Alinea cookbook

Alinea is widely regarded as one of America's best restaurants and its chef patron Grant Achatz is at the forefront of developing modern culinary techniques. Some of those techniques may owe more to the lab than our mother's kitchen, but they should not be knocked because of that.

Next year, the restaurant's first cookbook will be published and it is now available to pre-order, wherever you live. Annoyingly, this is currently an option only open to those with a US billing and delivery address. If you pre-order you get lots of additional goodies, like a signed edition and additional recipes on a dedicated website.

The book isn't available until this time next year and that throws up an interesting prospect: that it will come out at roughly the time the first Fat Duck cookbook is due. I've heard a lot of gossip about Heston's inevitable tome but no-one seems to know too much. Nonetheless, the latest I heard was to expect it towards the end of next year.

We face the fantastic prospect therefore of two of the world's greatest chefs publishing the recipes of the dishes they make in their kitchens. If they live up to their hype, they will be seminal works that define their era and represent a culinary timestamp. They will be direct heirs to White Heat. They should also help to move some of the modern techniques used in the best restaurant kitchens into the mainstream and provide some education to those who still insist on sniggering.

Hat-tip: Ideas in Food