Extreme eating: Inside the new $625 cookbook

Photo by: All images by The Cooking Lab, LLC
The rarified world of 'Modernist Cuisine'-
Food has a new language, and its dictionary has arrived in a $625 six-volume set of 2,438 pages (on sale for $461.62). 'Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking' is a labor of love from established inventor and ex-chief technology officer to Microsoft, Dr. Nathan Myhrvold. The cooking devotee has brought together a project so comprehensive, illuminating, and beautiful that he considers this price tag fair.

If you’re among the band of chefs, foodies, and casual eaters who think that the scientific approach to cooking is snobby, fussy, and unsatisfying, Ryan Matthew Smith’s arresting photographs from the book may give you pause. In the pages that follow, see a burger that requires 30 hours to make, the midsection of a fiery barbecue, dumplings made through reverse spherification, and other unimaginable perspectives on food.

With the help of a 20-person kitchen team and two co-authors, Myhrvold lays out techniques and recipes from the new school of cooking, known to many of us as molecular gastronomy, and known in the book as modernist cooking. With the price tag of a print encyclopedia, 'Modernist Cuisine' will be bought primarily by professional chefs, but the authors maintain that home cooks would benefit from reading about modern cooking techniques that don’t require the perfect timing of traditional cooking. Read on to browse Smith's stupendous images, and discover incredible facts from co-author and formidab less