York Nathan Myhrvold.

So Nathan, you wanted to start with a presentation about the

book and give an overview.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah, let me show some pictures, and then

we can talk.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Sounds good.

And then we'll open it up for Q&A at the end.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Great.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about "Modernist

Cuisine At Home." In 2011, we released this book, "Modernist

Cuisine." This is what we call the big book, which was an

encyclopedic treatment of all aspects of cooking and the

science behind it.

So the really interesting question is,

what do we do next?

And one next thing after that that we could do, may still

do, would be pastry baking and dessert, because the first

book didn't cover that.

But as our next act, we decided, in fact, we would do

modernist cuisine at home instead.

And the idea was basically that modernist cuisine was

about sort of the no holds barred approach to cooking.

There are recipes that require a centrifuge, or a rotary

evaporator, or all kinds of things that most people--

I have them at home, but most people don't

have them at home.

So we decided we would do a book that would take the same

ideas as "Modernist Cuisine," but apply them in a way that

was a smaller, little bit less daunting book.

It's a little pamphlet, like 700 pages.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It weighs more than my child, we were

deciding earlier.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: And try to do stuff that would address

things that people could do at home.

So every recipe in here, you can do at home.

It doesn't require unusual equipment.

And it doesn't require unusual ingredients.

And we also tried to really focus on practical techniques

and use lots of photography to make it really easy to see

what's going on.

One side of these shows our step by steps.

The other thing shows what we call a cutaway.

This is where we show you the magic

view inside your equipment.

The people at Viking gave us this Viking

stove to cook with.

We cooked with it for a while.

And then we cut it in half.

It's sort of like the 4H kid that gets a little calf, and

raises it up, and then, oops.

But we cut it in half so you can see what

it looks like inside.

Like the first book, we have a washable kitchen manual.

It's on washable waterproof paper.

That's so you can take it in the kitchen, get it dirty.

It's a little bit smaller format, too.

And it folds back on itself, because it's spiral bound.

And we kind of consider this the next part of "Modernist

Cuisine," yet it's focusing on home cooking.

And home cooking just means two things.

One is what I said earlier, that it's a set of stuff that

you can do at home from an equipment perspective.

But equally important is that it's a set of cooking recipes

that are less formal.

In the first book, we've got recipes from Ferran Adria, and

Thomas Keller, and Heston Blumenthal, and all the best

chefs in the world.

You don't typically cook that food at home all the time.

In the new book, we have a chapter on mac and cheese.

We have a chapter on chicken wings, and

other skewered snacks.

So it's a little bit less formal style, in addition to

being a little bit more accessible from an equipment

perspective.

So here's uncompromising physical quality.

I wish I could say that about myself, but by god, I can say

it about my book.

So we tried to make the physical aspect of the book

kind of cool.

It's big, it uses great paper.

This is sort of nerdy, but I figured I'm at Google, so that

should be OK.

But when you typically print a picture in a book, it uses

half tone screen, and this is what it looks like when you

blow it up.

It's 175 line.

An art book would use a 200 line screen.

But this whole idea of using a fixed screen is sort of an old

analog world concept.

It's still done.

We used something called stochastic screening, which

uses an error diffusion algorithm, and the dots are

now all created digitally.

And you can see, it just looks a lot better.

Here's another thing most people don't realize.

The gamut is the range of colors

that inks can represent.

And most inks have a hard time with really saturated colors.

So here's a picture from the book where the grey shows the

stuff you can't actually represent in the color gamut.

Well, if you buy something called Chroma Centric inks,

you can show it all.

And so people will ask us, how did you get all of that color

in those pictures?

Is that because you digitally processed it?

And we said, no, we actually sprung for the expensive ink.

Because it turns it you just can't represent some colors,

particularly highly saturated colors.

You'll see it's the tomato, for example, and some of the

greens in the apple, or the greens in that cauliflower.

Those are the things that don't come across, because

they're highly saturated.

Now, of course, a good question is, why the hell am I

doing a book at all?

Why is it physical?

And the original answer for "Modernist Cuisine" is that at

the time we started, there were no tablet computers,

except for the first version of Kindle, which was tiny and

black and white.

There was no iPad.

It hadn't come out.

And so we had to choose a platform, and we chose print.

