Toronto BarChef co-owner Frankie Solarik shows CNN Deluxe the art of making beautiful cocktails.
FULL POST

Editor's note: Nathan Myhrvold is CEO of Intellectual Ventures, author of "Modernist Cuisine" and "Modernist Cuisine at Home." Sanjay Gupta hosts The Next List on Sundays at 2 p.m. ET, only on CNN

CNN: For people who don't know anything about cooking, how would you define modern cuisine?

Myhrvold: So modern cuisine is the movement of chefs that are trying to create new kinds of food, new food experiences. And they don't care if they have to break some of the traditional rules of cooking to do so.
FULL POST

Ray Isle (@islewine on Twitter) is Food & Wine's executive wine editor. We trust his every cork pop and decant – and the man can sniff out a bargain to boot. Take it away, Ray.

The other day, I felt the time had come to Vitamix some Bordeaux. Any reasonably sane person, of course, might wonder why. After all, the Vitamix (or at least the Vitamix Professional Series 750) whizzes its razor-sharp steel blades around at 24,000 rpm, which is fast enough to liquify pretty much anything. You could toss a license plate and some pool balls in there and end up with a smoothie; a weird one, but a smoothie nonetheless.
 
The reason I decided to frappé my French red, though, was to check out the idea of “hyper-decanting,” which is the inspiration of Nathan Myhrvold, ex–chief technology officer of Microsoft, all-around mad-scientist foodie and author of the monumental (meaning it weighs 50 pounds) book Modernist Cuisine. Myhrvold’s idea is pretty straightforward: Ordinary decanting - i.e., pouring your wine into a decanter - achieves its benefits because the wine is exposed to air. Blending it intensifies the exposure, and thus the benefits.
 
Before we get to the results, I should answer a basic question, which is: “Why the heck decant a wine in the first place?”
FULL POST

Editor's note: Heston Blumenthal is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest living chefs. A proponent of molecular gastronomy, his scientific approach to cooking has earned his flagship restaurant, The Fat Duck, three Michelin stars, bringing him as much attention as esoteric dishes like bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge. Here, he reveals the early experiences that helped form his multi-sensory cooking philosophy.

Think about the most memorable meal you ever had. Was it just the taste you remember, or everything else around it?

To me, food is as much about the moment, the occasion, the location and the company as it is about the taste.

It is the only thing we do that involves all the senses. It has the ability to generate so much emotion and so much memory. It has endless possibilities. It is one of those subjects where the more you learn about it; the more you realize you don't know.
FULL POST