i 'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food
in the last twenty years people have realized that science has a tremendousamount to do with food in fact understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking some of the chemistry some of the physics and so forth
but that 's not in any of those books there 's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed some about new aesthetics new approaches to food there 's a chef in spain named ferran adria he 's developed a very avant garde cuisine a guy in england called heston blumenthal he 's developed his avant garde cuisine
none of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last twenty years is in any of those books none of them are taught in cooking schools
in order to learn them you have to go work in those restaurants
and finally there 's the old way of viewing food is the old way
and so a few years ago fours years ago actually i set out to say is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before so we tried and i 'll show you what we came up with
this is a picture called a cutaway this is actually the first picture i took in the book the idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli and this magic view allows you to see all of what 's happening while the broccoli steams
then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact
and the hope was two fold one is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli
but the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into
stuff that was a little more technical maybe a little bit more scientific maybe a little bit more chef y than they otherwise would have because with that beautiful photo maybe i can also package this little box here
well that first cutaway picture worked so we said okay let 's do some more so here 's another one we discovered why woks are the shape they are this shaped wok doesn 't work very well this caught fire three times
but we had a philosophy which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second
and each of these text blocks explains a key thing that 's going on in this case boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic you don 't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can 't grow in the acid
so this is great for pickled vegetables which is what we 're canning here
here 's our hamburger cutaway one of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish so you can lavish all the same care all the same technique on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish
and if you do lavish as much technique as possible and you try to make the highest quality hamburger it gets to be a little bit involved
the point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven 't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers
most of the characteristic char grilled taste
doesn 't come from the wood or the charcoal buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing or burning so it 's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste now you might wonder how do we make these cutaways most people assume we use photoshop
and the answer is no not really we use a machine shop
and it turns out the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half
so we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world
now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots we would glue a piece of pyrex or heat resistant glass in front we used a red very high temperature silicon to do that the great thing is when you cut something in half you have another half
so you photograph that in exactly the same position and then you can substitute in and that part does use photoshop just the edges so it 's very much like in a hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air supported by wires and then they take the wires away digitally so you 're flying through the air
in most cases though there was no glass like for the hamburger we just cut the damn barbecue and so those coals that kept falling off the edge we kept having to put them back up but again it only has to work for a thousandth of a second
the wok shot caught fire three times what happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire
but to make them palatable we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this we 've got lots of little tidbits in the book everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage right
but you probably don 't know that much about james watt but now you will we put a biography of james watt in it 's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt and where he got his inspiration it turned out he was hired by a scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey
we also did a lot of calculation i personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook here 's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue or other radiant heat source goes as you move away from it so as you move vertically away from this surface
the heat falls off as you move side to side it moves off that horn shaped region is what we call the sweet spot that 's the place where the heat is even to within ten percent so that 's the place where you really want to cook and it 's got this funny horn shaped thing which as far as i know again the first cookbook to ever do this
you know there 's two ways you can make a product you can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it
here 's a step by step that shows grinding hamburger if you really want great hamburger it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain
and it 's really simple as you can see here as it comes out of the grinder you just have a little tray and you just take it off in little
passes build it up slice it vertically here 's the final hamburger this is the thirty hour hamburger we make every aspect of this burger the lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it we also have things about how to make the bun there 's a mushroom ketchup it goes on and on
now watch closely this is popcorn i 'll explain it here the popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics isn 't that beautiful we have a very high speed camera which we had lots of fun with on the book
the key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of one thousand six hundred that 's what 's happening to the water inside that popcorn so it 's a great illustration of that
now i 'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual we have a chapter on gels and because people watch mythbusters and csi i thought well let 's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin
here it is
and they 're nice big pages too
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