Well, if you ever got tired of listening to me, talk. Today’s the day when you just get to hear from my buddy, Chris Young, because I wound him up and clicked go, and he just talks, and it’s great. He has so much, interesting experience and amazing insights. So Chris Young, if you don’t know, I met him back when we started the Intellectual Ventures Lab, because he was the guy that Nathan Myhrvold hired to start the cooking projects.

We built an experimental kitchen there. Chris ran the project called Modernist Cuisine. Which ended up publishing a 2,400 page cookbook on the science of cooking. That won every award in the world. It’s literally a monument to modernist cooking. And these are new techniques for chefs and we talk about that a bunch today. Before that Chris had created the experimental lab at the Fat Duck and that’s Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant outside of London. Usually considered, if not the best restaurant on Earth, a contender.

Since publishing Modernist Cuisine, Chris started a company called ChefSteps to popularize sous vide, which is the most successful of the techniques so far invented by modernists. You have to learn to sous vide. It’s super easy. You can make everything you do come out perfectly.

After selling that company to Breville, Chris started a new company called Combustion and Combustion is really cool startup. There’s lots of lessons in here for entrepreneurs and folks who are making products. Chris is an amazing entrepreneur, very dedicated, really good at figuring out how to make everything work. Combustion is a difficult company to do because it’s hardware and software; and it’s in the kitchen; and it is hundreds of degrees, Fahrenheit. So it was just a lot to deal with. It’s great to learn these lessons and they’re shipping now and very successful with it. And then Chris has a YouTube channel called Chris Young Cooks, where he’s doing some of the cool stuff that we used to do on Modernist Cuisine. Cool photography, but doing it for video and sharing some of the insights that they have about cooking. So anyway, You’re going to have a blast listening to Chris.

Important Links

• Intellectual Ventures Lab

Chris Young Cooks

About Chris Young

Chris Young is a chef-scientist known for applying science and technology to create culinary experiences that earlier generations would never have imagined. Before becoming a chef, Young completed degrees in mathematics and biochemistry at the University of Washington. Unfulfilled with a life in the hard sciences, Young left his doctoral work behind for a job as a chef at one of Seattle’s top-rated restaurants, Mistral.

Young’s expertise wasn’t long secluded to the American Northwest. From 2003 to 2007, Young worked with the world-famous chef Heston Blumenthal to oversee development of some of his most innovative dishes. In 2004, Young opened The Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen, leading a team of more than six full-time chefs and coordinating the work of several consulting scientists. Beyond developing new dishes for The Fat Duck’s menu, Young was responsible for recipe development for the critically acclaimed first and second seasons of BBC’s “In Search of Perfection: With Heston Blumenthal.”

In 2007, Young was asked by the renowned technologist, inventor, and accomplished cook Nathan Myhrvold to return to Seattle to work at Intellectual Ventures. Alongside Myrhvold, Young helped research, experiment, and eventually coauthor the eagerly anticipated, industry game-changing Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.

In 2012, along with Modernist Cuisine colleagues Chef Grant Lee Crilly and photographer Ryan Matthew Smith, Young co-launched an online-based culinary school ChefSteps, using an underground space beneath Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Their mission: teaching people how to utilize modern techniques in their cooking. He is the founder and owner at Combustion Inc., a company that builds nice things that make cooking more enjoyable. Like a thermometer that’s wireless, oven-safe, and uses machine learning to do what no other thermometer can: predict your food’s cooking and resting times with uncanny accuracy.

Recorded on January 4, 2024