Nathan Myhrvold

Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has spent the past several years working on a tome about the science of cooking — a kind of cookbook for geeks. Now he's unveiling the massive work, and we do mean massive. The book, called "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," is a six-volume set totaling 2,400 pages. According to a promotional website, the book "reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food" and is "destined to reinvent cooking."

Myhrvold — better known as CEO of controversial patent firm Intellectual Ventures — is self-publishing the work, which is scheduled for release in December. While the book purports to be for amateur and professional chefs alike, it may be a bit out of reach for the masses. For one thing, it has a price tag of $421.87 on Amazon.com (full list price is $625). It also deploys various pieces of exotic lab equipment in the kitchen.

Myhrvold's co-authors are two chefs, including Chris Young, a University of Washington grad who spent time at The Fat Duck, an experimental restaurant near London. According to the Modernist Cuisine website, a team of 20 people worked on the book and "achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes."

Myhrvold has been talking up his culinary project for a while now, at a UW lecture last year and in tours of Intellectual Ventures' facility in Bellevue. Myhrvold has a large test kitchen there tricked out with a freeze drier, infrared cameras, and microscopes, among other things.

The promotional website says the majority of recipes in the book can be prepared in a "conventional home kitchen, especially if you get some fairly inexpensive additional equipment." But, it adds:

We decided early on, however, that we would not “dumb down” our those recipes that illustrate the fascinating culinary applications of advanced ingredients, such as liquid nitrogen, and equipment such as centrifuges and rotor-stator homogenizers.

I'll have to try those for my next summer barbecue.

As I've said in the past, I'll give this to Myhrvold: Whereas other wealthy food enthusiasts might be content to take a course at Cordon Bleu, he's taking his culinary obsession to a whole new level.

Follow my updates on Twitter.