Nathan Myhrvold may hold a record for the widest variety of interesting careers before the age of 50. He worked as a physicist alongside Stephen Hawking, then became chief technology officer for Microsoft. He's now turned to the science of cooking, and tells Amanda Gefter about busting cooking myths while simultaneously combating global warming and malaria
You are best known from the world of technology, but you're also a master chef. When did you first get interested in cooking?
When I was 9 years old I told my mother I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I can't say that I did a great job of it, but from that point on I was really interested in cooking. In the mid 1990s, I took a leave of absence from Microsoft, where I was a senior vice-president and chief technology officer, to go to chef school in France. The chef school wouldn't accept me until I had professional work experience, so for two years I worked one night a week at a restaurant in Seattle.
You've just published a cookbook, Modernist Cuisine. At over 2400 pages, it sets out to reinvent cooking. What inspired it?
Originally I thought it would be a huge book, but my idea of huge was 600 pages. We just kept finding more cool things to do. The inspiration was that there was no definitive source from which you could learn all about modern cuisine, covering the science of cooking and the techniques that have come to be in the last 10 to 20 years. So we thought there's an opportunity to be that big definitive book and, in the process, it went from what we thought was a huge 600 pages to 2400.
Do you have to be a chef or a scientist to use Modernist Cuisine?
We went to a lot of effort in the book to tell the scientific story of cooking in an accessible way so people who are not chefs or scientists will still find it fascinating. If you're curious about how the world works, knowing the science behind it makes it all the cooler. If you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, understanding the processes of geology that caused it gives you a better appreciation of it. There are some people who say "stop with the geology; don't ruin the view for me". I'm not one of those people.
We also went to a lot of effort taking photographs to illustrate the book, because cool pictures are a way to seduce people into getting interested in a technical topic.
In studying the science of cooking, have you found that there are certain folk-wisdom cooking techniques that turn out to be wrong?
A lot of them are quite wrong. For example, it is a common cooking technique to plunge something into ice water to stop the cooking. But it turns out it doesn't stop the cooking any quicker than if you leave it out on the counter. That's very counter-intuitive.
Here's another example. Suppose you're cooking a steak that's 1 inch thick and now I tell you to cook a steak that's 2 inches thick. Most people would agree that cooking the 2-inch steak will take longer, but how much longer? Intuition tells you it should be double the time. But heat conduction in things with similar geometry scales roughly as the square of the thickness. So it will take roughly four times as long. That's a simple rule, but I've never found a cookbook that says that.
Do people need high-tech equipment to make most of the recipes in the book?
To make some of the recipes, yes, but not for most. For a bunch of the recipes you need a blender. If you have something called a rotor-stator homogeniser it will work better than a blender, but a blender will work. For some of the recipes you need sous-vide cooking equipment, which involves cooking in a water bath. We decided not to dumb down the book, either in a conceptual way or in terms of the equipment.
You also use ingredients like enzymes and hydrocolloids that food purists might baulk at. What is your response to them?
People say: "Isn't your food full of chemicals?" And I say: "Yes, and full of elements too! Your food isn't?" Because, of course, all food is chemicals and all cooking is chemistry. The fact is, so-called traditional cuisine is all full of similar and in some cases the same things.
Where do you think the baking soda in your organic muffins came from? Or how about sucrose? Sucrose, until about 100 years ago, was an exotic thing that was bought from apothecary stores. It wasn't until a new industrial process allowed it to be created in bulk that sucrose, ordinary table sugar, got to be cheap enough for everybody to use it. Almost every ingredient has a story like this and it's inconsistent to say, "Oh, I like a traditional food like X, but not this new stuff," when the traditional foods are full of things which are just as much a chemical.You began your career as a theoretical physicist, working with Stephen Hawking. Why did you give that up?
I never decided to go out of it. I got involved in a software project with a couple of friends and I took a leave of absence for three months to finish that up. At the end of the three months we started a company so I kept extending my leave of absence. Then after running my company for two years, Microsoft bought it. After being at Microsoft for 14 years I announced I was taking a leave of absence; the next day I get this email from Stephen Hawking saying, does this mean you're coming back?
In 1983, the allure of the nascent world of software, computers and what became the internet was tremendously exciting. I still love physics, I still try to keep up with it.
At the company you co-founded after leaving Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, you're working on a solution to climate change...
Yes. As well as inventing for profit, we do inventions for humanity. One of the crazier ones we do is geoengineering. Right now it's hard to have a good feeling that we're going to solve the problem of climate change. Maybe the world will get its act together in time. But what if it doesn't? I think it is prudent to have a back-up plan. One way to stop global warming is to make the sun 1 per cent dimmer. We can't stop the sun, but if we put a little bit of material high in the atmosphere, we can scatter a little bit of sunlight back into space.
How would you do this?
With sulphur dioxide. It's good at scattering light, it's natural, it's in volcanoes and there's lots of it there already. Our contribution was to think, how the hell are you going to get it up there in a way that's reasonably cheap? We came up with the idea of taking a long hose and putting a string of balloons on it and pointing it up to the sky. All the calculations suggest that it works. That is about as far as we're going to go with it. Our basic thrust is to get this out there, and hopefully people will take these ideas seriously and test them to see whether they work or not.
You are also working on malaria. Why did you take on this problem?
We started a programme of inventing things to solve problems in the developing world. Malaria is a terrible disease and we've not made a lot of progress tackling it in the last 40 years. If the world can solve it the conventional way, good. But we're going to think outside the box and see if we can come up with some wacky, crazy ideas that might fail but if they work could change everything. We have half a dozen projects for malaria - making malaria diagnostics and doing studies on mosquitoes to understand how they fly and how to deter them. One of those is this idea of shooting mosquitos out of the sky with lasers. These lasers could be used as a perimeter defence around schools, clinics or fields.
فیروز نیکزاد منکل
No comments:
Post a Comment