the same anymore when you’re forty than when you’re twenty or thirty. You can’t work twenty-hour days. Then, I got a phone call from a recruiter from Modernist cuisine and eventually, I started working here. Professionally, I think it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Nathan Myhrvold is my boss. He’s an amazing, brilliant person and he provides everything that we need to write these books. We have a beautiful kitchen and we have all the equipment you can imagine. I almost feel guilty sometimes but it’s definitely been a fantastic opportunity and we’re gonna hopefully write many more books. Wong: Yes, all the books are masterpieces. Regarding the Modernists series, each one takes a lot of care in terms of the rigorous and logical approach. Everything is investigated, measured, and documented. Do you find that very different from a normal kitchen, and does that create any challenges for you? Migoya: No, you know, it was easier to transition into this type of kitchen than if you had to do it the other way around. Mostly because if you’re in a production environment, you
That’s why a handful of restaurants have started R&D kitchens, which are separate from day-to-day operations. If you think of Noma, Fat Duck, or Mugaritz in Spain, they all have chefs that specifically work on developing new menu items and they’re given the resources to do them so that they can free up the chefs. Wong: It certainly sounds like a very different environment. A thing I find interesting is that a lot of cooking and baking has a lot of tradition that goes with them. Everybody has their own little twist or little things that they do. The Modernist series often goes against these traditions scientifically. How do you decide which ones to investigate and to improve upon? Migoya: When you have experience cooking, also if you have some experience with scientific knowledge; there are ways of discerning whether something is true or if it might be a myth. For example, there are a lot of mythologies around bread. Before we
understood what was happening, we thought it was almost like sorcery, right? You mix water and flour and it starts to bubble. One of the things that we heard was people were passing down their sourdough starters from generation to generation. Or people saying, my sourdough starter is one hundred years old. That sets off an alarm to any scientist. Were the conditions the same for one hundred years that whatever micro-organisms were in there have been the same for a hundred years? Or more likely than not, the conditions have changed and that sourdough starter is not in the same spot where it was first created. So it turns out that it doesn’t matter how old your sourdough starter is. It could be two weeks old, or it could be five hundred years old. They can both produce really good bread. And if your grandma held onto it from the old country and she came to the new country with it, it’s not the
don’t have a lot of time to test stuff. There’s only so much food that can go to waste when you’re trying to develop something before it becomes too cost- prohibitive. So moving here, you have the time, space, resources, and people to work on all those tests. I have two people that work in the kitchen and a food scientist. There are learning experiences and failures, but if we had to do what we do here in a restaurant environment, it just would be impossible.
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