June 8, 2023 • 38 mins
Nathan Myhrvold is a voracious intellect: he enrolled in college at the age of 14, he has multiple degrees in mathematics, geophysics and physics, he helped build Microsoft as its Chief Technology Officer, and he has published 16 volumes of encyclopedic, visually arresting books. Martha is a longtime friend and admirer. She connects with him in his lab to talk about his latest book, Food and Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography, and a range of other projects, from building nuclear reactors to perfecting pastry. Listen in as the sparks fly.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, Nathan, Hey Martha, how are you great?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Old friend? Nathan Irvold is a true lifelong learner. His
interests range from physics, technology, dinosaurs, photography, food. The list
goes on and on. Nathan, who enrolled in college at
(00:25):
the age of fourteen, was once the chief strategist and
chief technology officer at Microsoft, and Bill Gates has been
quoted as saying, quote, I don't know anyone I would
say is smarter than Nathan unquote. I've had the pleasure
of getting to know Nathan over the years. A true
lover of food, He's been on my television show to
(00:45):
demonstrate suvid salmon, and I visited him at his impressive laboratory. Nathan,
who is an amazing photographer, has just released his latest
book featuring images of food like you've never seen before.
Joining me to catch up talk about his new book
and his other book projects and what's happening at his laboratory.
(01:07):
Is Nathan Merveld. Welcome to my podcast. Nathan. It's so
nice to see you. Or we're on zoom so I'm
seeing you, but I'll need an image of you and
much rather if I were there in your laboratory with you,
because that is a fascinating place. You built it when.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, we built the first version about ten years ago
and then at some point we wound up moving to
a bigger facility, so that was maybe five years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So I haven't seen your new one.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
The one's much cooler, even.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
It was very cool. The first one I have still
had machinery that you encouraged me to buy. Sitting around
and my little laboratories. Oh my gosh, it's so much fun.
And so you're you're continuing in what is your quest?
What is your quest with this amazing photography and food
(01:59):
investigation that you're doing. What are you looking for?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You know, our general idea is to look at food
and look at recipes in a different way than anyone
has done before. You know, we all see food a
couple times a day because we get hungry and so
we eat, But do you really look at it? And
when we do look at it, we're constrained by the
fact that a we don't have that much time, but
(02:23):
we also can only see things of a certain size. Well,
you know, if it's really really tiny, you're not gonna
be able to appreciate it. If it happens too quickly
or even too slowly, you don't necessarily see it. So
photography gives us a way of showing people food, familiar
food items, but showing it to them in a very
unfamiliar way. And I think that's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And these books, by the way, are monumental books. These
are really extraordinary books. Your first book was five volumes
and it was the History and Fundamentals, the Ingredients, the
Techniques and Equipment, the recipes one and the recipes two.
Five books and a huge slipcase made of what was
(03:08):
it made out of?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Plexiglass for the first one, plexiglass. Yes, Since then we've
moved to sainless steel slipcases.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah yeah. And then don't drop them on your foot,
by the way, don't please. But they're extraordinary. And Nathan
does a lot of the photography himself. Now have you
always loved taking pictures?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Since I was nine years old, which is also the
time I got serious about cooking. When I was nine,
I decided I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner all
by myself, and I went to the library and got
all these books and read them and I made Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
By god, do you remember the menu.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yes I do. Yeah, I did a turkey, of course,
and had a bunch of techniques to try to get
the turkey to look perfect. It looks pretty good. The
funniest part is I'd found a cookbook called the Pyromaniacs
Cookbook which was all about setting things on fire serving
at flombay, which, to a nine year old boy said,
the idea of setting dinner on fire at the table
(04:05):
was just so cool. So of course I had a
flombey thing. I think I had flombayed soup potatoes yum. Yeah,
burning rum poured over the top.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Oh wrong, okay with sweet potatoes is good. That's good.
And you're were you the only child?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
H No? I have a brother two years younger.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Does he share your love of food?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
He shares my love of food. He's not as taken
his cooking to the lunatic extreme that I have.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
But if you have, and what does your mother and
what does your mother say? You never told me about
your mother?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Well, you know, with your Sports Illustrated cover out, it's
kind of appropriate because my mother was a swimsuit model.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Ah, how great.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
But when mom was active, they Sports Illustrated didn't do
that thing. They started in sixty four. If they'd done
it in fifty four, Mom would have been in the issue.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Okay, you would have been in the issue she was.
That's probably That's probably when I should have been in
the issue. Not in fifty four. Well, I looked good
in a bathing suitent in fifty four. But I looked
really good in a bathing suitent around the sixties, like
that was my that was my prime for.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Bathing Well, I've never had a prime for bathing suits.
So so yeah, so mom was a skinny swimsuit model,
but I grew up in a farm in Minnesota, and
so she thought food was very important. But I've taken
the cooking to a level quite beyond moms.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Right, But this all happened after Really you went to
college at fourteen? Yeah, fourteen, And where was that? Where'd
you go?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Well? Initially I went to Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California,
and then then transfer to UCLA. I got a degree
there in math, bachelor's math and a master's degree in
geophysics and space physics. And then I went to Princeton
and I got a master's degree in economics, and then
I got a PhD in physics from Princeton and I
was twenty three way then.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And then did you go straight to Microsoft?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
No, I was a postdoctoral researcher. That normally in physics,
after you get a PhD, you go and you work
as a postdoc for a couple of years, and then
you try to get a faculty position. And I was
a postdoc with Stephen Hawking.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
The thing about working for Stephen Hawking is after you've
done that, it makes it very hard to feel sorry
for yourself because despite his incredible physical challenges because he
had als, he had a fantastic attitude and a great
sense of humor. And you know, whenever I start feeling
down about something, I think, well, hey, what do I
(06:50):
have to complain about compared to a m.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right, Well, that is that is a good lesson and
it is a good perspective to have because he did
so much. And Charles Sue My, you know, Charles Simony,
he has the seat at is it an Oxford?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, he's Charles endowed a chair at Oxford for the
Public Understanding of science.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Right, And he taught me a lot about Stephen Hawkin.
But wow, it's amazing. So then after that, is that
when you went to Microsoft.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Then I wound up starting a company in nineteen eighty four.
Two years later, I sold the company to Microsoft and
I went along with it, and I became Microsoft's first
chief technology officer and.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Worked on which projects because you know, we all use
everything that Microsoft's developed, and what were your projects?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Well, I was one of the development managers. I went
to IS two point zero and then I you know,
saw Windows and all the way through. But I also
was at one point or another Microsoft word in Excel
and programs like that all reported to me. I also
started the research group at Microsoft, and we built one
of the best research groups and computer science in the world.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Aren't you proud of the company that you really helped build?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I am.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
It's still an amazing company. It has not gone down
a rabbit hole. It has been producing and creating ever since.
And you left in what year?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I left in ninety nine, so I've been gone for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
But oh, I know, I know. But still maybe.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's what it took for them to be successful. As
you clear out the dead wood, get me out of there.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
They could have started the Microsoft restaurants or something like that.
But I think what you've done and what they've done
is just utterly phenomenal. And when you left, did you
know your focus was going to be food or what
were you What did you do when you left?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Well, you know, I'd built a house which had a
big kitchen. House I saw, Yes, the house you saw,
and that had a big kitchen in it, which was
so I wanted to spend more time on cooking. I'd
always been interested in cooking while I worked at Microsoft.
