Where It All Began

• The father of modernist cuisine, Herve This, a chemist and home cook in France, liked tinkering with recipes and testing traditional cooking rules. In 1988, he and a colleague came up with the name "molecular gastronomy" to describe their efforts. Nathan Myhrvold, inventor, home cook and former chief technology officer at a high-tech company, continued the work of This, popularized the term "modernist cuisine" and published the definitive Modernist Cuisine treatise in 2011.

The Modernist Creed

• Scientific cooking techniques and modern tools provide the jumping-off point for modernist cooks. They are interested in creating new, often abstract or idealized food with intensified flavors. The goal isn't the best cherry pie ever, but rather a dish with the quintessential flavor of cherry pie even if the cherries themselves are altered beyond recognition. Sometimes modernist chefs play with food and invite diners to join in the fun, such as Chef Homaro Cantu of the restaurant Moto in Chicago, who presents diners with olives that taste like parsley and garlic that tastes like olives.

Tools and Techniques

• Modernist cuisine equipment includes sous vide machines that poach meats or vegetables in vacuum-packed bags, the Pacojet machine that deep-freezes and spins foods into purees and ice creams and gelling agents that transform liquid ingredients into solids. Modernist cooking relies on some traditional cooking techniques, such as letting meat rest before carving, but does so for precise scientific reasons -- rested meat allows broken protein molecules to thicken juices.

Do It Yourself

• You may not be able to follow all modernist-cooking recipes, such as one from "Modernist Cuisine" that instructs cooks to "cavitate in an ultrasonic cleaning bath for 30 minutes," but you can experiment with modern ingredients such as flavored cooking oils for drizzling on foods or albumin powder for making gels. Modernist tools available to home cooks include blow torches for creating burnt sugar coatings and whipping siphons for carbonated juices or for creating flavored foams.