Food & Wine

My friends were perplexed when I invited them over for a dinner party based entirely on recipes from "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," the multivolume examination of avant-garde cooking and culinary technology.

"What, did you get a chemistry set for Christmas?" one friend asked.

"Foams and gelees? That's great; chewing is overrated," another quipped.

"Is the lab coat optional?" a third put in.

I got the idea after visiting the laboratory in Seattle where Nathan Myhrvold, who wrote the book with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, poured some of the millions he made as Microsoft's chief technology officer. There, Myhrvold and his team minutely analyzed the chemistry of cooking and developed the lavishly illustrated "Modernist Cuisine."

As the lab's massive immersion circulator hummed on the countertop, I nibbled on centrifuged pea-butter crostini and wondered whether any of this scientific research could be of use to home cooks.

Surely, somewhere within the 2,000-odd pages there must be simple, accessible techniques to make real food taste better — or at least easier to cook.

So I issued Myhrvold a challenge. Which of his modernist dishes could I whip up for a dinner party without having to buy any new equipment or bizarre ingredients (like low-acyl gellan and sodium tripolyphosphate, which are sprinkled throughout the book's recipes like so much salt and pepper). Myhrvold would teach me the dishes, then I would recreate them for my guinea pigs — I mean party guests.

After establishing that I did not, in fact, own a vacuum sealer or dehydrator, and that liquid nitrogen counted as a bizarre ingredient, Myhrvold emailed a menu that could have been plucked straight out of "The Joy of Cooking": salmon with spice butter, seared rib steak, winter squash purée, and panna cotta for dessert.

A few weeks later, Myhrvold, exuberant and ginger-haired with a teddy bear aspect, arrived at my door.

He showed me how to cook the salmon in a fake sous vide by putting it in resealable plastic bags and submerging them in warm tap water. This gave the fish a gorgeous plush texture. He briefly finished it in a pan with the spice butter. It was far superior to the standard sauteing, broiling or roasting, and no more difficult.

Next, we seared a couple of partly frozen rib steaks using a blowtorch — I happened to have one leftover from my love affair with creme brulee — and a cast-iron skillet. (We froze them on a baking sheet to get a flat surface for better browning.)

Once they were browned, we put the still-frozen steaks in a 200-degree oven for an hour. The charring gave them an alluring crust and tasty grilled flavor. The combination of low heat and an icy center left the insides cooked perfectly.

Instead of having the usual chewy gray ring around a bloody rare oval, the steaks were pink from top to bottom. It was a simple but brilliant tweak on the usual technique, one that I plan to pull out again during grilling season, freezing meat before subjecting it to the flames, then letting it gently cook on the cool side of the grill.

Both techniques depart from the fad for cranking a stove to its maximum.

Going low and slow, Myhrvold said, not only cooks things evenly but also provides a wider margin of error. If you accidentally leave your salmon in the bag for an extra five minutes while you abide by your hosting duties, nothing will happen. Don't try that with fish in a skillet.

Lower temperatures also played a role in the side dish, a caramelized delicata squash purée prepared in a pressure cooker.

Normally, a pressure cooker wouldn't get hot enough to caramelize anything. But, Myhrvold explained, if you create an alkaline environment with a sprinkle of baking soda, you can caramelize at a lower temperature. And the pressurized environment helps ingredients caramelize through and through, not just around the outside. This gave the squash an intense, nutty flavor but I thought I needed to enhance it with buckwheat honey and lemon grass.

For the panna cotta, the citric acid, combined with a little balsamic vinegar, set the cream without gelatin or eggs. It created a dreamy soft custard devoid of any bounce. And since you can easily find citric acid in health food stores, it didn't count as a bizarre ingredient. As an experiment, I used the pressure cooker to caramelize some apples as I did with the squash to put on top of the custard for a juicy contrast.

My experiment showed that once you get beyond the idea that modernist cuisine is all El Bulli foams and spheres, what you're ultimately working with are good techniques yielding great-tasting food. After all, the cooking techniques we already rely on are based on scientific tenets, whether we understand the science behind them or not.

