WEIGHING in at 18kg, costing $625 and coming in at 2,400 pages- the latest gourmet guide that foodies are lusting after isn't your average kitchen cookbook. The brainchild of Nathan Myhrvold, a multimillionaire tech visionary, Modernist Cusine is a six-volume behemoth that may be the world’s heaviest cookbook ever.

Taking 46 people nearly five years to produce in a massive Seattle warehouse, the incredible six-volume series celebrates the laboratory-inspired cooking made famous by El Bulli’s Ferran Adria and The Fat Duck’s Heston Blumenthal. But just how many people are likely to cook from it given the list of "must-have tools" includes liquid nitrogen, a centrifuge and a tabletop homogenizer.

For example, the book’s hamburger recipe involves preparing tomato and lettuce in a vacuum sealer, shaping hand-ground beef using half-cylinder moulds and creating restructured cheese with an algae by-product that is heated and then cooled – and after all that, you better factor in it’ll take you 30 hours prep time to get your burger on the table.“The most astonishing cookbook of our time,” the Wall Street Journal reviewer wrote.

“Arguably the most beautiful, in-depth, manual of cooking methods ever published,” Elizabeth Weise from USA Today said in her review. “The cookbook to end all cookbooks,” New York culinary phenomenon David Chang said.