The World's Heaviest Recipe Book a Treatise on 'Modernist Cuisine'

Do you want to cook some unknown recipes from tech visionary Nathan Myhrvold's 'Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking'? Well, first try lifting it. The book, which runs to 2,438 pages and apparently weighs more than 18kg, could be the heaviest - and most ambitious - recipe book ever sold, reports the Guardian.

The six-volume cookbook, priced at 395 pounds, was published in the United States on Monday.

Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, was inspired to create the culinary colossus in 2004 after discovering that a cooking technique called sous-vide - which uses vacuum-sealed bags to cook food in water under very controlled temperatures - was not widely available.

In response, he decided 'to create a comprehensive book that covered modernist cuisine in terms of history and recipes, science and technique'.

Highlighting developments spearheaded over the past 20 years by such forward-thinking chefs as El Bulli's Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, the book outlines the equipment (such as test tubes) and step-by-step maths and science techniques readers will need to recreate optimum cooking conditions in their own kitchen.

It took 36 people and four years to put together the contents in Myhrvold's Seattle-based Cooking Lab, using recipes from chefs both dead and alive.

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"This book is for people who really love food. The point of it is to be an encyclopedic reference that, in a self-contained way, explains the key techniques of 21st-century cooking and if you're not looking for that, then there are a million other cookbooks in the world," said Myhrvold.

Source-ANI