This said, Myhrvold did have one El Bulli-worthy dish up his chef's jacket sleeve: something called apple-infused celery. He squeezes apple juice into celery sticks with a pressurized whipped cream siphon. The pale green sticks look like celery, they crunch like celery, but they taste like apples.

That dish was the only one I wanted to change. It seemed to me that a touch of gin might transform an hors d'oeuvre into a solid aperitif.

The dish got a further makeover by my friend Dave Wondrich, a cocktail historian and the drinks master of the party, who used spicy tomato water and gin to turn the celery into crisp and juicy bloody Marys.

Other than infusing the celery sticks, and a tense moment when my husband upended a bottle of Barolo into the blender to hyper-aerate it (a trick from the book that worked nicely on the very closed, tight wine), all of the modernist techniques happened earlier, off stage. By the time my guests arrived, the kitchen was clean, cool and (despite having seared three steaks and cooked fish) completely odorless.

"Other than the absence of that warm and welcoming, you've-spent-all-day-cooking aroma that permeates most dinner parties," my friend Adam said, "if you hadn't told us it was a modernist dinner party, I don't think anyone would have noticed."

Not everyone at the party agreed. Some complained that the food was almost too perfect, too easily wrought. The drama of the unexpected mishap, usually pulsing tangibly through a dinner party, was lamentably absent. As my friend Anya put it: "We demand that perfection from a restaurant. But at home? Imperfection can be part of the charm. The anxiety and fear of failure is the human part of the parcel. Do you always want a seamless perfect first date? A souffle 100 percent guaranteed to rise?"

I could see her point. But then I remembered when I overcooked the lamb on Christmas Eve, and the time my oven caught fire when I was trying to broil salmon on not-soaked-enough cedar planks. So did I want perfection?

"Actually," I said, "yes."

BLOODY MARY CELERY STICKS

Adapted from "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet

Time: 20 minutes plus dripping and chilling times

Yield: 10 servings

3 pounds very ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped

½ teaspoon, plus pinch kosher salt

3 celery stalks

8 ounces gin

12 dashes Tabasco

12 dashes Worcestershire sauce

1. Line a colander with a thin dish towel or double layer of cheesecloth and place over a bowl. Put tomatoes in the colander and toss with ½ teaspoon salt, mashing tomatoes gently with your hands. Let tomatoes drip for 2 hours or refrigerate up to 8 hours. Give the tomato bundle a squeeze, then pour strained liquid into a measuring cup (you should have about 2 cups). Chill tomato water thoroughly before using (at least 2 hours or up to 2 days).

2. Snap off the very end of a celery stalk with your fingers and pull down the length of the stalk, pulling away strings as you go. Repeat until most of the strings have been removed. This will help the celery absorb more liquid. Slice each stalk in half lengthwise, then slice each piece crosswise.

3. Combine the tomato water, gin, Tabasco, Worcestershire, pinch of salt and celery stalks in the bottom of a whipped-cream maker. Charge with two cartridges of nitrous oxide. Release the pressure. Put a sieve over a bowl; empty the contents over the sieve. Transfer the celery sticks to a plate and serve.

HAZELNUT AND CORIANDER-SPICED SOUS VIDE SALMON

Adapted from "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet

Time: 1 hour

Yield: Serves 10

½ cup hazelnuts

2 ½ tablespoons coriander seeds

5 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

2 tablespoons dried chamomile blossoms or contents of chamomile tea bags

2 ½ teaspoons ground ginger

Kosher salt and black pepper

10 salmon fillets, 1-inch thick, about ¼ pound each

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

8 tablespoons unsalted butter

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Roast the hazelnuts in a baking pan until the skins are dark brown, about 10 minutes. Bundle the warm nuts in a clean dish towel and rub briskly together to remove the skins. Coarsely chop the nuts.

2. In a dry skillet over medium-high heat, toast the coriander seeds, stirring constantly, until golden brown and fragrant, about 3 minutes. Crush in a mortar and pestle or with a spice grinder.

