Photographer Aims To Publish Book On Recreating Alinea Cookbook Recipes
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Apr 26, 2014 4:00PM
Remember when the Alinea cookbook was released in 2008 and all the cool kids (and not so cool ones) tripped over themselves to replicate the recipes at home to varying degrees of success? D.C. resident Carol Blymire was arguably the most famous of these experimenters with her Alinea at Home blog. (We stopped after a frustrating process trying to make cheese crackers.)
Allen Hemberger spent five years photographing and writing about his experiences to recreate every recipe in the Alinea cookbook, documenting the process along the way, and is now turning to Kickstarter to fund a book on his project, which is about as meta as it gets.
“Over the course of the project,” Hemberger writes, “I've built precisely-controllable heating chambers for warming chocolate, learned how to import super-fresh fish from the Tsukiji fish market in Japan and washed more dishes than I could possibly keep count of.
“Every recipe in the book has offered new and unique opportunities for me to deepen my understanding and appreciation of the food I eat, how it is procured and prepared and how I can use it as more than just a source of nourishment, but as an expression of artistic creativity,” Hemberger adds.
With the help of his wife, a designer, Hemberger is looking to raise $28,500 to fund the project and have it published by a high-end book printer. And it looks as though he’s well on his way to fully funding it before a May 24 deadline. Check it out.