[1] It is notable for the use of elaborate equipment that many non-professional kitchens lacked at the time (sous vide machines, vacuum-chamber sealers, culinary centrifuges, culinary torches, high-precision gram scales) and for its lush photography, particularly its tricky cross-sectional images of ovens, barbecue grills, and woks, apparently caught in the act of cooking the food inside them, though this isn't physically possible; rather, each individual part of the cooking apparatus was hand-cut in a nearby metal shop and then photographed, the food—already cut in half—was shot at high shutter speed, and the images of both were combined into one in post production.

[2] Its six volumes cover history and fundamentals, techniques and equipment, animals and plants, ingredients and preparation, plated dish recipes and a kitchen manual containing brief information on useful topics.

He posted messages on eGullet, a high-end cooking forum, asking for recipes or sources, but found that the process was poorly understood.

First hired was Chris Young, who had just stopped his work of leading the development kitchen in Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck in England.

Young recruited Maxime Bilet, also from The Fat Duck, who led the team of research chefs that developed and tested the 1,522 recipes in the book.

[6] Initially the book was planned to be 150 pages on cooking sous vide in water baths and combi ovens, along with some scientific fundamentals relevant to those techniques.

[17] The Cooking Lab published a less expensive, two-volume sequel, titled Modernist Cuisine at Home, coauthored by Myhrvold and Bilet, in October 2012.

However, the book was criticized by reviewers in the New York Times and the New Yorker for being dryly written and of limited utility to cooks without an expensive array of kitchen tools at their disposal.