I actually got Bill to give me a leave of
absence to go to chef's school in France. And I
(09:10):
am the one person that has ever made that request
and then had it granted.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Did you ever cook for Bill?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Oh? Yes, I've cooked for Bill many times.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And now he spends his time Nathan spends his time
in this laboratory. I only saw the first laboratory, but
the second laboratory must be just extraordinary. I have to
come visit. You do do, yes? I do well. This
new book Food and Drink Modernist cuisine photography is utterly stunning, Nathan. Oh,
(09:41):
and where did the idea for this come up?
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Well, you know, I since my first book, which came
out in twenty ten, the first big cookbook that had
unusual photos of food. I have continued to take pictures
both for subsequent books like Modernist Pizza or Modernist Brand,
and also just pictures for their own sake. I've actually
have a couple of galleries where I sell my pictures
(10:05):
of food.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And another thing that Nathan has excelled at is to
is photographing like yeast rising, dough rising with all the
air bubbles in it, and other substances that you never
even imagined that their food. Oh you people out there, listeners,
please take a look at food and drink Modernist Cuisine
(10:29):
photography by Nathan Mervold. And what is the Modernist Cuisine
brand all about?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, after building that house with that kitchen, I sort
of wanted to get back into cooking. I had more
time since I'd retired from Microsoft, and I certainly evenly thought, well,
I know that there's a bunch of new cooking techniques
that people had been developing chefs like for An Adrea
or Heston Blumenthal or Wiley Defrayine in New York or
(10:56):
Grand Akets at Alnea. So I knew that that was
going on. I natally thought, well, I'll just get buy
some big book on it and i'll learn about it,
and there was no big book on it at the time,
and I also, in reading everything I could about it,
I realized that the normal intuition that people had about
(11:16):
traditional cooking and traditional cooking techniques wouldn't always work. So
I started doing lots of scientific experiments, and I did
a bunch of computer simulations, and I eventually decided, hey,
since that big book doesn't exist, I should write it.
And that's what led to the first Modernist Cuisine, and
(11:37):
since then we've continued the same spirit of exploration in
other topics. We did Modernist Cuisine at Home that was
a home version of the book that Our next big
book was Modernist Bread, where bread is one of these
amazing foods of mankind. It's thousands and thousands of years old.
But it's very complex because you need to have the
(11:58):
yeast work just right everything else work correctly. There's a
lot of stories and legends that are passed down about
why you do something in cooking, and some of those
are brilliant observations that are totally correct, and some of
them aren't. But if you're just doing the same recipe
(12:19):
over and over again, it kind of doesn't matter whether
they're true or not, because those are just stories that
you tell while you're following the recipe. And you don't
need to know how a recipe works to follow it.
You just follow it fairly, faithfully, and you're going to
get a good result if it's a decent recipe. But
I was interested in why. I was curious, so why
(12:39):
does something work this way? How does it work? And
so that's what the Monarchs cuisine brand is about. It's
about books where we go into enormous detail to understand
everything we possibly can bring lots of curiosity and lots
of scientific knowledge, maybe lots of unique equipment and things.
(13:00):
Read a book that is both a cookbook, but it's
also explaining how things work.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And that is so valuable to the home cook. It's
so valuable to the chef, the professional chef, and to
anybody interested in food. I just love looking and learning
from your books because you learn a lot. Now I
have forgotten I have something I wanted to ask you.
Have you done Potashoe?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Well, our next book is Modernist Pastry? Okay, so we're
doing Patashoe for Modernist pastry. It's one of the one
of the key dough types and as you know, very
different than other kinds of does and batters because you
cook it partially.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
First. I've looked at so many potashoe recipes. So I
have a young man who was working in my kitchen.
If you go back into many other books, the proportions
are pretty much the same. So this guy, Moys's his
name is. He's just a beginner cook, chef, and he
(14:01):
misread the recipe and he added fourteen eggs.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Okay, so he was making an omelet.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
No no, and my eggs are My eggs were small.
They were all the little pullet eggs in my in
my bowl from my chickens, and they were the best
puffs I have really eaten. So tell your chefs will
try the pata shoe with more than four eggs. You
might have already found that out already, but I'm telling
(14:34):
you they are a thin, thin shell of dough and
a absolutely empty center.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Well that's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
But again, this is the way great recipes happen. Yes,
experimentation and error, a mistake, you know, some misreading. I mean,
it was just phenomenal what happened. And I thought about you.
I thought about you right away. Awesome. Nathan has to
know about this. So who do you make your books for?
(15:13):
Is it a special audience? Have you found you've done
research on your audience? I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Well. I like to say that we write for people
that are passionate and curious about food. If you're not
passionate about food, you're not going to pick up much
less buy and read these books that are twenty five
hundred pages long. And of course you don't have to
read them from one end of the book to the
other end of the book. You can dip into them.
(15:39):
Some of the people who who buy the book buy
it because I think the book is a beautiful object
into itself. We try to have good quality paper and
high quality printing and great photos and so forth. Other
people are have it more for how does this work? Notion?
So they're curious about how how things work in cooking,
(16:01):
and they know that our books will explain it in
a way that they can understand and ask lots of
crazy questions most people don't ask. Then there's a course
serious home cooks and there's professional cooks. And a key
principle we have is we don't try to dumb stuff down.
(16:21):
You know, there's a bunch of books like cooking for dummies,
and those are fine books.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
But I can't write those are Peter Workman books. He
was smart. Do you have any of those books?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
He sold a lot of those books. But here's the thing.
I can't write that book better than he did. Okay,
it's these don't these don't Well, the world doesn't need
yet another one of those. The thing that that I
can do, hopefully is do these books that have a
bigger scope than most because we do tons of research
about history, about all other aspects of the food and
(17:01):
higher production values and try and lots of cool stuff.
So it's a very different take than most cookbooks. But
that's why we exist.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, they're extraordinary and I keep saying that, but I
really mean it. You use technology in a way nobody's
ever used before for food. There is a guy that
lives in Seattle. Do you know Kenji alt oh I?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Kenji? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Does Kenji come and work with you ever?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
He's been the lab and we'd love to have him
come to the lab more. I mean the last couple
of years, no one who's coming to the use of COVID.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
He's he's a very curious journalist who writes very serious
articles from the New York Times and publishes them. He
just published another recipe last week on how to cook
salmon with the skin on. But he salts it and
leaves it for up to three days and salt the
heavily salted fish and then just cooks it, doesn't rinse it.
(17:53):
How do you cook salmon?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Well as as little as possible, Right, So, I like
salmon cooked to about one hundred and thirteen degrees now
in you in the Southwest in the summer, that's outside
temperature just about or hot tub temperature. At that temperature,
it doesn't really change color. It looks almost more like
(18:17):
smoked salmon or even raw salmon, but it is fully cooked.
What Kenji was trying to get away from is the
fact that you have juices come out of the salmon
and beat up on the salmon on the outside. Then
they usually solidify.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That white stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, well, if you cook it at one hundred and
thirteen degrees, just so very briefly, but so it's all
the way through one hundred and thirteen degrees, that doesn't happen.
Now it's not crispy at that stage, so that that
would be a soft salmon. Otherwise, the key thing to
do is to sear it like crazy under high heat
(18:54):
and then let the heat just soak through the rest.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I agree with that. I like that one too.
