If someone is thinking "what could I get 'tptacek for Christmas for all his helpful comments", know that I can't justify dropping $500 for a book, but I soooooo want to. ;)
McGee and Ferran Adria both say this set of books is going to change cooking. McGee wrote basically the bible of culinary science (On Food And Cooking, which you should buy even if you don't cook much, it's just a great, great book to open to any page and thumb through); Ferran Adria is one of cooking's greatest innovators.
The Flavor Bible is also fun to flip to an arbitrary page in and read in either direction, but it really wants to be a web app, doesn't it? (There's obviously a bunch of web apps that try, but they don't have the curation that the book has).
I don't know if you've been following Myrhvold's cooking stuff, but my understand is that there's a fair bit of mythbusting going on too; he gave a talk recently where he claimed to debunk the notion that you have to poach duck in fat to confit it, for instance (lies! all lies!). My cofounder Dave is a cooking school grad and he's sure that this book is going to be hugely important, even if you already have McGee.
I have an actual smoker in my garage, but my partner Dave just built his own smoke gun out of $15 bucks worth of parts. Write something up about your smoke injector thingy so we can all talk about smoked food next!
McGee and Ferran Adria both say this set of books is going to change cooking. McGee wrote basically the bible of culinary science (On Food And Cooking, which you should buy even if you don't cook much, it's just a great, great book to open to any page and thumb through); Ferran Adria is one of cooking's greatest innovators.