In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org, on the subject of a kitchen technique called “sous vide.” The French term means “under vacuum,” and it refers to a process that has been around since the nineteen-seventies but has, in recent decades, become a favorite technique of the cutting-edge professional kitchen.

Nathan Myhrvold and his culinary colleagues love to cut things in half—like this traditional pot roast—and show cross sections. Photograph COURTESY THE COOKING LAB

In sous-vide cooking, ingredients and flavorings are prepared and put in a plastic bag, from which all the air is subsequently extracted by suction. The food is then cooked in a circulating water bath at a highly precise temperature—and this precision is what chefs love. A sous-vide steak, for instance, is not cooked rare or medium rare; it is cooked to 126 or 131 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. At these low temperatures, cooking times can be as long as seventy-two hours, and the results are often extraordinary. As David Chang puts it in his cookbook “Momofuku,” “If you know what temperature you want the thing to be, just cook it at that temperature for long enough to bring the whole thing up to that temperature and presto! It’s like magic: you’re not sitting there poking or prodding the meat or worrying that it’s rare or raw or overcooked.”

Myhrvold is fascinated by invention and innovation. He is the founder and C.E.O. of the company Intellectual Ventures, which has developed hundreds of patents. He is also a serious amateur cook, trained at La Varenne cooking school, in Burgundy, and a member of a team that won several prizes in a 1991 world barbecue championship. He is the “chief gastronomic officer” of Zagat Survey, the company that publishes the eponymous restaurant guides. At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one, incorporating primary research on the science of the technique, especially as it bore on the question of food safety.

Safety is a concern with sous vide. Because the technique cooks things low and slow, food can spend a long time in the bacteria-friendly zone above fridge-cold and below oven-hot. For that reason, health officers are sometimes wary of the technique. (The health department in New York is notoriously so.) At some point in his studies, Myhrvold was approached by Sean Brock, a chef in South Carolina, for assistance in convincing his local food inspector that sous vide was safe. A few days later, the food inspector got in touch: he found Myhrvold’s information so interesting that he wanted to know if there was any more where that came from. Myhrvold broadened his idea of the book to include food safety more generally, then broadened it further to include information about the basic physics of heating processes, then to include the physics and chemistry of traditional cooking techniques, and then to include the science and practical application of the highly inventive new techniques that are used in advanced contemporary restaurant food—the sort of cooking that Myhrvold calls “modernist.”

He hired two chefs who had worked in the kitchen of the Fat Duck, the science-minded experimental restaurant in Bray, England, and got busy. The result is an astounding magnum opus, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (The Cooking Lab; $625), which was written by Myhrvold and his chefs Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, and “required the combined efforts of several dozen people over the span of three years.” This isn’t how most cookbooks are produced, but, as the authors point out, “that level of effort is the norm for a major reference work or college textbook.” The book consists of five thick, thirteen-by-eleven-inch volumes and a ring-bound volume of recipes, and comes in at twenty-four hundred and thirty-eight pages. In its packed state, it weighs forty-six pounds. The scale and ambition of the project—and maybe at least one of the egos behind it—are Pharaonic.

One of the most useful things about the project is its title. The fact that there is something new going on in fancy restaurants has been evident for some years, with the Fertile Crescent of the new cooking being the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s restaurant elBulli, in the Catalan seaside town of Roses. Adrià, who began working there in 1984, closed his restaurant for six months each year to develop new ideas, and published updates on his progress every year, setting an unmatchable standard for authority and innovation. The range of techniques used by Adrià was considerable—one of them involved making a tomato explode with a bicycle pump—and many had a basis in the laboratory.