But he's an amazing researcher. And but he doesn't have
a lab like yours.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, I don't think many people have a lab your partisan,
and if they do, they're probably putting it to a
higher purpose than fooling around with the cooking. But here's
an example of something we discovered recently that I thought
it illustrates something. We're working chocolate chip cookies. So we've
gathered hundreds of chocolate chip cookie recipes. We analyze them
(19:28):
and analyze the differences. But here was the thing that
just started to bug me. Most recipes have baking soda
in them. Baking soda needs to react with acid. What's
the acid? Here's the other thing that was weird. Normally,
when you make something with baking soda, you have to
cook it right away because it's bubbling and if you
(19:49):
put it in the fridge overnight, you're not going to
have any rise to it. But it's quite often people
do put the cookies in the fridge for hours or overnight.
It turns out it's the brown sugar, which is weird.
But brown sugar and molasses for that matter, are acidic.
It's so sweet. We don't normally think of it as
(20:10):
a cidy, but if you test it with a little
pH test strip or a pH meter, it's a cidy.
And that's part of what the strong flavor of molasses
is about. There's other flavors that are in there as well.
So that was weird. I'd never We tried lots of books,
we tried asking everybody I knew. Nobody knew what the
acid was if that could possibly react. Of course, if
(20:33):
you use baking powder, baking better comes with its own acid,
and so that would explain it. But most cookie recipes
are soda.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Are you putting a chocolate chip cookie in your pastry book? Oh?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, absolutely we are.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Oh okay, Now is it a thin, crispy cookie or
is it a big fat doe cookie.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's you know, like tomato or tomato. It's I think
it's whatever people grew up with is the one that
they're going to gravitate towards. And so we have a
whole section where we describe if you want to get
different textures, here's what you do you know. You also
get this interesting philosophical question, what is a chocolate chip cookie?
(21:13):
In Europe? Where they know that Americans eat chocolate chip cookies,
but a lot of European bakers never seem to have
actually had one. You'll see things like in Paris right now,
it's very trendy to have chocolate chip cookies. Most of
the bakeries in Paris and now absolutely the weirdest thing,
and most of them, by American standards.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Are terrible.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Most of them are shortbread cookies that have chocolate chips
in them. So it has the texture of a short bread,
which is not a bad thing, but it's not what
we would call it chocolate chip cookie.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But mine is baking powder and baking soda in it
and brown sugar and white sugar and chocolate chips.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah. So brown sugar, as we explained a little minute ago,
is good for the flavor, but it also really does
help it rise oddly enough.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Oh, I can't wait to see your book because pastry
is my favorite thing. Yeah, I mean, I just I
just love making the best pie crust, and I love
making the patashu and theday all those things. That's all.
I that's what I really like to make. And Brioch.
Oh are you gonna do Breosia? That in your bread book?
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Well, we have it in the read book. We've actually
learned some new things. We have an update to the
Brioche that'll be in the pastry book in large part
because there's lots of other pastries that are Brioche based.
Right now, you start with brioche and then you're either
going to accessorize it after baking or you're going to
use that as the basis for making something like a
(22:43):
Danish pastry or something of that sort.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, tell me when you're doing something really excited and
I'll come to Seattle to see your lab because that
that is pastry is my thing. I mean, I just
love it so much. So is there is pastry? Does
that include cakes?
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah? And that is Uh, it's a big task. It
turns out Earth has a lot of cakes. Yeah, there's
a ton of them. We can't comprehensively cover all of them.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Of course, what's your favorite cake?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
So for the cake base, the actual cake part of
the cake, not the frosting and the decoration. We've been
doing a lot of stuff with chiffon cake, and I
like chiffon cake better, I've decided, than an ordinary sponge
cake or a frenchien mas base. It's got a I
(23:30):
think it's got the ideal texture for something that you're
then going to frost or fill or do that sort
of thing too. We have all of them in the book,
of course, but that's probably my favorite.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
My favorite cake of all time was the Chipriani cake,
the merangue cake. So that's basically a chiffon cake but
as egg yolks in it. And that's one little eight
inch cake that comes out to be like, you know,
like ten inches high, and it's all covered with meringue,
and that the crimpitches here in the in the middle
with whip cream. That's a very seriously good recipe.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Okay, well, we will make sure we include it then.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
So how many people are working with you nowadays in
your lab?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Well on the cookbook, We've got about six people in
the kitchen that we have, you know, probably another six
or seven people that are working editorial or marketing or
other things. So that's our little publishing company. There's all
together that there's one of the one hundred people that
come to work in the lab doing other more serious
(24:35):
science work right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
But you are you still doing your whole company with
the patents?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yes, we are still well. A lot of the whole
startup world is focused on people starting companies, but there's
been less attention I felt on the process of invention,
of coming up with what a new idea is. So
we made a company that was dedicated to invention, both
coming up with our own inventions, supporting external inventors who
(25:03):
are really good at coming up with inventions, and investing
in existing inventions. And so I've been running that for
god long twenty years now.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
So what's what was last year's invention of the year.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Well, for the very newest inventions, there's two ways you
can count that. You can either say, what are the
things that seem to be doing the best at the moment,
and there We've got a bunch of inventions and a
technology called meta materials. It's an exotic part of stolid
state physics. It's about making new kinds of wireless communications devices.
(25:41):
So we've got a couple of companies that we've started
that are doing well at that. Probably our most dramatic
one is we invented a new type of nuclear power
reactor to make carbon free Energy, and we have a
company that we've spun out Bill Gates as the chairman
of that company. I'm the vice Gaerman and we have
(26:03):
a deal to build a power plant in.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Wyoming using nuclear power.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, it's a new type, so it'll be the first
really new type of nuclear power reactor built in like
thirty years.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Big, Well, they're all big in some sense of the
word big.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Well, I meant I meant in size. You know, the
nuclear reactors that you fly over all the time are
really clunky looking giant cones that sit there.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes, that those big cones that you're seeing are actually
the cooling towers. That's not where the nuclear stuff happens.
It happens in a much smaller building. But that's the
image of them quite rightly. So ours are smaller than that.
The trouble is they're less efficient if you build them
very small. So there are some people trying to work
(26:50):
on very small nuclear reactors, but you get some efficiency
issues if you build them very small. There's also an
issue with finding a site to build them, because it
turns out the neighbors don't want it built in their
backyard and they don't care if it's a small nuclear
reactor or a big nuclear reactor, because even a small
reactor is big in terms of the energy output.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So are they Are they dangerous?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Well, we think ours are by far the safest that
anyone's ever designed. You know, the world needs to find
carbon free sources of energy, and you have to measure
both what's the objective danger that you have from the
power plant with the longer term danger from climate change.
(27:38):
In the case of a coal or a natural gas
power plant, they killed people every year, way more people
have ever been killed by nuclear.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
But also what about the pollution.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
The pollution, Well, that's the trouble is the pollution then
from those fossil fuel plants that may seem like either
they're not really safe, but they may seem like they're bounded.
