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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nathan Myhrvold

Modernist Cuisine’s Nathan Myhrvold on Photography, Robotics, and Pizza

If there’s one man who you can trust to take some out-of-the-ordinary food photographs — ones that both celebrate the natural phenomena of food and dissect it— it’s Nathan Myrhvold.

For those out of the know, Myhrvold is a techy, inventive powerhouse: former CTO of Microsoft, founder of intellectual property company Intellectual Ventures, and driving force behind the gastronomic, boundary-pushing Modernist Cuisine.

Oh, and photographer. Myhrvold is the one behind all the photographs in the awarded (and exhaustive) Modernist Cuisine cookbooks, which draw you in with logic-defying high def shots of fresh produce and laser-cut interiors of bread at all stages of baking. Last year he began setting up galleries to display the photography prints, which currently have locations in Las Vegas, New Orleans, and now Seattle, home of Modernist Cuisine and Intellectual Ventures (plus plans to open one in La Jolla). Yesterday I stopped by the Seattle outpost to take a tour and chat with the man behind the camera.

Modernist Cuisine

Myhrvold being Myhrvold, (most) of the photos on display aren’t simply of the point-and-shoot variety. “Those are the exception, rather than the rule,” he joked. The others come to life thanks to a few things you don’t see in most photography studios: robots and lasers.

In the Modernist Cuisine workshop they cut things like metal mixing bowls, woks, and ceramic coffee cups in two so you can see what’s really going on when you whip egg whites or pour cream into your coffee. The robots are there to create easily predictable, easily repeatable actions so that the photographer can capture, say, the splash of a drink or explosion of a champagne bottle precisely on multiple takes.

One upcoming Myhrvold project which will surely feature robots, microscopic photography techniques, and lasers a-plenty is the Modernist Pizza Book. Like the 5-volume Modernist Bread book epic which came out in 2017, the forthcoming book will also be multi-volume and will tackle the history, science, and taste of pizza.

All types of pizza. Myhrvold told me they’d spent several weeks in South America awhile back, exploring regional pie types. The local specialty: rings of pineapple with a green olive in the center. “You’d say that’s not pizza, or that’s for me,” he said. “But they love it there.” The same love-it-or-hate-it mentality applies to an American classic: Hawaiian pizza. (Fun fact: Myhrvold told me it was actually invented in Toronto.)

Modernist Cuisine

This sort of polarization seems to go double for pizza, a food that’s arguably the world’s most popular single dish. Though it has universal appeal, pizza also mutates depending on local tastes — thus how we get things like pineapple-and-olive pies. To Myhrvold, this dichotomy is what makes pizza so interesting: it’s a food that’s simultaneously universal and exceedingly particular. And it’s also one that people really like to get up in arms about. I’ve almost destroyed friendships because I’m a strong believer that the New York slice is essentially cardboard covered in cheese (sorry).

One thing that really ruffles traditionalist feathers is the idea of automating pizza-making. “You’ve got Zume over on one end, that’s robotically created pizza,” said Myhrvold. “on the other end Naples insists you need to use wood as fuel.” The inconsistent heat of wood-burning ovens makes pizza cooking a lot trickier but, when done right, creates an excellent pie.

Zume may never be able to pizza that’s quite as good as a pizzaiolo with decades of experience (at least, not yet), but they can make pretty good pizza that’s fresher, hotter, and tastes better than the frozen stuff. Costco, which Myhrvold told me is the 13th largest pizza chain the U.S., is also leveraging automation. It has saucing and crust-pressing robots to help them churn out faster pies without the need for highly-trained cooks, which translates to a cheaper pizza.

For Myhrvold, there’s room in this world for all types of pizza. And I tend to agree: there will always be demand for artisanal pies made by a master pizzaiolo. But as Myhrvold pointed out, convenience is also closely tied to pizza consumption, at least in the U.S.: first came frozen pizza, then Domino’s came in with delivery (and later chatbots and drones).  And now there are pizza vending machines, pizza portals, and even countertop pizza ovens, all vying to provide you with a piping hot slice in the easiest, quickest way possible.

“Food spans the whole range from pure fuel to high art,” he said. “There’s nothing bad about using technology to improve that.” For now, though, Myhrvold is partial to a deep-dish slice from a Chicago style pizza joint in Seattle. Hold the pineapple.

Pablos Holman Sees a Future Where We Print French Bread & Strawberries

While 3D food printing is still in its early stages, inventor/hacker Pablos Holman believes we’ll eventually live in a world where printers in our homes spit out complicated foods like French bread and even something resembling strawberries.

