For instance, to get leeks and watermelons to "glow," the team placed thin slices of the produce on clear Plexiglass and then lit them from below. They photographed rice and beans under a microscope to capture the super close-up macros. And to catch a kernel of corn popping, the team filmed more than 5 pounds of popcorn, Myhrovold says. (Who knew that popcorn could rival the grace of a Tchaikovsky ballet?)

But it's the "cutaway" photos that really steal the show. From tomatoes pureeing in a blender to a pork shoulder adsorbing heat in a pressure cooker, Myrhvold and his team offer a glimpse of radical transformations during 14 cooking techniques.

So how did they make the cutaways? Two words: band saw.

To capture the magic of grilling, the team at The Cooking Lab sawed a Weber grill in half and then combined 30 photographs together. Photo: Ryan Matthew Smith/Courtesy of The Cooking Lab

That's right, the Cooking Lab has its own machine shop, and a guy with spiky, red hair literally slices microwave ovens, pots and blenders in half. Then the teams uses toothpicks or sewing needles to hold the cut food into place. A piece of Plexiglass keeps boiling liquids inside the pans.

"We made a hell of mess especially when food was flying through the air," Myrhvold says. The team even started a fire while trying to catch a stir-fry in action. "But the food only had to look good for 1/1000th of the second."

And sometimes they didn't put the food in the air at all but just faked it. For instance, that tossed salad isn't tossed all. Instead pieces of lettuces and dressing are pinned to a black velvet.

All the photos are heavily edited. And many of the images are actually several — even dozens — of photos combined together in Photoshop. For instance, Myrhvold and the team cropped and combined 30 separate photos to capture the burger cooking on the sliced-in-half grill.

That time and effort are worth it, Myhrvold says, because the photographs lure readers into thinking about how cooking works.

"I think a picture may be worth even more than a thousand words," he says. "Nobody is going to read the thousand words anyway."

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Nathan MyhrvoldNathan Myhrvold

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