Ultimately the pollution is going to cause way way way
more harm. So I think if you take a very
rational view, you have to say, we need to have
carbon free sources of energy. Solar and wind are some
(28:11):
of those things, but they don't work either someone by
twenty four or solar doesn't work at night. So you
need to have what are called base load power supplies
to balance that, and nuclear is perfect for that.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
We think you get the gist listeners. Nathan is involved
in a lot of interesting projects, not just food, but many, many,
many other forereaching projects. I have a few silly questions
(28:45):
for you back to food. You've learned many things, and
I would love to get your opinion on fresh versus
aged mozzurilla, which is better.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
So when I went to Italy for the Pizza book,
we went and ate mozzarella de bouffala, you know, just
coming right out of the vat, and it had a
totally different texture than any mozzarella buffalo to have the
United States, and I had it in Italy before, but it
really struck me what is going on? And it turns out,
(29:20):
whenever we get fresh mozzarella in the United States, if
it's mozzerrella de buffala, it's coming from Italy. It's not fresh.
It's a week or two old. And so the super
soft texture that you might be used to from a
cuprasi salad or something like that, the very fresh stuff
doesn't have it. It squeaks when you bite it, so
(29:44):
it's a totally different texture. So yeah, and now that's
not extremely aged cheese, like like a blue cheese or
a parmechant or something else that could be aged for
for months or even years. But it's very striking to
me how some of the the reasons that people would
say they love mozzarella de buffalo if you talk to
(30:04):
people in the United States are totally missing in Italy because
it's a different cheese.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Does it melt nicely on the pizza?
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Well, fresh mozzarella has a problem with melting on a pizza,
which is it can be too.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Watery, too wet, rage.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
So what all of the best pizzolas and aples do
is they shred it, put it in a colander in
the fridge and let it sit overnight, you know, in
a bowl, so that you can let it drain. And
that drain mozzarella is way easier to use on a
pizza without it getting soupy in the middle.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
That's a good idea. Why does the sauce keep the
center of the pizza from rising?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
That was another one of our curiosity questions. I was
looking at a pizza, say how come the rim is
so tall compared to the center, And people say, oh, well,
that's because leaving more dough at the rim. But in Naples,
the traditional approach, the dough is dead flat, there's no
(31:08):
extra dough at the rim, you just put it in
the center. Then we thought, well, maybe it's the weight
of the sauce and the dough and the cheese. So
we took sand, We weighed out and equal a weight
of sand, spread that on our pizza. Pizza just puffed
right up. Threw the sand off, it doesn't care. And
(31:30):
so the reason is that the sauce is wet. And
because the sauce is wet, it doesn't matter if the
oven is five hundred degrees. The wet sauce is going
to boil when it gets hot. That means it can't
be higher than two hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit, and
that's actually relatively cold. And it's that cooling effect that
(31:52):
keeps the pizza from puffing up, because most of that
puffing up in the rim is puffing up by steam.
It's actually the same method as Patta show in your
high egg you putta show, it's the same deal. Your
steam is what powers that. And if you've got a
layer of tomato sauce on top, you don't get hot
(32:13):
enough to have enough steam. That's what makes the center
of the pizza low.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
What can the home cooked. You to optimize the home
oven for pizza, so.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Pizza ovens are almost always hotter than home ovens. There
are a few kinds of pizza that work very well
in home ovens, but they're a specific type. Detroit style pizza,
which has a thick crust fo katcha, which isn't really
a kind of pizza, but you can put toppings kind
of like a pizza. Those things work super well in
a home oven. If you really want to go beyond that,
(32:45):
what you need to do is get something that will
hold heat. So people will use a pizza stone. I
don't think the pizza stone is as good as a
big block of metal. So the simplest way to get
a block of metal is a flat cast iron skillet.
They're cheap, you know, These black iron things are about
(33:06):
a quarter of an inch thick.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
That's good enough.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, that works great. So then you put that in
there and you make your oven very hot, by very hot,
basically hos.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
It will go like five hundred that's about the that's
about the limit for most home ovens.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Most home ovens four fifty five hundred, yeah, is marked
on the oven, and then depending on the oven, sometimes
it's marked as five hundred and it's really five point
fifty and sometimes it's really.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Four fifty, right the thermometer.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Use the thermometer. But if you let it heat up
for twenty thirty minutes before you put the dough onto
that hot surface, you'll get enough stored heat transfer that
it'll make the bottom of your pizza better. It'll rise
better the edges. So that's a really a great technique.
(33:55):
We're swell outside too. You can put that same cast
iron skillet on your barbecue. If you've got a covered
barbecue like a Weber or a green Egg or one
of those. If you put on one of those skillets
that gets nice and hot, you can put your pizza
directly onto that.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
What is your favorite grill? Now that we're outside and
cooking outside, what's your favorite well?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
For convenience, I like a gas grill. There's really no
difference in cooking with charcoal briquettes or rough charcoal or
gas into there's no product From the whole point of
charcoal is it takes out all of the smell and
the unique thing. So if someone says, oh you need
to have a mesquite charcoal, askuite charcole is just charcoal.
(34:40):
You don't need it. And what you do in as
grill instead is you typically have some metal plates. Those
metal plates get hot, and it's the infrared radiation given
off by those plates that is part of what grilling
is about. But the other part. If you just go
from a like a broiler where the infred he on
(35:00):
the top, it doesn't taste the same as a grill,
and that's because a grill also has flavor that comes
from fat from the food dripping off and flaring up
and burning. And you see that happen all the time.
It's one of the reasons that people sometimes have trouble
grilling vegetables if you put a corn on the cob,
(35:23):
or you put cut up peppers or onions.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Because there's no fat.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
There's no fat exactly, and if there's no fat, there's
no drips. If there's no drips, you don't get that
grilling flavor. So we like putting on an oil marinate
on them and then that drips and that gives you
all those of those things. But if you have a
really nice hot grill, however, you're heating the plates on
(35:47):
the grill gas that he is most convenient and you
put a nice steak on there. The dripping is what
gives you the characteristic grilling taste.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
What was the last thing that filled you with awe?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Some of these cooking things that we discover fill me
with awe. I mean that the most recent thing wasn't
the one I mentioned about the sugar being the acting
as the partially the levener. But things like that when
you discover some brand new thing and it just like
shocks you. And we've discovered a bunch of them so far,
but the cool thing is we're always finding more of them.
(36:23):
And you got like, we'll try adding extra eggs and
I think it'll make an awesome pet of shoe. But
then really understanding that and doing experiments, we can figure
out why is it working that way? You know, I
think it's awesome when you discover something new. Well, the
thing that's cool to me is about discovering it for
(36:46):
the first time. Maybe not for the first time in humanity, right,
first time? For me? That that is fun.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
After pastry, what's next?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
So if you ask a restaurant show what the pastry
chef does, it's almost any kind of dessert. But for
this book, we take pastry to mean pastries like something
in a bakery, so not ice cream, for example, not mooses.
