"Modernist Cuisine at Home" by Nathan Myhrvold with Maxime Bilet cookbook review.

Another cookbook review! Wohoo! This is exciting because I loved this book. Nathan Myhrvold writes this book with Maxime Bilet and team. I bought this book from amazon and it cost me $86.49 (exclude shipping fee).  It is a very expensive book and the shipping fee is insane! So you might want to think twice before buying it. 

Basically, this book tells you heaps and heaps of information about modernist cuisines, including of introduction of the modernist equipments, ingredients, techniques, sous vide and varieties of recipes. But, the most important thing is the photography. It is really alive! No wonder I was disappointed with modernist cooking made easy book that I recently reviewed. However, I would say that these two cookbooks have a slightly different concept.

First of all, the MCME (Modernist Cuisine Made Easy) book gives you heaps of information about the techniques such as spherification, foaming, gelling, thickening and so on (that’s pretty much what they cover plus sous vide). On the other hand, MCAH (Modernist Cuisine at Home) book gives you a whole different perspective of modernist cuisine. This book covers more about cuisines. They did not cover techniques such as foaming, gelling or spherification but more on how to cook perfectly, how to use pressure-cooking instead. However, they also used the modernist ingredients such as lecitin and xantan gum and modernist tools such as whipping siphons and hand blender.

However, I would say this book is not suitable for everyone. I personally liked this book and I think it worth every penny I spent. If you don’t have any idea of what molecular gastronomy/ modernist cuisine/ modernist cooking is, I would not recommend this book to you. This book suits a person like me who has interest about modernist techniques and wanted to know how could it be applied in daily cooking.  

This book is not really an introduction book. To practice these techniques written in the book, it takes willingness, interests and it is pretty expensive to be practiced because they use some tools and ingredients that home cooks don’t use. Also, if you are a chef or home cooks who want to enhance your skills in cooking and knowledge, this book is perfect. Modernist cooking is the next level of normal cooking.

Moving onto the content, this book has plenty and plenty of amazing pictures and recipes. I don’t know if all of the recipes will fit into your taste bud but they really do look amazing. If you are curious to try some of the recipes, you can go their website (www.modernistcuisine.com). They put some of the recipes up on the website. From the website itself, you can tell that they are really serious about this stuff.

My favourite part of the book is sous vide. The book covers different method you can try to achieve sous vide other than using the expensive sous vide water bath machine, such as oven, sink, cooler and rice cooker. It also covers methods to seal the meat without using the vacuum sealer (how cool is that). Additionally, this book also comes with a portable, thinner and smaller recipe book, which actually contains all the recipes in the big book. I would definitely try these recipes and share my experience with you guys. So, please stay tuned :)

I hope you found this review helpful and I'm looking forward to see you soon :)