But here's the other reason--

here's a picture from the original book, and here's what

it looks like on Kindle and on an iPad.

And once you decide you're going to do layout for a big,

big high resolution display that you're going to get this

close to, it's hard to just change it.

Of course you could do it.

But if you just literally took the PDFs from the book and

just said, I'm going to move them onto a tablet, it's not

very usable, because you're always scrolling one way and

scrolling another way.

It also, to me, is kind of boring.

Because if you just took the PDFs, you don't have any of

the things that's magical about an interactive platform.

So we're talking about one possible future project is to

make a really interactive version.

But then that actually starts getting to be real work,

because you have to animate, and you want to have a lot of

things live, and you have to have a little

different user interface.

So at some point, yeah.

For now, actually, print is a great way to deliver large,

high resolution pictures to people.

And particularly, if I target the people in this room or in

the tech industry, then tablets would be even more

appropriate.

But if I want to have influence with lots of

traditional chefs around the world and give them an ability

to step up, actually print is probably a better platform

from that perspective at the moment.

So here's some fun facts about the new book.

Two volumes, 9.9 pounds unpacked, 684 pages, 228 of

which are waterproof.

23 chapters, 210,000 words, 405 recipes, 114 that have

step by step photos.

And we took about 86,000 pictures, of which 1,500 are

in the book.

So here's how we can sort of put it in perspective.

If you took "Modernist Cuisine At Home," and you put it all

in one line of text at the same type size, it would be

1.4 miles long, and that would stretch from 14th Street up to

42nd Street.

So several subway stops.

And of course we're here.

That's the you are here.

"Modernist Cuisine," the big one, that actually would go

from lower Manhattan all the way up to 116th Street.

So here's another comparison.

People will say, why is this book so expensive?

And we say, well, look.

The first book was $625.

List price, street price, maybe $460.

The new book is $140.

Currently the street price is $130.

I'd be surprised if that didn't go down.

I have no way to control street price, of course.

That's what retailers sell it at.

But it's only $0.41 per recipe, and $0.35 per recipe

in the new book.

It's $15.63 a pound for this, but only $14.00 a pound.

How does that compare?

Parmesan-Reggiano is $19 a pound.

We are cheaper than Parmesan cheese.

So if you love cheese, you should love this book.

It's cheaper.

FEMALE SPEAKER: That's a good sales pitch.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Yeah, I've been I'm trying to come out of

being a programmer and actually learn how to sell.

As I said before, we've got lots of step by step photos.

I don't think we have a single page that doesn't have a color

photo on it.

Here was another.

In "Modernist Cuisine," we decided we would have

everything with weights.

But our new motto is, now with teaspoons!

FEMALE SPEAKER: For the home cook.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD: Because home cooks--

now, when people ask, what's the first gadget they should

buy for their kitchen, I always say a digital

thermometer.

And then the second one is a digital scale.

And they're like $20.

This is not like any kind of expensive thing.

But once you get into it, weighing ingredients is faster

and more accurate than measuring them out.

And you don't have to worry about leveling it.

And you don't have to worry about is your sugar clumping a

different way, or some other things.

So I highly recommend the weight approach.

But now we have teaspoons, by god.

Whenever we do a recipe, we like to have lots of

variations on those recipes.

So here was something.

One spread shows pesto, and we started off making pesto.

And then we went, what the hell, let's make a whole bunch

of pesto-like sauces.

We started off with a chapter on chicken wings.

And then we said, let's make yakitori style chicken wings.

But then if you like yakitori, tsukune, these chicken

meatballs are really cool.

And then pretty soon we had saute, and

tons of other skewers.

So we love having variations.

And we want to encourage people to mess around and do

cool new things with cooking.

It's not about here's a recipe for one thing.

Lots of books will do that.

We try to say, here's a principle, and here's an

example, and now here's a couple other examples, and

then experiment yourself and go take it other places.

We have some tables.

We had a lot of tables in the big book.

We have fewer in the small book.

But here, if you're cooking meat, there isn't a right way

to cook it.

If you want it rare or medium rare or pink or medium,

there's different levels and different temperatures,

different times that you can use.

So we try to provide all that information.

We do have things on sous vide in the new book.

And sous vide is something that most people don't have

the equipment for, but increasingly they are.