Modernist Cuisine mistakes the chef for the great creator

If you're wondering why the food trend that brought us foamed potatoes, liquid

nitrogen semifreddos and steak simmered in a plastic bag for 36 hours (it's called

sous vide) went suddenly out of vogue a few years ago, I suggest you peruse pages 80

through 87 of Volume III of the monumentally ambitious, breathtakingly awesome, but

– dare I say – critically flawed cooking tome to end all cooking tomes, Modernist

Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.


After a fascinating disquisition on the role of collagen in braising (more is better)

and an illustrated technique for gluing de-fatted duck skin onto a duck breast using

a substance called Activa RM (a "transglutaminase preparation"), there is a hamburger

recipe. Or, should I say, a hamburger manual.

Here is a gross oversimplification: Cook the patty in a Ziploc bag to a "final core

temperature" of 56C (about 30 minutes), dip in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds, then

deep-fry in oil at 232C for one minute.

As for the patty itself, the book recommends a blend of short rib, aged rib eye and

hangar steak cut into cubes, chilled to -1C, put through a grinder that has itself

been cooled with liquid nitrogen, forced into a cylindrical mould, sliced into disks,

then cooked, seasoned and garnished.

You might call this the Platonic ideal of recipes – a formulation as precise and

unchanging as an isosceles triangle. According to this school of thought, you can

think of a dish as an exalted state that ingredients can reach, but only via the hand

of the great creator, the chef. That's why Modernist Cuisine favours precision over

that hilariously primitive custom called "cooking to taste."

Alas, there is a problem. Humans may be able to measure quantities of Activa RM down

to the nearest microgram and prepare blends of ground beef using exact ratios of

short rib and aged rib eye. But nature doesn't work that way.

For example, is that aged rib eye from a 14-month-old barley-fed Charolais steer or a

24-month-old ryegrass-finished Galloway heifer? Because both will feature different

profiles of fatty acids and volatile aromatic compounds. And if you use the latter,

don't bother with the cylinderizing, liquid nitrogen and deep-frying: Just form a

patty with your hands, hit it with sea salt and high heat, and you will discover

burger bliss. (And just how many Microsoft stock options do you have to cash in

before grinding an exalted cut like rib eye seems like a good idea?)

There's a different school of cooking that sees nature, not humans, as the great

creator. A chef I met in Paris put it to me this way: "Cooking is the easy part. A

chef's greatest challenge is finding good ingredients." The chef's job is to amplify

them. Or, as a scientist might put it: The rate-limiting step isn't the cooking, so

much as the thing that's getting cooked.

That's why most of us are more interested in farmers' markets than liquid nitrogen.

It's about ingredients, method plays a supporting role. But modernist cuisine –

molecular gastronomy, whatever you want to call it – isn't dead. Its techniques live

on. Cooking meat sous vide, for instance, used to be extremely trendy, but now it's

just one more technique a chef can use, which is a good thing – so long as the chef

is sourcing excellent meat.