By Adam Salomone, Photo by Elena Hernandez

Modernist cuisine. No two words in the culinary world seem to excite such a spectrum of reactions, from starry-eyed adoration to deep-set vitriol for what has become a bit of a misunderstood field of food exploration. For those who fall on the latter half of the spectrum, modernist cuisine may seem like a bunch of hocus-pocus, because, honestly, submerging a vacuum-sealed pouch of steak in a sous vide bath for three days seems hardly efficient or challenging in a culinary sense. For those who look lovingly upon this new frontier for food, modernist cuisine is less about the flash and fashion of high-tech gadgets, and more about having a better understanding of how our food “works.”

The movement is perhaps best represented by its namesake product – Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume, 2,400-page behemoth that tracks the rise and trajectory of the movement. When talking about the book and its author’s grand vision for modernist cuisine, readers, cooks, and consumers invariably gravitate towards extreme examples (i.e., emulsified passion fruit that’s made to look like an egg) that are relatively outlandish when it comes to broader culinary applicability. Less talked about, however, are the explorations into how our senses perceive “taste,” how searing food actually doesn’t seal in juices, and how using weight to judge cooking times for meat can be a useless exercise. In short, things that all cooks or culinary entrepreneurs would want to know to better their understanding of food and how they use it.

So what do you think? Is modernist cuisine a worthwhile pursuit for the broader culinary arena, or will it be relegated to those corners of the cooking market reserved for food geeks? As part of the upcoming IACP Anuual Conference, we’ll be talking about just this issue in the session "What’s to Know About – and What Should We Care About – Modernist Cuisine" on Saturday, March 31 from 2 to 3:30 pm. Join us as we talk with Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, authors and bloggers; Cesar Vega, PhD, research manager for Mars Botanicals; and Bill Yosses, White House pastry chef and lecturer at Harvard University’s Science & Cooking series, about where the modernist cuisine movement has been, where it’s going, and why you should care.
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Adam Salomone is the Associate Publisher at the Harvard Common Press, a Boston-based cookbook publisher. A lover of food, wine, and spirits, Adam enjoys talking, thinking, and writing about the intersections of food as they impact our lives every day.