We'll have a few mooses for filling a cake. But
(37:19):
we had to cut down the size of the endeavor
a little bit because baking as it stands is so
broad that we couldn't do all of the things we'd
like to do with gelato and sorbet and all these
other wonderful, wonderful things. But basically, this book is about
desserts that involve flour and heat. You know, the next
(37:40):
book after that will be about desserts where we do
more broadly what you would do in a dessert, which
could include things that have no flour and no heat.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Well, it's just incredible the things that you do and
have done, and it's always a pleasure Nathan to talk
to you. And you can find Nathan's latest book, Food
and Drink Modernist Cuisine Photography wherever you like to get
your books. It's a beautiful book and you'll all want
to get one. It's a great present. And also follow
(38:12):
Modernist Cuisine Instagram at Maude Cuisine. Nathan, thank you, it's
been too long, and I hope to see you in
the near future. And I do want to come to
your lab and see something about the pastry book.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Okay, okay, excellent.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
All right, well, thank you so very much and I
best to your wife and sons.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Okay, great, thank you bye,
Hi, Nathan, Hey Martha, how are you great?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Old friend? Nathan Irvold is a true lifelong learner. His
interests range from physics, technology, dinosaurs, photography, food. The list
goes on and on. Nathan, who enrolled in college at
(00:25):
the age of fourteen, was once the chief strategist and
chief technology officer at Microsoft, and Bill Gates has been
quoted as saying, quote, I don't know anyone I would
say is smarter than Nathan unquote. I've had the pleasure
of getting to know Nathan over the years. A true
lover of food, He's been on my television show to
(00:45):
demonstrate suvid salmon, and I visited him at his impressive laboratory. Nathan,
who is an amazing photographer, has just released his latest
book featuring images of food like you've never seen before.
Joining me to catch up talk about his new book
and his other book projects and what's happening at his laboratory.
(01:07):
Is Nathan Merveld. Welcome to my podcast. Nathan. It's so
nice to see you. Or we're on zoom so I'm
seeing you, but I'll need an image of you and
much rather if I were there in your laboratory with you,
because that is a fascinating place. You built it when.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, we built the first version about ten years ago
and then at some point we wound up moving to
a bigger facility, so that was maybe five years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So I haven't seen your new one.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
The one's much cooler, even.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
It was very cool. The first one I have still
had machinery that you encouraged me to buy. Sitting around
and my little laboratories. Oh my gosh, it's so much fun.
And so you're you're continuing in what is your quest?
What is your quest with this amazing photography and food
(01:59):
investigation that you're doing. What are you looking for?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You know, our general idea is to look at food
and look at recipes in a different way than anyone
has done before. You know, we all see food a
couple times a day because we get hungry and so
we eat, But do you really look at it? And
when we do look at it, we're constrained by the
fact that a we don't have that much time, but
(02:23):
we also can only see things of a certain size. Well,
you know, if it's really really tiny, you're not gonna
be able to appreciate it. If it happens too quickly
or even too slowly, you don't necessarily see it. So
photography gives us a way of showing people food, familiar
food items, but showing it to them in a very
unfamiliar way. And I think that's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And these books, by the way, are monumental books. These
are really extraordinary books. Your first book was five volumes
and it was the History and Fundamentals, the Ingredients, the
Techniques and Equipment, the recipes one and the recipes two.
Five books and a huge slipcase made of what was
(03:08):
it made out of?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Plexiglass for the first one, plexiglass. Yes, Since then we've
moved to sainless steel slipcases.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah yeah. And then don't drop them on your foot,
by the way, don't please. But they're extraordinary. And Nathan
does a lot of the photography himself. Now have you
always loved taking pictures?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Since I was nine years old, which is also the
time I got serious about cooking. When I was nine,
I decided I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner all
by myself, and I went to the library and got
all these books and read them and I made Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
By god, do you remember the menu.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yes I do. Yeah, I did a turkey, of course,
and had a bunch of techniques to try to get
the turkey to look perfect. It looks pretty good. The
funniest part is I'd found a cookbook called the Pyromaniacs
Cookbook which was all about setting things on fire serving
at flombay, which, to a nine year old boy said,
the idea of setting dinner on fire at the table
(04:05):
was just so cool. So of course I had a
flombey thing. I think I had flombayed soup potatoes yum. Yeah,
burning rum poured over the top.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Oh wrong, okay with sweet potatoes is good. That's good.
And you're were you the only child?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
H No? I have a brother two years younger.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Does he share your love of food?
Speaker 2 (04:26):
He shares my love of food. He's not as taken
his cooking to the lunatic extreme that I have.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
But if you have, and what does your mother and
what does your mother say? You never told me about
your mother?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Well, you know, with your Sports Illustrated cover out, it's
kind of appropriate because my mother was a swimsuit model.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Ah, how great.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
But when mom was active, they Sports Illustrated didn't do
that thing. They started in sixty four. If they'd done
it in fifty four, Mom would have been in the issue.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Okay, you would have been in the issue she was.
That's probably That's probably when I should have been in
the issue. Not in fifty four. Well, I looked good
in a bathing suitent in fifty four. But I looked
really good in a bathing suitent around the sixties, like
that was my that was my prime for.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Bathing Well, I've never had a prime for bathing suits.
So so yeah, so mom was a skinny swimsuit model,
but I grew up in a farm in Minnesota, and
so she thought food was very important. But I've taken
the cooking to a level quite beyond moms.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Right, But this all happened after Really you went to
college at fourteen? Yeah, fourteen, And where was that? Where'd
you go?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Well? Initially I went to Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California,
and then then transfer to UCLA. I got a degree
there in math, bachelor's math and a master's degree in
geophysics and space physics. And then I went to Princeton
and I got a master's degree in economics, and then
I got a PhD in physics from Princeton and I
was twenty three way then.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And then did you go straight to Microsoft?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
No, I was a postdoctoral researcher. That normally in physics,
after you get a PhD, you go and you work
as a postdoc for a couple of years, and then
you try to get a faculty position. And I was
a postdoc with Stephen Hawking.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
The thing about working for Stephen Hawking is after you've
done that, it makes it very hard to feel sorry
for yourself because despite his incredible physical challenges because he
had als, he had a fantastic attitude and a great
sense of humor. And you know, whenever I start feeling
down about something, I think, well, hey, what do I
(06:50):
have to complain about compared to a m.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right, Well, that is that is a good lesson and
it is a good perspective to have because he did
so much. And Charles Sue My, you know, Charles Simony,
he has the seat at is it an Oxford?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, he's Charles endowed a chair at Oxford for the
Public Understanding of science.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Right, And he taught me a lot about Stephen Hawkin.
But wow, it's amazing. So then after that, is that
when you went to Microsoft.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Then I wound up starting a company in nineteen eighty four.
Two years later, I sold the company to Microsoft and
I went along with it, and I became Microsoft's first
chief technology officer and.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Worked on which projects because you know, we all use
everything that Microsoft's developed, and what were your projects?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Well, I was one of the development managers. I went
to IS two point zero and then I you know,
saw Windows and all the way through. But I also
was at one point or another Microsoft word in Excel
and programs like that all reported to me. I also
started the research group at Microsoft, and we built one
of the best research groups and computer science in the world.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Aren't you proud of the company that you really helped build?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I am.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
It's still an amazing company. It has not gone down
a rabbit hole. It has been producing and creating ever since.
And you left in what year?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I left in ninety nine, so I've been gone for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
But oh, I know, I know. But still maybe.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's what it took for them to be successful. As
you clear out the dead wood, get me out of there.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
They could have started the Microsoft restaurants or something like that.
But I think what you've done and what they've done
is just utterly phenomenal. And when you left, did you
know your focus was going to be food or what
were you What did you do when you left?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Well, you know, I'd built a house which had a
big kitchen. House I saw, Yes, the house you saw,
and that had a big kitchen in it, which was
so I wanted to spend more time on cooking. I'd
always been interested in cooking while I worked at Microsoft.
