls of a kitchen than the usual crap paintings of grapes or farms or cows that people seem obligated to put up these days. If it seem like I'm gushing, it's because I am. Any home cook who has jumped into sous vide cooking has probably experienced the frustration I have with cookbooks dedicated to the style. You have Douglas Baldwin's "Sous Vide for the Home Chef," which, while great for it's temperature charts (and the fact it came out before anything else was available) is too simple for anyone looking to expand their horizons into restaurant-quality preparations (French Laundry, anyone?). And on the other end of the spectrum is Thomas Keller's "Under Pressure," which, while exquisite in creativity and detail, is geared completely towards the restaurant chef (which he warns in the forward), both in scale and complexity. Even the original "Modernist Cuisine", while featuring more accessible recipes than "Under Pressure", still excluded the home cook from about half of it's contents due to equipment or ingredient limitations. MCAH is the first book that features sous vide in a way that the home cook can learn and excel at, while also creating dishes that will blow the guests away. Seriously, the stuff you can make from this book looks like it belongs on the set of Iron Chef. BOTTOM LINE: This is a "modern" (or Modernist) cookbook, so the recipes inside are going to be closer to what you'd find in a restaurant that uses an obscure adjective for it's title rather than what you'd see in your grandmother's kitchen. If the idea of cooking a beautiful cut of salmon in a Ziploc bag seems blasphemous, or using a digital scale instead of an elephant-shaped measuring cup is akin to high treason, you may not be ready to make the jump. But if you want to learn how modern cooking styles can produce amazing taste and presentation in your kitchen (while removing much of the uncertainty and variation that traditional high-heat methods entail), this is the book for you. PROS: - Currently the best book available for home sous vide setups - Delicious recipes using accessible ingredients for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Meat, Poultry, Fish and Veggies. Even has a few vegan options inside. - Teaches the "why" of cooking, not just the "how" - Stunning photography, and great step-by-step images for most of the recipes - Comes with a separate water-resistant "kitchen manual" with every recipe inside so you can keep the gorgeous main-book away from the messiness of the kitchen. - Comes with 4 prints you can frame in your home. Or not. - Even though the recipes are designed using ingredient weights, approximate volume measurements are included - Well constructed. You could easily beat an intruder to death with this book if you caught him stealing your sous vide setup - Even has the bookmark ribbon you see in bibles, which fits, since this has become my new kitchen bible. CONS: - Though it says "at Home" in the title, your average kitchen will most likely lack some of the basic tools used in many of the recipes. At a minimum, you will need a digital scale, Sous Vide setup, a pressure cooker, and a whipped cream siphon. MCAH will help you in your quest to acquire those tools, but you should commit to expanding your kitchen arsenal if you plan to use this book to it's full potential. - There are no calorie counts on these recipes, and in some cases if there were, it would take scientific notation to fit on the page. This is not a diet book, this is a book dedicated purely to creating the most delicious food possible at home. When you get to the page about deep-frying a hamburger, you'll understand what I mean. - $140 (or whatever they charge now) isn't chump change, and for most people the new equipment will add to the cost. - The sandwich on the cover does not actually levitate when you make it at home. - Does not mow the lawn while you aren't using it. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I am in no way affiliated with the producers of this book, though I would consider trading my first-born for a chance to work in their kitchen. Your Mileage May Vary. EDIT - 6 Oct 2015: Three years later and I still love this book. I not own the full-fledged Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking , but I'm always going back to this one. Take the leap!

