I came across an interview/conversation (via) between Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz, an american chef also known for his molecular gastronomy. Both guys have books out later this year (October) and they’re discussing various aspects of the process that goes into them. Both have managed to retain a lot of control over the content and style of their books (Grant is self-publishing, and Heston spent time interviewing publishers before selecting Bloomsbury), and as a result both admit that some of the recipes included in the book will be difficult for a home-cook to manage. Heston
we’re making absolutely no concessions whatsoever. We’re printing exactly the recipes [we use in the restaurant] […] We started looking at reducing some of the quantities down to a more manageable size, but we found that if you started to divide the various ingredients and scale a recipe down for four or six people, if you had [an ingredient] like gelling gum, which you use in small quantities [anyway], you might end up with something like 0.021 grams. So we actually decided to make a caveat at the beginning of the recipe section that these are literally Fat Duck recipes stuck in the book.
And Grant, on his decision to stick to metric measurements:
Ten Speed[the distributor of the book] was like, if you want to sell cookbooks, there’s no way people in the U.S. are going to buy it if you make them go out and buy a digital scale. And we said, well, then tough! Because like Heston just said, you can’t accurately weigh some of these things in 1/2 teaspoons and 1/8 teaspoons. You have to have an accurate gram scale; that’s just the way it is. So it’s going to be really interesting how people will respond to that.
One way in which they differ though is on the estimatd price. Grant made the decision that he wanted the book to be “approachable on the price scale” and is aiming for $50 (£25) a copy, which for a cookbook is fairly cheap. Heston on the other hand decided that he didn’t want a cheap book, and is hoping to price it at £100 a copy, which (to me at least) is quite a lot of money for a book.
Towards the end, both chefs make mention of websites - “Alinea Mosaic” will be companion-site to Grant’s book, allowing people to give feedback and ask questions and that, to me, seems like a really good idea - having a place to share the tweaks and changes made to complex recipes will be really useful for people wanting to find replacements for equipment and ingredients. Heston is more secretive, but we should see something around the books’ launch.