I actually got Bill to give me a leave of
absence to go to chef's school in France. And I
(09:10):
am the one person that has ever made that request
and then had it granted.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Did you ever cook for Bill?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Oh? Yes, I've cooked for Bill many times.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And now he spends his time Nathan spends his time
in this laboratory. I only saw the first laboratory, but
the second laboratory must be just extraordinary. I have to
come visit. You do do, yes? I do well. This
new book Food and Drink Modernist cuisine photography is utterly stunning, Nathan. Oh,
(09:41):
and where did the idea for this come up?
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Well, you know, I since my first book, which came
out in twenty ten, the first big cookbook that had
unusual photos of food. I have continued to take pictures
both for subsequent books like Modernist Pizza or Modernist Brand,
and also just pictures for their own sake. I've actually
have a couple of galleries where I sell my pictures
(10:05):
of food.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And another thing that Nathan has excelled at is to
is photographing like yeast rising, dough rising with all the
air bubbles in it, and other substances that you never
even imagined that their food. Oh you people out there, listeners,
please take a look at food and drink Modernist Cuisine
(10:29):
photography by Nathan Mervold. And what is the Modernist Cuisine
brand all about?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, after building that house with that kitchen, I sort
of wanted to get back into cooking. I had more
time since I'd retired from Microsoft, and I certainly evenly thought, well,
I know that there's a bunch of new cooking techniques
that people had been developing chefs like for An Adrea
or Heston Blumenthal or Wiley Defrayine in New York or
(10:56):
Grand Akets at Alnea. So I knew that that was
going on. I natally thought, well, I'll just get buy
some big book on it and i'll learn about it,
and there was no big book on it at the time,
and I also, in reading everything I could about it,
I realized that the normal intuition that people had about
(11:16):
traditional cooking and traditional cooking techniques wouldn't always work. So
I started doing lots of scientific experiments, and I did
a bunch of computer simulations, and I eventually decided, hey,
since that big book doesn't exist, I should write it.
And that's what led to the first Modernist Cuisine, and
(11:37):
since then we've continued the same spirit of exploration in
other topics. We did Modernist Cuisine at Home that was
a home version of the book that Our next big
book was Modernist Bread, where bread is one of these
amazing foods of mankind. It's thousands and thousands of years old.
But it's very complex because you need to have the
(11:58):
yeast work just right everything else work correctly. There's a
lot of stories and legends that are passed down about
why you do something in cooking, and some of those
are brilliant observations that are totally correct, and some of
them aren't. But if you're just doing the same recipe
(12:19):
over and over again, it kind of doesn't matter whether
they're true or not, because those are just stories that
you tell while you're following the recipe. And you don't
need to know how a recipe works to follow it.
You just follow it fairly, faithfully, and you're going to
get a good result if it's a decent recipe. But
I was interested in why. I was curious, so why
(12:39):
does something work this way? How does it work? And
so that's what the Monarchs cuisine brand is about. It's
about books where we go into enormous detail to understand
everything we possibly can bring lots of curiosity and lots
of scientific knowledge, maybe lots of unique equipment and things.
(13:00):
Read a book that is both a cookbook, but it's
also explaining how things work.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And that is so valuable to the home cook. It's
so valuable to the chef, the professional chef, and to
anybody interested in food. I just love looking and learning
from your books because you learn a lot. Now I
have forgotten I have something I wanted to ask you.
Have you done Potashoe?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Well, our next book is Modernist Pastry? Okay, so we're
doing Patashoe for Modernist pastry. It's one of the one
of the key dough types and as you know, very
different than other kinds of does and batters because you
cook it partially.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
First. I've looked at so many potashoe recipes. So I
have a young man who was working in my kitchen.
If you go back into many other books, the proportions
are pretty much the same. So this guy, Moys's his
name is. He's just a beginner cook, chef, and he
(14:01):
misread the recipe and he added fourteen eggs.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Okay, so he was making an omelet.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
No no, and my eggs are My eggs were small.
They were all the little pullet eggs in my in
my bowl from my chickens, and they were the best
puffs I have really eaten. So tell your chefs will
try the pata shoe with more than four eggs. You
might have already found that out already, but I'm telling
(14:34):
you they are a thin, thin shell of dough and
a absolutely empty center.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Well that's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
But again, this is the way great recipes happen. Yes,
experimentation and error, a mistake, you know, some misreading. I mean,
it was just phenomenal what happened. And I thought about you.
I thought about you right away. Awesome. Nathan has to
know about this. So who do you make your books for?
(15:13):
Is it a special audience? Have you found you've done
research on your audience? I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Well. I like to say that we write for people
that are passionate and curious about food. If you're not
passionate about food, you're not going to pick up much
less buy and read these books that are twenty five
hundred pages long. And of course you don't have to
read them from one end of the book to the
other end of the book. You can dip into them.
(15:39):
Some of the people who who buy the book buy
it because I think the book is a beautiful object
into itself. We try to have good quality paper and
high quality printing and great photos and so forth. Other
people are have it more for how does this work? Notion?
So they're curious about how how things work in cooking,
(16:01):
and they know that our books will explain it in
a way that they can understand and ask lots of
crazy questions most people don't ask. Then there's a course
serious home cooks and there's professional cooks. And a key
principle we have is we don't try to dumb stuff down.
(16:21):
You know, there's a bunch of books like cooking for dummies,
and those are fine books.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
But I can't write those are Peter Workman books. He
was smart. Do you have any of those books?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
He sold a lot of those books. But here's the thing.
I can't write that book better than he did. Okay,
it's these don't these don't Well, the world doesn't need
yet another one of those. The thing that that I
can do, hopefully is do these books that have a
bigger scope than most because we do tons of research
about history, about all other aspects of the food and
(17:01):
higher production values and try and lots of cool stuff.
So it's a very different take than most cookbooks. But
that's why we exist.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, they're extraordinary and I keep saying that, but I
really mean it. You use technology in a way nobody's
ever used before for food. There is a guy that
lives in Seattle. Do you know Kenji alt oh I?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Kenji? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Does Kenji come and work with you ever?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
He's been the lab and we'd love to have him
come to the lab more. I mean the last couple
of years, no one who's coming to the use of COVID.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
He's he's a very curious journalist who writes very serious
articles from the New York Times and publishes them. He
just published another recipe last week on how to cook
salmon with the skin on. But he salts it and
leaves it for up to three days and salt the
heavily salted fish and then just cooks it, doesn't rinse it.
(17:53):
How do you cook salmon?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Well as as little as possible, Right, So, I like
salmon cooked to about one hundred and thirteen degrees now
in you in the Southwest in the summer, that's outside
temperature just about or hot tub temperature. At that temperature,
it doesn't really change color. It looks almost more like
(18:17):
smoked salmon or even raw salmon, but it is fully cooked.
What Kenji was trying to get away from is the
fact that you have juices come out of the salmon
and beat up on the salmon on the outside. Then
they usually solidify.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That white stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, well, if you cook it at one hundred and
thirteen degrees, just so very briefly, but so it's all
the way through one hundred and thirteen degrees, that doesn't happen.
Now it's not crispy at that stage, so that that
would be a soft salmon. Otherwise, the key thing to
do is to sear it like crazy under high heat
(18:54):
and then let the heat just soak through the rest.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I agree with that. I like that one too.