“This isn’t as weird as it sounds,” said Holman, who spends his days working in the lab at Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s invention and research organization that has become one of the most prolific invention centers – as measured by patents filed and issued – in the world.

According to Holman, wheat and other materials within bread could be stored in “printer” cartridges and turned into bread at the push of a button.

“What a chef is doing is putting wheat through a complicated process to manage texture,” said Holman. “What my 3D printer would do is put down a pixel of wheat, hydrate with a needle, zap it with a laser to cook it, rinse and repeat for every pixel, and it’s going to print you a meal.”

While it’s weird to think of foods traditionally cooked by humans instead being printed on printers, Holman thinks this method is vastly superior to the one-sized-fits-all production method of traditional kitchens.

“The (3D printed) meal is customized and customized for you,” said Holman, who before working at Intellectual Ventures helped to start Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin. “It avoids your allergens, and dietary restrictions and injects your pharmaceuticals.”

In short, Holman believes 3D printed meals could be optimized for each person’s specific dietary requirements and taste profile. “Now we have a way of correlating your diet to health effects. If you have to get off of sodium, we’ll drop it by one milligram a day for months, and you’ll never feel it happen.”

“Unless you have a personal chef, it’s almost impossible for people to do that kind of thing right now,” Holman continued. “What we really want to do is have the computer to know what you ate, know what health effects you are experiencing are, know how to tune your meals so that they’re optimized for you.”

In Holman’s view, the biggest challenge to ushering in a world of personalized printed food will be managing texture. But, he believes, it’s a challenge that is hardly insurmountable: “When you think about what a chef is doing, they’re managing flavor, managing aroma, managing nutrition and they’re managing texture,” said Holman. “I can buy flavor in a bottle. I can buy aroma in a bottle. I can both nutrition in a bottle. What’s left is managing texture.”

And, as Holman sees it, developing 3D food printers that can create food textures that are pleasing to the human tongue is just another step forward on centuries-long creativity continuum that brought us food like French bread and pasta. “We learn new textures are the time,” he said. “God did not invent pasta or French bread. Those are inventions. Humans make those.”

Holman is not shy about sharing this view. Five years ago he went to Parma, Italy, the birthplace of pasta, to speak at Barilla headquarters where he “told a room of full of twelve hundred Italians that God did not invent pasta.”

While Holman hasn’t been invited back, Barilla may have gotten the message anyway: The world’s largest pasta company has since launched its own 3D pasta printer.

If you want to listen to the full conversation with Pablos Holman to hear his views on the evolution of 3D food printing, the development of Intellectual Ventures lab and more, you can download the podcast here, get it on Apple podcasts or just click play below.

Ever Wonder What Dinosaur Tastes Like? Ask Nathan Myhrvold (VIDEO)

Ever wondered what a dino burger tastes like?

The answer is ostrich or emu. While this may come as a surprise to some (I would have guessed lizard), what isn’t surprising is the guy who provided us with the answer: Nathan Myhrvold.

That’s because Myhrvold is one of the few people on the planet that can talk with authority about both paleontology and bread making.

I became familiar with Myhrvold’s eclectic interests first-hand last fall when I had a chance to visit the new headquarters for Intellectual Ventures and Modernist Cuisine.  Within the space of an hour, I’d had a whirlwind tour that featured efforts to recycle spent nuclear rods, finding a cure for the Ebola virus and bread made with cricket flour. I also had a chance to sit down with Myhrvold and discovered the longtime CTO of Microsoft and founder of Modernist Cuisine has a thoughtful and interesting opinion on pretty much everything, and that was doubly so when it comes to food, cooking and kitchen innovation.

So when Myhrvold got on stage last month with the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman, I was pretty sure the discussion would be fascinating. I wasn’t disappointed.

The conversation ranged from the taste of dinosaur meat to Modernist’s new bread book to Myhrvold considering the question of whether steam should become an important feature of modern consumer ovens (answer: yes). He also addressed the subject of innovation in the kitchen and said there are two large opportunities: one of which is to use it to make us better cooks, the other is to help make our lives more convenient. He pointed to Keurig-based coffee models as a good example of fulfilling a consumer need for convenience, but also stressed how important it was to capture the imagination of consumer when introducing new product innovation into the kitchen.

Overall it’s a great interview, so I suggest watching the whole thing. If you’re interested in Modernist Bread, it’s available for pre-order on Amazon and will ship in May of 2017.

If you’re interested in other videos from the Smart Kitchen Summit, you can find them here. If you’d like our weekly newsletter with analysis and news about the future of cooking and the kitchen, subscribe here.