Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume set of cookbooks that goes on sale today. The $625 set isn't for those of us who use a microwave for most meals. This cookbook looks into the science of cooking and the ultimate methods of getting to the ultimate results. For example, this hamburger take a total of 30 hours to make!
Get a closer look at the burger at the Wall Street Journal's interactive feature. Link to article. Link to hamburger. -via Nag on the Lake
Take the book's hamburger. Prepping the lettuce and tomato requires a vacuum sealer. The cheese is restructured—heated with ingredients like carrageenan and cooled in a mold—for a gooier texture. And making the burger itself requires hand-grinding the beef and using half-cylinder molds to catch the strands and gently form the patties.
Get a closer look at the burger at the Wall Street Journal's interactive feature. Link to article. Link to hamburger. -via Nag on the Lake
If you can't deal with my opinion I'm sorry.
When there are thousands of people in the US alone starving on the streets this kind of food snobbery totally totally rubs me the wrong way.
Feel free to disagree with me, I'm sure you will.
My point is that this books isn't your everyday go-to recipe book. From my point of view, it exists to show people what CAN be done with food, using food as an art form like others would use paint or clay.
A bunch of people took their passion for food, spent a lot of time and effort and money creating something unique they could be proud of, and you've got the nerve to call it pretentious? That's a pretty small-minded view of things.
If I could afford the book, I'd buy it, but just because I can't afford the hefty price tag doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss it as a pretentious waste of money.
try that you do not need to spend 30 hours hand crafting a burger to make a good burger.
I like food, I like cooking for myself. I could make, literally, thousands of tasty burgers in the same time it takes to make one of these.
All of that unnecessary stuff is to convince yourself your burger is better than any other. Thus pretentious.
If you want my kind of fun food stuff walk yourself over to Youtube and look for a show called Good Eats. that's my kind of cooking.
This ind of thing is doubly disappointment when you realize the 600 bucks for the cookbook alone will feed me literally for about 3 months. Lord knows how long I could eat on the cost of the equipment to do all of this.