Gastronaut Files: Pressure Cooker Recipes

Nathan Myhrvold has a high-tech kitchen lab, but the device he calls magical is a basic pressure cooker.

"I outdid myself," says Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, his exhaustive (and exhaustively publicized) 2,438-page, six-volume, $625 cookbook. That's quite a statement coming from Microsoft's former chief technology officer, who researched cosmology with Stephen Hawking and writes scholarly paleontology articles almost as a hobby.

Smart Ways to Use a Pressure Cooker

Myhrvold and his staff spent more than three years exploring flavor in his state-of-the-art culinary lab. And while they found ingenious applications for rotor-stator homogenizers and other scientific equipment, the device they turned to most often was a basic pressure cooker. "It can do magical things," says Myhrvold. His team relied on it to rapidly make rich stocks and found that its ultra-high temperatures are capable of transforming familiar ingredients in unexpected ways. "We make a risotto with pressure-cooked pine nuts, and they have a beautiful popping texture," says co-author Maxime Bilet. F&W put that pressure cooker recipe and two others to the test to see if Modernist Cuisine delivers more than intellectual heft. And it does.

Nathan Myhrvold's Pressure Cooker Tips

Inside the Kitchen Lab

Pressure Cooker Recipes: Nathan Myhrvold

The Visionary

"I've been interested in cooking my whole life," says Myhrvold, who attended La Varenne cooking school in France. (Another pursuit: trying to eradicate malaria.)

The Space

Myhrvold's culinary lab (part of his larger research facility in Seattle) is staffed by 16 full-time employees and stocked with everything from pots and pans to medical gear like autoclaves. An adjacent machine shop can fabricate all kinds of equipment.

Nathan Myhrvold: Modernist Cuisine Books

The Cookbook

A Chef's Take: "The most interesting dish was the rare beef stew—it was so obvious, I wanted to smack my head and say, 'Why didn't I think of that!'" remarked David Chang of NYC's Momofuku empire after attending a dinner to preview Modernist Cuisine. "The book has minor breakthroughs like that, but mostly it documents the past 25 years in Western gastronomy, which is super-important. It will be in every chef's office—no question."