I’ve recently returned from a trip to Las Vegas, home of the 1,000-item breakfast, 6lb burrito challenge and a dish called “fried chicken Benedict”. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up reading two lengthy magazine articles about food on the flight home.
The first, from the US edition of Wired magazine, covers the quest of the former Microsoft chief technical officer Nathan Myhrvold, 51, to create the world’s most comprehensive cookbook. It’s 2,400 pages long, has 1,600 recipes, weighs nearly 50lb and costs £375.25. (Effortlessly besting Heston Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck Cookbook, a snip at £84.49, and even trouncing Ferran Adria’s El Bulli 2003-2004, at £215.15.)
Why the need for all those pages? To accommodate Myhrvold’s incredibly detailed instructions, of course. Listen to how he cooks his chips:
Myhrvold cuts his potatoes into batons and rinses them to get rid of surface starch. Then he vacuum-seals them in a plastic bag, in one even layer, with water. He heats the bag to 212 degrees for 15 minutes, steaming the batons. Then he hits the bag with ultrasound to cavitate the water — 45 minutes on each side. He reheats the bag in an oven to 212 degrees for five minutes, puts the hot fries on a rack in a vacuum chamber, and then blanches them in 338-degree oil for three minutes. When they’re cool, Myhrvold deep-fries the potatoes in oil at 375 degrees until they’re crisp, about three more minutes, and then drains them on paper towels. Total preparation time: two hours.
You’ll be pleased to know that, after this process, “the outside nearly shatters when you bite into it, yielding to a creamy center that’s perfectly smooth”.
It’s a fascinating article, particularly as a portrait of one man’s obsession — for Myhrvold has built an entire laboratory in his backyard, with all manner of high-tech gizmos to realise his dream of turning cookery into a science. As the writer notes, he has “the lifestyle flexibility of a multimillionaire and the mental discipline of a world-class researcher”.
But if all this talk of affluent people faffing around with vacuum chambers just to make lunch leaves you a little nauseous, then I suggest reading instead this piece from the current issue of The Atlantic, which asserts that “gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony”.
The contributing editor B R Myers attacks the “gloating obsessiveness” of those who write professionally about food. While I can’t say I agree with him entirely (a world where journalists were only allowed to write about Big Important Things would be a brutally dull one), some of his barbs do hit home. There is, after all, something distasteful about one part of the world fetishing food while another part struggles to get it at all.
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