Following Adrià’s lead, other chefs began to take an interest in the new possibilities. Heston Blumenthal, who runs the Fat Duck, began working with scientists to come up with new ideas for the kitchen. He developed a showstopping palate cleanser at the start of his set menu, in which the waiter dropped a mixture of lime juice, egg white, green tea, and vodka (out of what looked like a can of shaving foam) into a bucket of liquid nitrogen, at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. A few seconds later, it emerged as a frozen meringue. Liquid nitrogen became a new standby for the gastronomic avant-garde. Grant Achatz, at Alinea, in Chicago, invented a transparent rosewater envelope. Wylie Dufresne, at wd-50, in New York, invented deep-fried hollandaise, foie gras tied into a knot, and instant tofu noodles. Science suddenly seemed to be in the forefront of what was happening in advanced kitchens. Everywhere you went, there were newfangled foams, gels, “airs,” and “soils,” and ingredients doing impossible things.

Intertwined with this novelty-obsessed culinary movement was the field of kitchen science, which sought to figure out the chemistry of even the most ordinary forms of cooking. That field has been a lively one since the late nineteen-sixties, kick-started by a famous public lecture given by the Hungarian-British physicist Nicholas Kurti. He was a specialist in low-temperature physics who for many years held the record for having created the lowest temperature ever achieved—a millionth of a degree above absolute zero—and who was also a keen amateur cook. In 1969, Kurti gave a Royal Institution lecture, broadcast on television, during which he cooked a soufflé bristling with heat probes, and asked, “Is it not quite amazing that today we know more about the temperature distribution in the atmosphere of the planet Venus than that in the center of our soufflé?” Interest in the field grew, and fifteen years later Harold McGee, an American with degrees in astronomy from Caltech and English literature from Yale, published “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen,” an encyclopedic survey of kitchen science, and a work revered by chefs. In 1992, a conference on the subject was held at a scientific center in Erice, Sicily. Someone—credit is usually given to Kurti, though the origin myth is as disputed as most origin myths are—came up with the term “molecular gastronomy.”

There are many troubles with that label. For a start, as a culinary designation it doesn’t mean anything. All cooking is molecular; Colonel Sanders’s cooking is just as molecular as Ferran Adrià’s. Furthermore, much of the scientific work being done in the area is not on new techniques but on the science of what cooks are already doing. The concise summary of this research is that there is a remarkable amount of scientifically sound practice involved in the traditional kitchen. Harold McGee, for instance, discovered that the practice of whisking egg whites in copper bowls takes advantage of the fact that copper ions have a stabilizing effect on the resultant foam—a remarkable thing for cooks to have figured out by the eighteenth century. The science of the ordinary kitchen is a particular interest of Hervé This, one of the French pioneers in the field, and, as far as he’s concerned, that’s what molecular gastronomy actually means. Finally, chefs have come to dislike the term “molecular gastronomy,” on the ground that it is alienating and makes what they do sound like scientific party tricks. Much of the new cooking has nothing to do with the lab. Grant Achatz’s signature amuse-bouche of a deconstructed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, for instance, is a cutting-edge classic with nothing “molecular” about it.

That is why the term “modernist cuisine” is so handy. When modernism arrived in the arts, it marked a dual break: a rupture within the history of the art form and a splitting off between advanced practitioners and the general public—between the popular and the serious. That’s what is happening in cooking, and the idea of it as a modernist revolution is a clarifying one, not least because it helps explain a distinction in the high-end restaurant business. Many of the world’s best restaurants are not modernist: Thomas Keller’s Per Se and the French Laundry, for instance, serve superbly executed versions of food that is still attached to the historic traditions and techniques of the kitchen. Myhrvold and his colleagues call this “New International” cooking, which is a good way of pointing to the distinction between it and the new new thing. New-international cuisine stands in the line of descent from the French chef Antoine Escoffier, whose “Le Guide Culinaire” (1903) imposed an intellectual order on the classical kitchen that has lasted ever since.

