What do you do if you're a wealthy technologist and are interested in food? Take some classes at the Cordon Bleu, right? Well, if you're Nathan Myhrvold -- former CTO of Microsoft and founder of Intellectual Ventures -- you take it a step further. Myhrvold hired a team of 15 people, including a chef from a famous London restaurant, who are helping him write a 1,500-page tome on the science of cooking. Today he showed off his culinary research in a lecture at the University of Washington, and treated the crowd to almond ice cream made with liquid nitrogen (video below).

Myhrvold described the cookbook as three years in the making (with a target publication date a year from now). He called it an "encyclopedic treatment of modern cooking" and said his team has been laboring away on it in a corner of Intellectual Ventures' Bellevue invention lab. The book seeks to explain -- often in minute detail -- the physical processes behind cooking: everything from evaporation and emulsification to heat equations and temperature distribution.

Myhrvold giddily rattled off some of the high-tech toys in his test kitchen, including a freeze drier (acquired at a biotech company's bankruptcy auction), a centrifuge (which can subject food to 40,000 times the earth's gravity), infrared cameras, and various microscopes, among other exotic pieces of equipment. He was joined on stage by Chris Young, a UW chemistry grad who worked for a time at the Fat Duck, a London restaurant known for its manipulations of food flavors and textures (the menu includes salmon poached in liquorice and chocolate wine slush). Myhrvold, a fan of the Fat Duck, hired Young to help him with the cookbook.

Toward the end of Myhrvold's lecture, Young used liquid nitrogen to whip up some almond ice cream. Is Myhrvold aiming to be the next Food Network star?

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