Future of food: Drinkable bagels and beyond 2,438-page Modernist Cuisine cookbook is born in 20,000-square-ft. kitchen 0

Recently, in a laboratory outside Seattle, I ate a piece of buttered toast that I will remember for the rest of my life. The bread itself was not extraordinary, but it was spread thickly with the brightest-green butter I've ever seen. It was not true butter, but rather an extract of pure green peas. Fresh peas are blended to a puree, then spun in a centrifuge at 13 times the force of gravity. The force separates the puree into three discrete layers: on the bottom, a bland puck of starch; on the top, vibrant-colored, seductively sweet pea juice; and separating the two, a thin layer of the pea's natural fat, pea-green and unctuous. A standard pea yields about 3 percent fat, so the half-ounce of glistening viridian on my toast was the equivalent of perhaps a pound and a half of peas condensed into a single bite.

I was eating with Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, in the rather amazing kitchen at the heart of his 20,000-square-foot laboratory.

Around us stood shelves of hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, freeze-drying and spray-drying apparatus, a battery of immersion circulators, homogenizers, vacuum chambers, and even less readily identifiable laboratory equipment that Myhrvold and his team have shanghaied for culinary purposes. "I never want to work again in a kitchen without a centrifuge," Maxime Bilet, the kitchen's head chef of research and development, tells me.

This kitchen is the home base of Modernist Cuisine, a rather ambitious cookbook project that Myhrvold first outlined in 2006. He holds Ph.D.s in mathematical economics and theoretical physics, studied with Stephen Hawking and worked for years as CTO of Microsoft (which left him with a healthy amount of spare change). But cooking, and particularly the research end of cooking, has always been a strong interest. He studied at the esteemed cooking school La Varenne, apprenticed at top Seattle restaurant Rover's one day a week while he was still at Microsoft; and won first-place titles at the World Championship of Barbecue in 1991.

Click here for a photo gallery of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen at PopSci.com

As he became interested in sous-vide cooking — the modern method of cooking vacuum-sealed foods at low temperatures for hours or days on end — he saw the need for a book codifying the increasingly popular technique. But, with perhaps fewer constraints on him than many of us have, he saw the book blossom into what it has now become: six volumes covering a much broader domain of technologically enhanced cookery, totaling 2,438 13-by-10-inch pages, self-published and sold in an acrylic case for $625. Last year, when it was projected at a mere 1.5 kilopages, it had already garnered blurbs from top names in food like "The most important book in the culinary arts since Escoffier" (Tim Zagat) and "The cookbook to end all cookbooks" (David Chang).

"We're the only combination cookbook studio, research kitchen, and general laboratory that I'm aware of," says Myhrvold as we unfold our napkins. In addition to the kitchen where we sit, the building, which belongs to Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures, houses a working biology lab and mosquito hatchery, a chemistry lab, a serious machine shop, a "small things lab" and a photography studio (where the beautiful book was produced), as well as a number of areas demarcated by blue masking tape on the floor, about which I am sworn to secrecy.