One of the lessons of modernism, in all fields, is that to break with the past you first have to understand it. Members of the “Modernist Cuisine” team do that through a brash, thrillingly thorough, firsthand exploration of all sorts of culinary basics: grilling, barbecuing, baking, roasting, frying. They study these at length, accessibly, and with liberal use of truly gorgeous photography. Some of these photographs are of food pathogens—the things we eat that make us sick. The discussion of food safety comes in the first volume, not long after our introduction to the wonders of the new cooking, and there is something amusing and disconcerting about flicking a few pages on from the double-page spread of famous modernist dishes—carrot air with mandarin and bitter coconut milk, cèpes in amber—to huge pictures of E. coli and salmonella, and a voluptuous but revolting full-page photograph of a trichinosis worm inside a pork cyst. It turns out that E. coli has dreadlocks, and trichinosis is a remarkable-looking beast. It’s one of the few pathogens that we don’t ingest by accidentally eating excrement. The discussion of poo-eating in “Modernist Cuisine” is exhaustive, convincing, and gag-inducing. According to the microbiologist Philip Tierno, “We’re basically bathed in feces as a society.” “Bathed in feces”—not words you often read in a cookbook, but apparently poo-eating accounts for about eighty per cent of all food-related illness. Also, cat litter in the kitchen? Bad news. Toxoplasma gondii, a species of protozoa present in cat litter, kills three hundred and seventy-five Americans a year, and perpetuates itself through cat feces in a freaky way: when rodents eat toxoplasmii, their brain chemistry is changed so that they develop an attraction to the smell of cats. There’s no happy ending.

The discussion of pathogens is fascinating, but it’s something of a relief to move on to the cooking. One of the coolest things the “Modernist Cuisine” team does is to cut stuff in half, then take a picture of it. The cross-sectioned objects include barbecues, broilers, controlled-vapor ovens, woks, frying pans, hot-water baths, ice-water baths, saucepans, steaks, and consommés, most of them in mid-cooking. The resulting photos-with-explanation are admirably clear, which is a good thing, because a significant amount of what the team has to say is novel. Notwithstanding its title, “Modernist Cuisine” contains hundreds of pages of original, firsthand, surprising information about traditional cooking. Some of the physics is quite basic: it had never occurred to me that the reason many foods go from uncooked to burned at such speed is that light-colored foods reflect heat better than dark: “As browning reactions begin, the darkening surface rapidly soaks up more and more of the heat rays. The increase in temperature accelerates dramatically.” The science is obvious, once it’s pointed out.

Much of the rest of the science is a lot less obvious. For instance, in baking, the oven temperature is measured by a dry bulb, and can, in a domestic oven, go to about 475 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the interior of whatever is being cooked is much cooler. In fact, because most of what we eat is largely water, the internal wet-bulb temperature of the food never goes above the boiling point of water. This simple fact has many consequences, and the authors have a compelling account of the three phases undergone in traditional baking. (By “baking,” they mean cooking in a closed oven—as with what’s conventionally called a “roast,” say. They don’t discuss cakes, breads, or any other “baked goods.”) They stress the importance of the humidity level within the oven, and the fact that most of the inside of the food is heated by conduction. Browning requires the creation of what they call a “desiccation zone,” in which the water has evaporated. By their account, “As moisture evaporates from the desiccation zone, juices slowly wick up from below, pushed by diffusion and pulled by capillary forces. The trickle of juices provides a continual supply of sugars, peptides, and oils that chemically rearrange to create the characteristic color, tastes and aromas of baking food.”

They also offer a detailed comparison between baking in New York City and in Mexico City. Water boils at a cooler temperature in Mexico City—twelve degrees Fahrenheit cooler—owing to the higher altitude and lower air pressure. The New York oven starts out hotter (as measured by the all-important wet-bulb temperature), is overtaken by the Mexican oven after 17.5 seconds and falls as much as nine degrees behind, stays there for eighteen minutes, and then overtakes the Mexican oven so that, after an hour, the New York oven is seven degrees hotter, and after three hours is ahead by eleven degrees. That is a complicated matrix of differences for cooks to manage.

And how about braising and stewing? The guys say that differences in the shape and color of a pan can cause variations in cooking temperature of up to thirty-six degrees, and that differences in atmospheric humidity can cause fluctuations of up to eighteen degrees. So a different pan and different weather can cause a variation of fifty-four degrees. No wonder stews, in theory such a forgiving form of cooking, are in practice so easy to screw up.