'Modernist Cuisine' Pizza

If there's anything Modernist Cuisine, the stunning, large-format series of cooking textbooks from photographer and author Nathan Myhrvold, taught us, it's that a) physical cookbooks are still something to get excited about, and b) it's more than OK to spend more than $600 on them.

And though it's been only a few months since Modernist Bread's 2,500 pages were published, the ex-Microsoft executive and his team already have their sights set on their next anthology: a collection of books dedicated to pizza.

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"Despite its ubiquity, there's still a lot to learn about one of the planet's most popular foods, and our hope is that Modernist Pizza will deliver the story of pizza as it's never been told before," Myhrvold, who recalls deciding on the subject after trying to include it in Modernist Bread, says. Doing so would've meant adding another volume to the already-52-pound series. "It became clear that we needed to dedicate an entire book to the subject."

As of now, the author and his culinary team, led by head chef Francisco Migoya, are "conducting extensive research" and testing "long-held pizza-making beliefs" for what they're promising will be one of the world's most comprehensive cookbooks on pizza. While it won't be as lengthy as their most recent carb bible, according to a blog post, Modernist Pizza will still definitely be a multivolume work, containing both classic and new-age pizza-making techniques. And, of course, it will still incorporate all the diagrams, close-up photographs, illustrations and details that made Modernist Cuisine the graduate school textbook of the food world.

A publication date has yet to be announced, with a representative telling Eater that it will be at least a year before you can get your flour-dusted hands on Modernist Pizza. So in the meantime, scroll through to see some of Myhrvold's early photos.