“Writing about sous vide led Myhrvold to think more deeply about how heat moves through different media (which is why Modernist Cuisine may well be the only cookbook ever published with a long disquisition on Fourier’s law, the equation for calculating heat transfer). That led to food safety, and that led to a more general exploration of the microbiology of food. Myhrvold soon realized that his ambition for Modernist Cuisine had outstripped his ability to write it alone. “It’s like writing software,” he says. “If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn’t that interesting.” - × × ×