Chris Hennes

I did, that's what the little sprinkles are on the surface (this is the Chaat Masala recipe from the original MC, however, because I had it on hand. I don't know if the one in MCaH is different). Yes, the soup is perfectly delicious without it, albeit a bit more conventional-tasting: which is to say, it's a top-notch roasted cauliflower soup, but not unique. The Chaat Masala, almonds, and grapes are what take it someplace new.

I completely understand where you're coming from here. I haven't had any real losers, but so far none of the recipes has scaled the heights that were to be found in the original: there have been no revelations so far, just some good food. In any other cookbook I'd be fine with that, but between the precedent set by the original MC and the price tag of this one, the bar was set pretty high. I've also been quite disappointed with the decisions they made with respect to ingredient selection. It's almost as though their entire goal was to make this "home cookin'" by omitting anything that sounded "chemically." I don't think it's reasonable to argue that their ingredient selections were based only on availability: I have to order Tipo 00 flour from the same place I order Calcium Chloride, and even Chervil is basically unobtainable here unless I grow it myself. I'm OK with drawing the esoteric ingredient line someplace (e.g. no transglutiminase) but I think they drew it too far back, especially considering that many of the more conventional non-chemical ingredients are equally difficult to procure. I also find that many of the recipes here are very simple extrapolations from "mother" recipes in MC: this would be completely fine in a $25 cookbook, but in a volume as expensive as this one I don't think I can blow a two-page spread on grilled-cheese sandwiches, or vegetable puree soups. I was looking for a little more innovation, rather than just "OK, now that you've learned how to emulsify cheese with sodium citrate, let's spend eight pages thinking up completely conventional uses for it. How about... baked mac and cheese!" I think ultimately it comes down to value, which is of course a very personal thing: I believe this is a good cookbook. It is certainly a gorgeous cookbook. The recipes are clear, extraordinarily well-illustrated, and in my experience good to very good tasting. But this book retails for $140 US. There's no escaping that in the shadow of Modernist Cuisine, this is... just a cookbook.

Cauliflower Soup (p. 180) Using the leftover cauliflower from the quinoa salad I made the other day, I made the pressure-cooked Cauliflower Soup for dinner tonight. This is made the same was as the carrot soup that we know and love, but replaces the carrots with cauliflower and the carrot juice with vegetable stock. I think I'm on the record as saying that the MC sous vide vegetable stock is drinkable on its own it is so good: I think this is the same recipe (though I admit I didn't actually check). The pressure-cooked cauliflower has a nice roasted flavor, so coupled with the stock the soup itself was excellent. It was also very creamy, considering that it has no cream in it, though I suppose this might just be due to the BlendTec. MCaH's suggested garnishes are very similar to those used in the MC deep-fried cauliflower recipe: Chaat Masala, Marcona almonds, and grapes (instead of the tamarind in the original). I enjoy this flavor combination, though I admit that considering that the rest of the dish took very little time (not counting cooking the stock) there was no way I was going to peel the grapes.

Yeah, I guess so: the wings were crispy, at any rate. I'm not sure they lasted long enough to get soggy even with a "normal" wing sauce, though.

Sous Vide Buffalo Wings (pp. 250-251) Buffalo Sauce (p. 258) Blue Cheese Sauce (p. 261) Green Salad with Romaine Dressing (pp. 168-169) Today was an all-afternoon Modernist cooking day, doing a bunch of prep for things I'm making for dinner later this week. While I was making a chicken stock and a vegetable stock, I decided I'd also make some Buffalo wings for dinner. Of course, this is a multi-step process itself, but it fit in between stock steps pretty well. It begins by brining the wings in a salt and baking soda brine for flavor and Maillard improvement. While that was going on, I made the blue cheese dip: this is just an emulsion of Gorgonzola in whole milk, thickened with Wondra: Next up, the buffalo sauce: this is basically a mayonaise made with an infused oil. It's designed to allow the wings to stay crispy even with the sauce on them. The infusion has onion, garlic, jalapeño, chipotle en adobo, and paprika: This simmers for a half hour, until you have: Strained: Emulsified with an egg yolk into lemon juice: The wings come out of the brine, get patted dry, and are then cooked sous vide for an hour: They come out of the SV, get patted dry, and then shallow-fried at 392°F: And finally, plated up with the same salad as yesterday (minus the beets and pecans): When I tasted the buffalo sauce on its own I was not terribly impressed, but once it was on the wings I changed my tune (in particular once dipped in the blue cheese). These were really, really good wings. Tough to do for a crowd, I think, since you can't fry that many at a time, but the taste and texture were top notch.

