“Modernist Cuisine at Home” Brings a Slightly-More-Affordable Version to the Masses

The groundbreaking Modernist Cuisine isn’t exclusively for expert chefs, but the price and heft (~$450, extremely hefty) take it out of reach for most regular people. Enter Modernist Cuisine at Home, a newly announced new book that takes much of the goodness of the original six-volume set and adapts it for the home cook–along with over 400 new recipes.

The new 456-page Modernist Cuisine at Home has “all the essential information that any cook needs to stock a modern kitchen, to master Modernist techniques, and to make hundreds of stunning recipes.” It also comes with a waterproof 230-page “Kitchen Manual” that has every recipe reprinted for easy, safe use.

The new recipes are definitely geared more towards home cooks, which means Myhrvold, Chris Young, Maxime Bilet and the rest of the ModCuis team have included a lot more comfort food than in the original book. There’s a chapter on mac and cheese, a recipe for boneless chicken wings, one for a lobster roll, a whole section on microwave cookery, and more. Oddly, there’s still no hint of a possible tablet version–I’ve been wanting an iPad Modernist Cuisine since we heard of the project, and continued wanting it while reading Paul’s exploration of pea butter, his tour of Modernist Cuisine’s lab equipment, and his home centrifuge experiment. Looks like I’m still waiting–and might be for awhile, since Myhrvold has spoken in the past about not being satisfied with tablets and wanting to completely rethink the book before releasing a tablet version, but in the meantime, you can pre-order the new book now (it’ll cost around $140, though Barnes & Noble has it for $112–still pricey for a cookbook, but at least a little more affordable) to receive it when it’s released on October 8th.