But he's an amazing researcher. And but he doesn't have
a lab like yours.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, I don't think many people have a lab your partisan,
and if they do, they're probably putting it to a
higher purpose than fooling around with the cooking. But here's
an example of something we discovered recently that I thought
it illustrates something. We're working chocolate chip cookies. So we've
gathered hundreds of chocolate chip cookie recipes. We analyze them
(19:28):
and analyze the differences. But here was the thing that
just started to bug me. Most recipes have baking soda
in them. Baking soda needs to react with acid. What's
the acid? Here's the other thing that was weird. Normally,
when you make something with baking soda, you have to
cook it right away because it's bubbling and if you
(19:49):
put it in the fridge overnight, you're not going to
have any rise to it. But it's quite often people
do put the cookies in the fridge for hours or overnight.
It turns out it's the brown sugar, which is weird.
But brown sugar and molasses for that matter, are acidic.
It's so sweet. We don't normally think of it as
(20:10):
a cidy, but if you test it with a little
pH test strip or a pH meter, it's a cidy.
And that's part of what the strong flavor of molasses
is about. There's other flavors that are in there as well.
So that was weird. I'd never We tried lots of books,
we tried asking everybody I knew. Nobody knew what the
acid was if that could possibly react. Of course, if
(20:33):
you use baking powder, baking better comes with its own acid,
and so that would explain it. But most cookie recipes
are soda.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Are you putting a chocolate chip cookie in your pastry book? Oh?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, absolutely we are.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Oh okay, Now is it a thin, crispy cookie or
is it a big fat doe cookie.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's you know, like tomato or tomato. It's I think
it's whatever people grew up with is the one that
they're going to gravitate towards. And so we have a
whole section where we describe if you want to get
different textures, here's what you do you know. You also
get this interesting philosophical question, what is a chocolate chip cookie?
(21:13):
In Europe? Where they know that Americans eat chocolate chip cookies,
but a lot of European bakers never seem to have
actually had one. You'll see things like in Paris right now,
it's very trendy to have chocolate chip cookies. Most of
the bakeries in Paris and now absolutely the weirdest thing,
and most of them, by American standards.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Are terrible.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Most of them are shortbread cookies that have chocolate chips
in them. So it has the texture of a short bread,
which is not a bad thing, but it's not what
we would call it chocolate chip cookie.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But mine is baking powder and baking soda in it
and brown sugar and white sugar and chocolate chips.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah. So brown sugar, as we explained a little minute ago,
is good for the flavor, but it also really does
help it rise oddly enough.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Oh, I can't wait to see your book because pastry
is my favorite thing. Yeah, I mean, I just I
just love making the best pie crust, and I love
making the patashu and theday all those things. That's all.
I that's what I really like to make. And Brioch.
Oh are you gonna do Breosia? That in your bread book?
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Well, we have it in the read book. We've actually
learned some new things. We have an update to the
Brioche that'll be in the pastry book in large part
because there's lots of other pastries that are Brioche based.
Right now, you start with brioche and then you're either
going to accessorize it after baking or you're going to
use that as the basis for making something like a
(22:43):
Danish pastry or something of that sort.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, tell me when you're doing something really excited and
I'll come to Seattle to see your lab because that
that is pastry is my thing. I mean, I just
love it so much. So is there is pastry? Does
that include cakes?
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah? And that is Uh, it's a big task. It
turns out Earth has a lot of cakes. Yeah, there's
a ton of them. We can't comprehensively cover all of them.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Of course, what's your favorite cake?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
So for the cake base, the actual cake part of
the cake, not the frosting and the decoration. We've been
doing a lot of stuff with chiffon cake, and I
like chiffon cake better, I've decided, than an ordinary sponge
cake or a frenchien mas base. It's got a I
(23:30):
think it's got the ideal texture for something that you're
then going to frost or fill or do that sort
of thing too. We have all of them in the book,
of course, but that's probably my favorite.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
My favorite cake of all time was the Chipriani cake,
the merangue cake. So that's basically a chiffon cake but
as egg yolks in it. And that's one little eight
inch cake that comes out to be like, you know,
like ten inches high, and it's all covered with meringue,
and that the crimpitches here in the in the middle
with whip cream. That's a very seriously good recipe.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Okay, well, we will make sure we include it then.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
So how many people are working with you nowadays in
your lab?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Well on the cookbook, We've got about six people in
the kitchen that we have, you know, probably another six
or seven people that are working editorial or marketing or
other things. So that's our little publishing company. There's all
together that there's one of the one hundred people that
come to work in the lab doing other more serious
(24:35):
science work right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
But you are you still doing your whole company with
the patents?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yes, we are still well. A lot of the whole
startup world is focused on people starting companies, but there's
been less attention I felt on the process of invention,
of coming up with what a new idea is. So
we made a company that was dedicated to invention, both
coming up with our own inventions, supporting external inventors who
(25:03):
are really good at coming up with inventions, and investing
in existing inventions. And so I've been running that for
god long twenty years now.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
So what's what was last year's invention of the year.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Well, for the very newest inventions, there's two ways you
can count that. You can either say, what are the
things that seem to be doing the best at the moment,
and there We've got a bunch of inventions and a
technology called meta materials. It's an exotic part of stolid
state physics. It's about making new kinds of wireless communications devices.
(25:41):
So we've got a couple of companies that we've started
that are doing well at that. Probably our most dramatic
one is we invented a new type of nuclear power
reactor to make carbon free Energy, and we have a
company that we've spun out Bill Gates as the chairman
of that company. I'm the vice Gaerman and we have
(26:03):
a deal to build a power plant in.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Wyoming using nuclear power.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, it's a new type, so it'll be the first
really new type of nuclear power reactor built in like
thirty years.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Big, Well, they're all big in some sense of the
word big.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Well, I meant I meant in size. You know, the
nuclear reactors that you fly over all the time are
really clunky looking giant cones that sit there.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes, that those big cones that you're seeing are actually
the cooling towers. That's not where the nuclear stuff happens.
It happens in a much smaller building. But that's the
image of them quite rightly. So ours are smaller than that.
The trouble is they're less efficient if you build them
very small. So there are some people trying to work
(26:50):
on very small nuclear reactors, but you get some efficiency
issues if you build them very small. There's also an
issue with finding a site to build them, because it
turns out the neighbors don't want it built in their
backyard and they don't care if it's a small nuclear
reactor or a big nuclear reactor, because even a small
reactor is big in terms of the energy output.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So are they Are they dangerous?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Well, we think ours are by far the safest that
anyone's ever designed. You know, the world needs to find
carbon free sources of energy, and you have to measure
both what's the objective danger that you have from the
power plant with the longer term danger from climate change.
(27:38):
In the case of a coal or a natural gas
power plant, they killed people every year, way more people
have ever been killed by nuclear.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
But also what about the pollution.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
The pollution, Well, that's the trouble is the pollution then
from those fossil fuel plants that may seem like either
they're not really safe, but they may seem like they're bounded.
Ultimately the pollution is going to cause way way way
more harm. So I think if you take a very
rational view, you have to say, we need to have
carbon free sources of energy. Solar and wind are some
(28:11):
of those things, but they don't work either someone by
twenty four or solar doesn't work at night. So you
need to have what are called base load power supplies
to balance that, and nuclear is perfect for that.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
We think you get the gist listeners. Nathan is involved
in a lot of interesting projects, not just food, but many, many,
many other forereaching projects. I have a few silly questions
(28:45):
for you back to food. You've learned many things, and
I would love to get your opinion on fresh versus
aged mozzurilla, which is better.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
So when I went to Italy for the Pizza book,
we went and ate mozzarella de bouffala, you know, just
coming right out of the vat, and it had a
totally different texture than any mozzarella buffalo to have the
United States, and I had it in Italy before, but it
really struck me what is going on? And it turns out,
(29:20):
whenever we get fresh mozzarella in the United States, if
it's mozzerrella de buffala, it's coming from Italy. It's not fresh.