Actually, many of the recipes in this book have you use Ziploc bags rather than a vacuum sealer.

Green Salad with Romaine Dressing (pp. 168-169) The ultra-green dressing for this salad is based on romaine lettuce, along with chives, mint, tarragon, and basil. It's also got a strong dose of Parmesan and anchovies and is emulsified by a sous vide soft-cooked egg. I served it over Boston lettuce with radishes, sous vide beets, and pecans. The dressing is good but not great, tasting first of Parmesan, then through the progression of herbs. I'd make it again as it was quite simple and the color is striking, but I'm not convinced it really deserves a two-page spread in this particular volume.

Pressure-Cooked Quinoa Salad with Cauliflower (pp. 170-171) This is a cold salad of quinoa and cauliflower, accented with apple, pine nuts, parsley, celery, and currants: the dressing is white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and macadamia nut oil. The cauliflower is shaved a la Adria's "couscous" and the quinoa is quickly pressure cooked (four minutes, with a rapid cooldown). Start to finish the dish takes under an hour. The cauliflower: The cooked and chilling quinoa: Finished salad, served as a main: Overall the flavor balance here was very good: I might go a little lighter on the parsley next time, mine is pretty aggressively flavored and 40g is quite a lot of parsley. The pressure-cooked quinoa was nice, it had a good texture. I've never made quinoa before so I can't really compare to other techniques, however.

therippa, one trick I use is to put a smaller bowl inside my pressure cooker, almost like a double boiler (except I have the water in the main PC touching the bowl). Then I can use whatever the best bowl size is for the quantity. You still have to heat enough water to pressurize the larger cooker, but that's not actually that much water (1cm should do fine). Just be careful about how high you crank the heat, and how fast you cool it down, as the inner bowl can boil over.

I always do, but I think once you've got enough water vapor in there it probably doesn't much matter, the steam that condenses on your (relatively) cool inner pot should heat it up very quickly.

I don't think we'll be able to make it this year. Have a great time!

Especially since that stuff is the raison d'être of the whole book! It's like buying a book on using a bread machine and then complaining that it requires a bread machine.

Right: a basic pressure cooker isn't that different from a normal pan. If you only apply heat from the bottom you can easily scorch things, especially if you've got the heat on high to get the pressure up quickly. I am actually using a gargantuan pressure canner that I put a smaller bowl inside with the food in it. That works well for me.

The book is perfect for a beginner, though if you haven't made any sort of sausages before you might want to start out with fresh instead of dry (I'd suggest their original Charcuterie book for that).

Pressure-Cooked Chickpea Salad (p. 172-173) Sous Vide Tuna Confit (p. 174) Dinner tonight was two simple dishes from MCaH, one cooked sous vide and the other pressure cooked. I made the recipes almost exactly as written, with the exception of replacing the mineral water called for cooking the chickpeas in with a 1% calcium chloride solution (the recommended ratio from MC for cooking beans). The tuna is brined for 24 hours and then cooked in oil to 122°F: it wound up meltingly tender (and very difficult to plate neatly, I thought). The chickpeas were fully cooked but still firm, with an intensely lemony dressing. I found that my mint leaves were much smaller than theirs, so I need far more than 5-6 leaves to get three grams, but otherwise everything worked out as expected.

