After Publishing Five Volumes Of Modernist Bread, Nathan Myhrvold Adds One For Home Baking, Part One

As if billionaire scientist, technologist and inventor Dr. Nathan Myhrvold didn’t have enough on his plate even after publishing five volumes about Modernist bread making, he decided one more volume was needed for those who want to make perfect breads at home.

Myhrvold, 64, with a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a master’s degree in mathematical economic, from Princeton, co-founded the software company Dynamical Systems Research, and worked in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University with Professor Stephen Hawking, then led the advanced technology and business development at Microsoft for fourteen year, managing an R&D budget of $2 billion, and servings strategist and chief technology officer.

In 2000, he retired from Microsoft to create Intellectual Ventures (IV), with more than 900 U.S. patents, and founded Global Good to invent technologies for global health and development, and the Institute for Disease Modeling.

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ven as a child Myhrvold developed a passion in for food and cooking, and while at Microsoft worked nights at a Seattle restaurant u and obtained a culinary degree at Ecole De La Varenne in Burgundy. In 2007, he founded The Cooking Lab, a culinary research laboratory, photo studio and publishing company, that in 2011 produced the 2,500-page Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, followed in 2013 by The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, then in 2021 three volumes on Modernist Pizza, and this spring, Modernist Bread.

If this seems obsessive as well as time-consuming, for Myhrvold it’s all in a day’s work, a day that’s grown into years. I interview him about how and why he has clearly gone where no one else has gone before on these subjects.

When did you develop such a fervid interest in the principles of modernist food?

My culinary path began nearly 50 years ago with youthful inquisitiveness, including a foray into competitive barbecue, a long stint as a stagiaire at Thierry Rover’s restaurant in Seattle and a diploma from a culinary school in France. Besides cooking, the students would go to a lot of great restaurants for dinner. At one dinner I was told of a chef working in Spain near the border with France in a restaurant called elBulli, but it was too far away at the time. It would have been fascinating to visit, because the year was 1995, and I would have seen the Modernist revolution at an even earlier stage than I did.

That would come soon after, however. Learning about cooking requires a lot of eating, and I have been an enthusiastic eater on my travels around the world. That exposed me to the Modernist cooking happening at the world’s best restaurants, including elBulli, which eventually I was fortunate to visit many times.

In 1999, I retired from Microsoft and founded my own company focused on invention. By the 2000s, I had become immersed in Modernist cooking, a field that lacked any central texts. There was very little information about the technique in English at that time. Based on the discussions I was having on the eGullet forum, I knew there was a need for a comprehensive book on sous-vide in English, so I decided to write it, but I quickly realized I needed to expand the scope to all of Modernist cooking, so I decided to assemble a team to create that missing piece as a way of making these new Modernist techniques more widely available.

Modernist Cuisine was a watershed moment for me and for the cooking world. My team and I went on to publish six more books, Modernist Cuisine at Home, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, Modernist Bread, Modernist Pizza, Food & Drink: The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and now Modernist Bread at Home.

Modernist Bread was five volumes. What more could be found and why this new book Modernist Bread at Home?

My team and I studied bread intensively and spent several years going through the bread world with a fine-tooth comb. We always realized home baking was important, which is why we made Modernist Bread at Home accessible to anyone who is passionate about bread.

For this book, we’ve distilled the most important lessons we learned from that research into a single volume book. We put a lot of thought into how we can push bread in new directions, but also help make bread less intimidating and more convenient for home bakers. Readers will discover innovative ways to simplify the bread-making process and save time, new technical skills to master, and beautiful loaves that have a depth of flavor beyond what you’ll find in the store.

While the full edition is found in many homes, you might not have room for 50 pounds of books and instead might want to store 50 pounds of flour. We’ve still included references to Modernist Bread in case you want to graduate on to it as you become a more confident bread maker, and we’ve retained some of our most interesting findings in the new book.

What are some of the myths you found about breadmaking?

Conventional wisdom holds that overproofed doughs are irretrievably damaged and should be thrown away. Our experiments found just the opposite: we were able to resuscitate the same batch of dough up to 10 times before it suffered any serious loss in quality. This discovery led to one of our favorite techniques for rescuing overproofed bread, which we call Dough CPR.

Additionally, many bread books emphasize the importance of kneading, either by hand, by a mixer fitted with a dough hook, or by some other mechanical means. They argue that this action of working the dough is what develops gluten, providing structure and texture to the loaf. Contrary to this commonly held belief, mixing is not what develops the gluten. We’d love to take credit for this revelation, but the truth is that there have been recipes for “no-knead bread” for decades. It really became a sensation in 2006, when the New York Times published a recipe for baker Jim Lahey’s version. The dough is mixed together just until it forms a shaggy mass (pretty much the least amount you can mix the dough and have it come together), then left at room temperature for 12–18 hours, over which period the flour hydrates and the gluten network forms. No-knead bread relies on time to hydrate the glutenin and gliadin proteins in the flour, rather than the force of mixing applied by hand or dough hook.

All this isn’t to say that mixing is a waste of effort in every instance. It speeds things up and allows you to create breads that would be very impractical to make any other way, such as enriched doughs with a lot of butter or very high-hydration doughs.

You are very exacting about proofing the yeast. How should it be done?

Final proofing replaces gas depleted through the dividing and shaping process with new carbon dioxide, continuing the fermentation process that began when the dough was first mixed. This new gas expands the dough’s existing bubbles and creates an open crumb structure that, when baked, is soft and pleasant to eat. The baker’s role in this process is to provide an appropriate environment for the dough, to protect it as it develops, then judge when final proofing is complete. That final assessment takes experience and patience to perfect, but it is crucial; the success or failure of a bread’s volume and flavor is partly determined by how accurately it is proofed.

The type of yeast (commercial yeast versus a starter) and its percentage in the dough will make a difference. Generally, the higher the temperature (up to a certain point), the faster the fermentation. The longer the overall fermentation time before the final proofing stage, the more the carbon dioxide production. The lower the hydration, the slower the speed of fermentation.

There’s an art, though, to determining when final proofing is complete. The most common method is the fingertip test, which involves gently pressing your finger into the dough and seeing how quickly it springs back. The drawback to the fingertip test is that it relies heavily on experience and practice, so it’s a skill that can take time to develop.

Proofing dough at room temperature is the simplest method and requires the least equipment—all you need is a proofing container and something to cover the dough so that it doesn’t form a skin. This method depends on the temperature of the environment, which can vary by location and by day, as well as your expertise in calling proof.