THE wait for the 30-hour cheeseburger just got a little longer. The dish, which takes more than a day to prepare, calls for a short-rib patty to be slow-cooked in a vacuum pack, then dunked in liquid nitrogen before it is deep fried. It is among more than a thousand recipes in “Modernist Cuisine,” a cookbook whose publishing delay, announced on Sept. 15, set off a collective sigh among gastronomes.

Proofreading and packaging concerns pushed back the release of Nathan Myhrvold’s six-volume, 2,400-page, $625 book from December to March. But that merely sweetened the anticipation among chefs and the type of home cooks unafraid to make almond cream with a homogenizer.

Dr. Myhrvold is a former chief technology officer for Microsoft who had his first Ph.D. at age 22 and later studied quantum theories of gravity with the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. “Modernist Cuisine” grew out of Dr. Myhrvold’s passion for science and food; he trained as a chef at LaVarenne in Burgundy, France.

He has spent three years in a laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., testing and adapting the increasingly complex cooking techniques emerging at restaurants like El Bulli, the Fat Duck and WD-50. Where other cookbook writers use whisks and graters, Dr. Myhrvold, who amassed hundreds of millions of dollars at Microsoft, wields vacuum sealers, colloid mills and rotary evaporators, and ingredients like agar and methylcellulose.