Same as Merkinz, amazon simply shipped it early. Their page still claims it hasn't been released yet, of course! Merkinz, I think it's interesting that you find the graphic design of this volume a step backwards from MC: I personally thought it was slightly better, not slightly worse. In particular, I thought the space utilization on the page was actually improved, with more information in less space, but never feeling crowded (in my opinion). In particular I liked that so many of the recipes had multiple in-process photographs, so you could see what things should look like at each stage.

I don't think those people will be disappointed: this then turns into just another volume of recipes that uses some (but not all) of their stuff. I think the people who will be most disappointed are those who were hoping that this would be "MC Junior" and wanted it to basically be a low-cost replacement for the original set, which it is not. This is a book of recipes targeted at the home cook who is interested in culinary Modernism, and who owns those two piece of equipment (sous vide setup and pressure cooker). It is a great supplement to MC, but in no way a replacement for it. You don't need to own MC to use this book, and can make every single recipe in it without referencing MC for anything. But you need MC if you want to learn the science.

A cookbook about Modernist Cuisine includes "Modernist complications"?! Shocking! And you need a sous vide rig and a pressure cooker, and in some cases even some crazy ingredients like... Wondra. OK, so I haven't read the whole review, maybe it's not that bad, but from the excerpt it does seem a bit absurd.

Tasted? The same, I hope! But yes, the difference here is in the texture. I personally think it was worth the extra five minutes, but I'm fanatical about grilled cheese .

Aged White Cheddar on Sourdough With Apples (p. 318) Once they introduce the idea of using sodium citrate to stabilize cheese and make your own processed cheese slices, they have a two-page spread with ideas for grilled cheese sandwiches. I was looking through it this morning and realized that I had all the ingredients for one of them, so I made it for lunch: Starting with a Grafton cheddar and emulsifying it in water using sodium citrate: I poured that into a shallow baking dish and tossed it in the fridge while I started making the rest of the sandwich: first layer (after the buttered sourdough) is a thinly sliced jalapeño. This is from my garden, and they are quite hot, so I tried not to overdo it. The next layer is sliced honeycrisp apple: By the time that was assembled the cheese had cooled enough to be maneuverable, so I put a slice on (the good fit to the bread is coincidental, that's just how the edge of the cheese pool turned out): A shot of the finished sandwich: And proof of the supreme meltability of this cheese:

"Discussion" is not quite right: this is not Modernist Cuisine. The "at Home" version contains a two page spread with very brief descriptions of a dozen or so Modernist pantry staples. There is no in-depth discussion of any of them. This is mostly a recipe book.

Fresh apple juice and gelatin, mostly (some lime juice, sugar, and salt as well): chilled for four hours and then dispensed from a thermowhip. It held its shape for about a half hour before deflating, so it has to be a last-minute addition to the pie before serving.

They don't show a single "perfect" process: there are several different techniques they use to achieve different sorts of results. One is boneless, one is skinless, one is more like the traditional. The specially engineer the "traditional" sauce to be low water content so it doesn't make the wings soggy.

Apple Cream Pie (continued) This morning I assembled (and ate) the Apple Cream pie. Last night we made the apple foam, which then sat in the fridge overnight. Will it blend? Strained: After overnight refrigeration, dispensed onto the pie (whose crust did not appreciate being extracted from the tart pan): I was a little surprised at the stability of the foam after slicing. I figured it would run some, but it actually stayed quite neat: Overall, the taste was good, in particular the combination of the apple foam, vanilla custard, and brown-butter crust. The general consensus was that next time I should double or even triple the amount of apple foam, which gives a great apple punch as you first take a bite, but is too quickly lost to the custard. I also thought that I should have used fresher cinnamon (and probably actually canela as I'm sure the recipe intended... all I had on hand was some Rancho Gordo Mexican true cinnamon, which is not as intense). Still, everything worked well, and with some tweaking this is a winner.

In the new Modernist Cuisine at Home book they often suggest using standard ziploc bags instead of vacuum sealing: I have heard of people cleaning those out and re-using them (though of course there are lots of questions about the relative merits of doing so).