Who knew that Slashdot would have links to interesting food articles. The NY times ran an article on ex Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. I read his Wikipedia entry and was immediately intimidated. He started college at 14 studying math geophysics and space physics and received his PHD in theoretical and mathematical physics at 23. He’s a foodie and has taken a scientific approach to cooking. He’s assembled a team to do some pretty radical thing with food, but the really interesting part is his approach and the tools he’s using. The ultimate goal seems to be writing a molecular gastronomy text book, but he’s treating it as a software dev project. It reminds me a bit of the things I’ve read about the Fat Duck, probably because he’s hired Chris Young(ex Fat duck’er), but they do some very interesting and innovative things. Like using a dog brush to perforate the skin on a duck breast to help the fat render, and cooking sous-vide. The sous-vide part isn’t ground breaking, but freezing the skin side of the duck breast with dry ice before searing it to get crispy skin, while keeping the meat near raw before it goes into the immersion cooker. That’s worth mentioning.
Have a read:
Interesting stuff, I’ll buy the book and pick trough it like I did with “On food and Cooking” (Harold McGee).