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So I'm going to tell you a little bit
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about reimagining food.
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I've been interested in food for a long time.
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I taught myself to cook
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with a bunch of big books like this.
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I went to chef school in France.
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And there is a way
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the world both envisions food,
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the way the world writes about food and learns about food.
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And it's largely what you would find in these books.
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And it's a wonderful thing.
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But there's some things that have been going on
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since this idea of food was established.
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In the last 20 years,
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people have realized that science
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has a tremendous amount to do with food.
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In fact, understanding why cooking works
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requires knowing the science of cooking --
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some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth.
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But that's not in any of those books.
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There's also a tremendous number of techniques
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that chefs have developed,
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some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food.
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There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria.
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He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine.
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A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal,
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he's developed his avant-garde cuisine.
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None of the techniques that these people have developed
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over the course of the last 20 years
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is in any of those books.
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None of them are taught in cooking schools.
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In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants.
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And finally,
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there's the old way of viewing food
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is the old way.
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And so a few years ago -- fours years ago, actually --
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I set out to say, is there a way
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we can communicate science and technique and wonder?
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Is there a way we can show people food
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in a way they have not seen it before?
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So we tried, and I'll show you what we came up with.
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This is a picture called a cutaway.
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This is actually the first picture I took in the book.
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The idea here is to explain what happens
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when you steam broccoli.
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And this magic view allows you to see
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all of what's happening
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while the broccoli steams.
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Then each of the different little pieces around it
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explain some fact.
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And the hope was two-fold.
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One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli.
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But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people
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into stuff that was a little more technical,
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maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y
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than they otherwise would have.
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Because with that beautiful photo,
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maybe I can also package this little box here
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that talks about how steaming and boiling
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actually take different amounts of time.
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Steaming ought to be faster.
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It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation,
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and this explains that.
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Well, that first cutaway picture worked,
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so we said, "Okay, let's do some more."
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So here's another one.
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We discovered why woks are the shape they are.
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This shaped wok doesn't work very well;
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this caught fire three times.
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But we had a philosophy,
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which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second.
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(Laughter)
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And one of our canning cutaways.
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Once you start cutting things in half, you kind of get carried away,
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so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan.
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And each of these text blocks
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explains a key thing that's going on.
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In this case, boiling water canning
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is for canning things that are already pretty acidic.
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You don't have to heat them up as hot
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as you would something you do pressure canning
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because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid.
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So this is great for pickled vegetables,
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which is what we're canning here.
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Here's our hamburger cutaway.
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One of our philosophies in the book
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is that no dish
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is really intrinsically any better than any other dish.
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So you can lavish
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all the same care, all the same technique,
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on a hamburger
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as you would on some much more fancy dish.
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And if you do lavish as much technique as possible,
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and you try to make the highest quality hamburger,
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it gets to be a little bit involved.
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The New York Times ran a piece
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after my book was delayed
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and it was called "The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger
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Just Got Longer."
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Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe,
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if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff,
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it does take about 30 hours.
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Of course, you're not actually working the whole time.
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Most of the time is kind of sitting there.
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The point of this cutaway
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is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven't seen before
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and to explain the physics of hamburgers
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and the chemistry of hamburgers,
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because, believe it or not, there is something to the physics and chemistry --
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in particular, those flames underneath the burger.
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Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste
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doesn't come from the wood or the charcoal.
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Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference.
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Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing, or burning.
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So it's the fat that drips down and flares up
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that causes the characteristic taste.
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Now you might wonder, how do we make these cutaways?
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Most people assume we use Photoshop.
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And the answer is: no, not really;
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we use a machine shop.
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And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half
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is to actually cut them in half.
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So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world.
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(Laughter)
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We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half.
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The manufacturer said,
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"What would it take for you to cut one in half?"
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I said, "It would have to show up free."
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And so it showed up, we used it a little while,
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we cut it in half.
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Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots.
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We would glue a piece of Pyrex
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or heat-resistant glass in front.
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We used a red, very high-temperature silicon to do that.
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The great thing is, when you cut something in half,
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you have another half.
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So you photograph that in exactly the same position,
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and then you can substitute in --
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and that part does use Photoshop -- just the edges.
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So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie
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where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires,
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and then they take the wires away digitally
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so you're flying through the air.
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In most cases, though, there was no glass.
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Like for the hamburger, we just cut the damn barbecue.
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And so those coals that kept falling off the edge,
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we kept having to put them back up.
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But again, it only has to work for a thousandth of a second.
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The wok shot caught fire three times.
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What happens when you have your wok cut in half
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is the oil goes down into the fire
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and whoosh!
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One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way.
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But hey, they grow back.
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In addition to cutaways,
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we also explain physics.
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This is Fourier's law of heat conduction.
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It's a partial differential equation.
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We have the only cookbook in the world
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that has partial differential equations in it.
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But to make them palatable,
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we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire
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and photographed it like this.
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We've got lots of little tidbits in the book.
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Everybody knows that your various appliances
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have wattage, right?
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But you probably don't know that much about James Watt.
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But now you will; we put a biography of James Watt in.
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It's a little couple paragraphs
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to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt,
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and where he got his inspiration.
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It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery
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to understand why they were burning so damn much peat
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to distill the whiskey.
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We also did a lot of calculation.
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I personally wrote thousands of lines of code
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to write this cookbook.
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Here's a calculation
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that shows how the intensity of a barbecue,
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or other radiant heat source, goes
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as you move away from it.
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So as you move vertically away from this surface,
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the heat falls off.
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As you move side to side, it moves off.
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That horn-shaped region
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is what we call the sweet spot.
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That's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent.
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So that's the place where you really want to cook.
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And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing,
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which as far as I know, again,
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the first cookbook to ever do this.
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Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it.
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You know, there's two ways
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you can make a product.
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You can do lots of market research
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and do focus groups
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and figure out what people really want,
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or you can just kind of go for it
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and make the book you want and hope other people like it.
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Here's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger.
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If you really want great hamburger,
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it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain.
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And it's really simple, as you can see here.
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As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray,
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and you just take it off in little passes,
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build it up, slice it vertically.
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Here's the final hamburger.
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This is the 30-hour hamburger.
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We make every aspect of this burger.
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The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it.
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We also have things about how to make the bun.
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There's a mushroom, ketchup -- it goes on and on.
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Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here.
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The popcorn is illustrating
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a key thing in physics.
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Isn't that beautiful?
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We have a very high-speed camera,
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which we had lots of fun with on the book.
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The key physics principle here
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is when water boils to steam
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it expands by a factor of 1,600.
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That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn.
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So it's a great illustration of that.
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Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual.
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We have a chapter on gels.
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And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI,
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I thought, well, let's put in a recipe
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for a ballistics gelatin.
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Well, if you have a high-speed camera,
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and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around,
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pretty soon somebody does this.
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(Gasps)
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Now the amazing thing here
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is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic
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what happens to human flesh when you get shot -- that's why you shouldn't get shot.
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The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down,
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it falls back down as a nice block.
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Anyway, here's the book.
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Here it is.
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2,438 pages.
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And they're nice big pages too.
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(Applause)
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A friend of mine complained
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that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen,
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so there's a sixth volume
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that has washable, waterproof paper.
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(Applause)