I received as a gift (some great gift!) the original Modernist Cuisine -- the full 5 volume set. I loved reading it, but never really got to cook from it. For me it functions as a reference book and I love it. Modernist Cuisine at Home is a whole other thing. This really is a book for home cooks who want to know the hows and whys of cooking and who enjoy trying new techniques. While there are some way-out-there recipes involving special ingredients and equipment, there is so much that is really for making home cooking wonderful. The price of the book is worth it just for the directions for pressure cooking stock -- veggie, meat & poultry! I followed the recipe for the pressure cooked chicken stock, also made a pot using the techniques used by my Grandmother and a third pot using a mix of the two ( needed a lot of stock for the holidays). Then I held a blind tasting for my family. Unanimous and enthusiastic agreement: the pressure cooking method won hands down. AND it was easier and faster than the traditional method. The directions are clear, the explanations enable you to be able to riff on recipes with your own variations if you enjoy doing that. So my feeling is that although there are recipes that are way more involved than most home cooks will want to use, there are so many that can enhance and elevate even our everyday cooking. And did I mention all the information about sous vide that makes me feel it really is worth doing at home?! Fantastic. One more thing which I am adding a day later to this review: The Modernist Cuisine at Home does one more thing which is VERY helpful and which I wish would become the standard for cookbooks from now on: measurements are given in weight, volume and scaling percentages! Yeah! Weighing is much easier and more efficient. The scaling method is very useful when wanting to make a recipe for 2 or for 12 or even 20. Digital scales are so cheap and useful that I believe that every kitchen should have one sitting on the counter. If you haven't used one when baking, borrow one from a friend and try it -- once you do, you'll be a convert, and you'll thank Myhrvold and Bilet and all the team at The Cooking Lab for this extra measure of help and usefulness. Now if only other cookbook writers and their publishers would take their cue and provide us with this help. I no longer buy books on baking which don't provide measurements weights -- if I want to guess at how much of an ingredient to use, I don't need to pay for a recipe, and that if what it amounts to using volume measurements when baking. Also, don't let the size and weight of the book put you off -- that is just for reading and reference even though it has the recipes in it. What you will use in the kitchen is the smaller spiral bound plasticized pages book with just the recipes. Splattered? The pages wipe clean. Open it up to a recipe and the pages lie flat. Easy to use in kitchen while cooking. But wait, there's more: there are charts giving guidance on various cooking methods for various cuts of meat, etc., such as best cooking methods for tough cuts of meat and then listing the various ways -- pressure cooker, braising, sous vide, etc for different cuts of meat. And excellent overview. As I say, this book is useful for all skill levels.

I can't say enough about how cool this book is. I've only tried a couple recipes, but i love that they are written for maximum reproducibility. I already had most of the tools needed for many of the recipes (pressure cooker, hand blender, sous vide setup) and really enjoyed the gorgeous photos. I also loved that the companion "cookbook" with just the recipes has waterproof pages, totally designed for being in the kitchen with you. There's so much great information in this book, it's definitely become a new favorite.

The first cookbook I ever read head to tail within a week followed by a shopping spree in order to acquire a Jaccard, a pressure cooker and a blowtorch. Used a whipping siphon for the first time in my life. Beautiful 🤩 photos and impressive Cut through of stoves etc . The recipes are easy to scale up or down , which is great and the recipes are printed on user friendly paper washable in an extra ring book.

Il titolo rende l'idea... passare dalla cucina casareccia approssimativa (dove non si sa mai come sarà il risultato) all'approccio ingegneristico dove la cucina diventa una scienza esatta e replicabile se fatta debita attenzione. Purtroppo non economicissimo ma pure bello come oggetto.

That’s a bible for cookers and enthusiasts! An obligatory reading on techniques and modern processes of cooking.

This book has just arrived and already I can't praise it enough. To get some idea of the sheer content and breadth of this book - check out the content list on their site: [...] - I can't even begin to review the detail of the topics covered but will give a couple of lines on who it may suit. I'd describe myself as an enthusiastic home cook with a growing shelf of cooking books and countertop of kitchen gadgets (including a sous vide cooker). I'm happy to take time over recipes but don't possess the skills or resources of a professional kitchen. I have read (or at least dipped into) a large number of cookbooks which have excellent content including the full version of modernist cuisine. The recipes that inspire you in the likes of the Fat Duck Cookbook, Under Pressure and titles of similar calibre are mainly beyond what one can reasonably hope to replicate in the home kitchen due to all the individual parts that go into each dish. This book manages to contain similar dishes but quickly gets to the crux of why something should be cooked in a certain way, explains it simply and gives an interesting recipe that incorporates it (without requiring 8 other parts to be prepared before plating). The stunning photography challenges any coffee table cookbook yet this is not a book that is likely to remain there. There are so many recipes that will inspire you and all are accessible to a (enthusiastic) home cook. It's printed on the highest quality art paper and includes a cooking proof kitchen manual that includes all the recipes on washable, tear resistant paper. If you have a passion for cooking (or know someone that does) just buy the book - it's well worth the cost and there's no way you can be disappointed.