Ten facts about Modernist Cuisine at Home:

1. Modernist Cuisine at Home is written by Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet, along with over 20 other contributors including chefs, machinists, photographers and editors.
2. There are a total of 210,000 words making up Modernist Cuisine at Home.
3. The cover is of a de-constructed grilled cheese sandwich. Its recipe doesn’t actually exist in the book though the different components are covered in the section on grilled cheese sandwiches.
4. The weighty (9.9lbs) book’s foreword is by Martha Stewart… and Thomas Keller.
5. At the beginning of the book, there is a two-page user guide. It teaches you, amongst other things like scaling recipes, how to use the book.
6. There are two parts. Part one is all about stocking the Modernist Kitchen with notes on how things work, recommendations for just about every professional kitchen tool or equipment out there and guide to some specialist ingredients. Part two is composed of the recipes – all 145 of them, plus their variations.
7. There’s a 230-page waterproof Kitchen Manual that reproduces every recipe included with the book.
8. Sous vide is a big theme, as is pressure cooking, but most of the recipes are for simple home-cooked foods like pizza, burger and mac and cheese.
9. No hob or oven? No problem. There’s an entire chapter of recipes for the microwave.
10. It’s more text-book than stylised food-porn though the real science is still found in the original Modernist Cuisine books.

Curated by Qin Xie