BELLEVUE, Wash. — Two years ago in Paris, Nathan Myhrvold wandered the Louvre on a mission, camera in hand, documenting every image of bread that he could find. “Sadly, art historians don’t catalog paintings by whether or not there’s bread in them,” he said.

So Mr. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft and a founder of the investment firm Intellectual Ventures, built his own catalog. That day, he shot about 100 buns and rolls that peeped from underneath oil-rendered French linens and gleamed in dark Dutch still-lifes.

Each one became a data point in his obsessive study of bread and how it’s changed through the ages: “Modernist Bread,” a five-part cookbook to be released on Nov. 7 by the Cooking Lab, Mr. Myhrvold’s own publishing house.

Written with the chef Francisco Migoya, the book is a single-subject follow-up to “Modernist Cuisine,” the encyclopedic 2011 boxed-set cookbook that used hard science to demystify culinary techniques, and dazzled cooks with its cross-sectional photographs showing hidden processes inside pressure cookers and charcoal grills.