It's a week or two old. And so the super
soft texture that you might be used to from a
cuprasi salad or something like that, the very fresh stuff
doesn't have it. It squeaks when you bite it, so
(29:44):
it's a totally different texture. So yeah, and now that's
not extremely aged cheese, like like a blue cheese or
a parmechant or something else that could be aged for
for months or even years. But it's very striking to
me how some of the the reasons that people would
say they love mozzarella de buffalo if you talk to
(30:04):
people in the United States are totally missing in Italy because
it's a different cheese.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Does it melt nicely on the pizza?
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Well, fresh mozzarella has a problem with melting on a pizza,
which is it can be too.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Watery, too wet, rage.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
So what all of the best pizzolas and aples do
is they shred it, put it in a colander in
the fridge and let it sit overnight, you know, in
a bowl, so that you can let it drain. And
that drain mozzarella is way easier to use on a
pizza without it getting soupy in the middle.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
That's a good idea. Why does the sauce keep the
center of the pizza from rising?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
That was another one of our curiosity questions. I was
looking at a pizza, say how come the rim is
so tall compared to the center, And people say, oh, well,
that's because leaving more dough at the rim. But in Naples,
the traditional approach, the dough is dead flat, there's no
(31:08):
extra dough at the rim, you just put it in
the center. Then we thought, well, maybe it's the weight
of the sauce and the dough and the cheese. So
we took sand, We weighed out and equal a weight
of sand, spread that on our pizza. Pizza just puffed
right up. Threw the sand off, it doesn't care. And
(31:30):
so the reason is that the sauce is wet. And
because the sauce is wet, it doesn't matter if the
oven is five hundred degrees. The wet sauce is going
to boil when it gets hot. That means it can't
be higher than two hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit, and
that's actually relatively cold. And it's that cooling effect that
(31:52):
keeps the pizza from puffing up, because most of that
puffing up in the rim is puffing up by steam.
It's actually the same method as Patta show in your
high egg you putta show, it's the same deal. Your
steam is what powers that. And if you've got a
layer of tomato sauce on top, you don't get hot
(32:13):
enough to have enough steam. That's what makes the center
of the pizza low.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
What can the home cooked. You to optimize the home
oven for pizza, so.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Pizza ovens are almost always hotter than home ovens. There
are a few kinds of pizza that work very well
in home ovens, but they're a specific type. Detroit style pizza,
which has a thick crust fo katcha, which isn't really
a kind of pizza, but you can put toppings kind
of like a pizza. Those things work super well in
a home oven. If you really want to go beyond that,
(32:45):
what you need to do is get something that will
hold heat. So people will use a pizza stone. I
don't think the pizza stone is as good as a
big block of metal. So the simplest way to get
a block of metal is a flat cast iron skillet.
They're cheap, you know, These black iron things are about
(33:06):
a quarter of an inch thick.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
That's good enough.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, that works great. So then you put that in
there and you make your oven very hot, by very hot,
basically hos.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
It will go like five hundred that's about the that's
about the limit for most home ovens.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Most home ovens four fifty five hundred, yeah, is marked
on the oven, and then depending on the oven, sometimes
it's marked as five hundred and it's really five point
fifty and sometimes it's really.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Four fifty, right the thermometer.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Use the thermometer. But if you let it heat up
for twenty thirty minutes before you put the dough onto
that hot surface, you'll get enough stored heat transfer that
it'll make the bottom of your pizza better. It'll rise
better the edges. So that's a really a great technique.
(33:55):
We're swell outside too. You can put that same cast
iron skillet on your barbecue. If you've got a covered
barbecue like a Weber or a green Egg or one
of those. If you put on one of those skillets
that gets nice and hot, you can put your pizza
directly onto that.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
What is your favorite grill? Now that we're outside and
cooking outside, what's your favorite well?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
For convenience, I like a gas grill. There's really no
difference in cooking with charcoal briquettes or rough charcoal or
gas into there's no product From the whole point of
charcoal is it takes out all of the smell and
the unique thing. So if someone says, oh you need
to have a mesquite charcoal, askuite charcole is just charcoal.
(34:40):
You don't need it. And what you do in as
grill instead is you typically have some metal plates. Those
metal plates get hot, and it's the infrared radiation given
off by those plates that is part of what grilling
is about. But the other part. If you just go
from a like a broiler where the infred he on
(35:00):
the top, it doesn't taste the same as a grill,
and that's because a grill also has flavor that comes
from fat from the food dripping off and flaring up
and burning. And you see that happen all the time.
It's one of the reasons that people sometimes have trouble
grilling vegetables if you put a corn on the cob,
(35:23):
or you put cut up peppers or onions.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Because there's no fat.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
There's no fat exactly, and if there's no fat, there's
no drips. If there's no drips, you don't get that
grilling flavor. So we like putting on an oil marinate
on them and then that drips and that gives you
all those of those things. But if you have a
really nice hot grill, however, you're heating the plates on
(35:47):
the grill gas that he is most convenient and you
put a nice steak on there. The dripping is what
gives you the characteristic grilling taste.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
What was the last thing that filled you with awe?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Some of these cooking things that we discover fill me
with awe. I mean that the most recent thing wasn't
the one I mentioned about the sugar being the acting
as the partially the levener. But things like that when
you discover some brand new thing and it just like
shocks you. And we've discovered a bunch of them so far,
but the cool thing is we're always finding more of them.
(36:23):
And you got like, we'll try adding extra eggs and
I think it'll make an awesome pet of shoe. But
then really understanding that and doing experiments, we can figure
out why is it working that way? You know, I
think it's awesome when you discover something new. Well, the
thing that's cool to me is about discovering it for
(36:46):
the first time. Maybe not for the first time in humanity, right,
first time? For me? That that is fun.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
After pastry, what's next?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
So if you ask a restaurant show what the pastry
chef does, it's almost any kind of dessert. But for
this book, we take pastry to mean pastries like something
in a bakery, so not ice cream, for example, not mooses.
We'll have a few mooses for filling a cake. But
(37:19):
we had to cut down the size of the endeavor
a little bit because baking as it stands is so
broad that we couldn't do all of the things we'd
like to do with gelato and sorbet and all these
other wonderful, wonderful things. But basically, this book is about
desserts that involve flour and heat. You know, the next
(37:40):
book after that will be about desserts where we do
more broadly what you would do in a dessert, which
could include things that have no flour and no heat.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Well, it's just incredible the things that you do and
have done, and it's always a pleasure Nathan to talk
to you. And you can find Nathan's latest book, Food
and Drink Modernist Cuisine Photography wherever you like to get
your books. It's a beautiful book and you'll all want
to get one. It's a great present. And also follow
(38:12):
Modernist Cuisine Instagram at Maude Cuisine. Nathan, thank you, it's
been too long, and I hope to see you in
the near future. And I do want to come to
your lab and see something about the pastry book.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Okay, okay, excellent.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
All right, well, thank you so very much and I
best to your wife and sons.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Okay, great, thank you bye,
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