We are Chris Young, Grant Crilly, and Ryan Matthew Smith—all alumni of the Modernist Cuisine team.
Nathan Myhrvold set an audacious goal for that book; and we achieved it because a team of talented people collaborated to create something that would have lasting value for the culinary world. But once Modernist Cuisine was published, we thought: What next?
For us, the answer was to build our own experimental kitchen (and photo studio) where we could keep doing what we love to do, which is explore what’s possible in a kitchen where the art and science of cooking come together.
We’ve done this. Delve Kitchen is our workshop located in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. It’s filled with all the usual stuff you expect in a well-equipped kitchen, plus a number of exotic tools, technologies, and toys found only in research labs and machine shops. Better still, steps from our door are the farm stands, butchers, fish mongers, specialty grocers, and local artisans that make Pike Place Market the heart of Seattle’s food scene.
Once our kitchen was up and running, a lot of people assumed that we would quickly get to work on another book. Now, big beautiful cookbooks are great—and we’re always excited when a new one arrives at our kitchen—but we were interested in doing something different. Rather than sequester ourselves away for a long time before publishing our work with great fanfare, we wanted to do something more collaborative.
So rather than a book, our audacious goal is to create a culinary school where curious cooks can learn the how’s and why’s of cooking.
Our first course is on sous vide cooking, and you can read more about it here. But creating the course content is actually the easy part of our job; we need your help to make this successful. Our team is small, we’re in start-up mode, and this is all being done without a bunch of investor funding.
And this is where you come in: If this seems interesting, tell us, and better still, tell your friends about us. Feel free to use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or some other new social media thing that we don’t know about yet. Then, once the course starts, get engaged with us and with your peers. Above all, practice the techniques, try the recipes, and then let us know how it goes. Your feedback (good and bad) will keep us getting better at what we do.
Thanks,
Chris, Grant, and Ryan
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