3. Add the hazelnuts, sesame seeds, chamomile, ginger and 1 teaspoon salt to the grinder or mortar and grind to a coarse powder. Work in batches if necessary. Place in an airtight container and refrigerate until ready to use.

4. Season the fish fillets with salt and pepper. Place a large pot in your sink, and add warm water until the pot is full and the water reaches 115 degrees. Place two fillets side by side in a gallon-size heavy-duty, resealable plastic bag. Drizzle fillets with oil. Submerge the bags halfway into the warm water (this creates a vacuum that will help eliminate air); seal as airtight as possible, pushing out any excess air. Repeat with the remaining fillets.

5. Once all the salmon fillets are submerged in the pot, add more hot water until the water temperature returns to 115 degrees (the cold fish will reduce the water temperature). Let the salmon rest in the water bath about 20 to 25 minutes until its core temperature is 113 degrees (remove and check one with an instant-read thermometer). Check the water temperature occasionally and add more hot water as needed to maintain the temperature of 115 degrees.

6. Transfer the salmon bags to a cutting board. Remove fish from plastic bags and gently pull off the skins (or use a butter knife). Transfer the cooked fillets to a plate for easier handling.

7. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-low heat. Add about 2/3 of the fish spice, and increase the heat until the butter just starts to bubble. Sear the fillets on both sides in the pan while basting with the hot butter, about 30 seconds. Serve immediately, sprinkled with more fish spice, if desired.

SEARED FROZEN RIB STEAKS

Adapted from "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet

Time: 1 hour 15 minutes, plus freezing time

Yield: 10 servings

3 bone-in rib steaks (about (1 ½-inch thick and 1 ½ pounds each)

Safflower oil

Coarse sea salt and black pepper

1. Place the steaks on a baking sheet and freeze them for 1 hour.

2. Heat the oven to 200 degrees. Season the steaks all over generously with salt and pepper.

3. Heat a cast iron skillet until very hot, at least 10 minutes; add a thin layer of safflower oil. Sear the steaks, one at a time, on one side, until they form a golden crust. Transfer, seared-side up, to a rimmed baking sheet. Alternatively, arrange steak on a rimmed baking sheet. Holding a propane torch 6 inches from the meat, run a flame back and forth across the surface of the meat, giving it an even crust. Make sure to sear the fatty edges and the bones. (You only need to sear one side and the edges.)

4. Cook steaks until they reach a core temperature of 122 degrees for rare, about 30 minutes to 1 hour. (If you like your meat cooked a little more, just leave the meat in the oven until done to taste.) Let stand 10 minutes before thinly slicing. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and serve immediately.

CARAMELIZED DELICATA SQUASH PURÉE WITH BUCKWHEAT HONEY AND LEMONGRASS

Time: 35 minutes

Yield: 10 delicate servings

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 ½ pounds Delicata squash, peeled, seeded and cut into ½-inch cubes (4 cups or 1 pound trimmed weight)

½ lemon grass stalk (optional)

1 teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

Buckwheat honey or other honey

1. Melt butter in the base of a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 psi) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.

2. Depressurize the cooker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

3. Remove lemon grass stalk. Blend the squash mixture to a smooth purée. Season with honey to taste. Serve immediately, or refrigerate until ready to use. Reheat gently before serving.

Note: To double the recipe, cook the squash in two batches.

BALSAMIC PANNA COTTA

Adapted from "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet

Time: 15 minutes plus chilling time

Yield: 10 servings

4 cups heavy cream

½ cup granulated sugar

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

½ teaspoon citric acid (available in health food stores)

1. Stir together all the ingredients in a heavy-bottomed pot and bring to a simmer over medium heat (it will immediately thicken and then thin out again).

2. Divide mixture between 10 4-ounce ramekins. Cool, then cover tightly with plastic wrap and chill for at least 1 hour or until ready to serve, up to 3 days.

Information in this article, originally published Jan. 18, 2012, was corrected Jan, 18, 2012. A previous version of this story had incorrectly listed the yield for each recipe. All the recipes serve 10. In the steak recipe, Safflower oil was omitted from the list of ingredients.