J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
>If I don’t like something, I simply don’t write about it. you do a much better service by leading people to great places they may not have heard of than telling them to avoid a place they probably weren’t going to go to anyway
I'm not a fan of watching video content, much prefer reading text. My Kenji consumption has dropped by quite a bit since he's moved to mostly Youtube. He's doing what he wants/loves though, and that's what matters.
I suppose what I'm saying is I want the text recipe first, and perhaps the video. From what I've seen on the Youtube channel the video is provided and sometimes the written recipe.
The biggest gaps in written IMHO tend to be (a) things people do but don't realize they do, (b) things people do but assume everyone else already knows, (c) things people do more efficiently but don't think to mention (obvious example: use a cook time break to clean prep-ware).
I would much prefer a stable camera video. The PoV videos are unwatchable for me unless I take dramamine.
Thanks for all the steak science.
And yes, I 100% agree that Kenji has been an amazing culinary content creator, researcher, and resource for years. Look at his recipes and insights on turkey/prime rib/etc for holiday meals, noodles, cookies, and more as a few outstanding examples. He reminds me a lot of many of the best things about Alton Brown and Jacques Pépin - a scientifically/analytically fussy approach to cooking and baking, but in the right ways - not in the "fussiness without usefulness" (or without useful explanation, at least) route that many chefs take.
Spanish tortilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYk9W9v-bI
Oyakadon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzpCqKdUA
I feel like --- I might be wrong here --- Kenji's origin story is the Cook's Illustrated vodka pie crust, which replaces water in the dough with vodka to minimize gluten formation (the alcohol cooks off). I think that's where I first heard of him, and I've been following ever since. He's pretty great.
An irony of this article, BTW, is that it highlights Kenji's love of Windy City Pizza in Seattle, but Kenji made waves on Twitter a few years ago for taking down Chicago-style deep dish pizza on the grounds that no mainstream Chicago place properly seasons their crust. As I recall, he even went to Pequods and was unimpressed.
Extremely cool fun fact, by the way: Kenji's wife Adriana is a cryptographer at Google with a PhD from NYU; her thesis is dedicated to Kenji, "for loving a crypto nerd".
That is an awesome recipe I use all the time, it is brilliant.
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-5118015
I think this is the first article of his I found. An adventure into how to make fries like McDonald's:
I'm a devotee of his book The Food Lab and his prior work there on Serious Eats, but haven't gotten into his videos much. I should.
It's not that they are very orthodox recipes, cut and paste from a traditional recipe cookbook, but instead very good adaptations of them, taking into account ingredients availability and different contexts.
I can't really tell about other cousines, but judging how he cooks Spanish food I'd say he knows what he's talking about.
Add to that that he seems like a very decent and empathetic person and I'd say he's someone you want to listen to if you are looking for cooking advice.
I've made dozens since last summer, and Kenji's technique in the video has been pretty much bulletproof for me.
His extra-creamy scrambled egg is also a mainstay now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX-Y513ohbc --- I love how little patience he has with macho restaurant culture, and that he won't even link to Gordon Ramsay, who popularized the dish.
It's on every menu in Barcelona - yes, served cold.
A Spaniard taught me that mixing in some potato chips gives it some variety. He said he even sometimes makes it completely out of packaged chips.
It is a curious and useful book: the recipes are for the unfussy Spanish homestyle meals they served to the staff at el Bulli each night before opening. Each recipe is one that can scale way up, and the quantities are given to make each dish For 2, 6, 20, or 75 (!) people. It’s a good source of inspiration if you need to cook a dish for a crowd.
There are also detailed photo illustrations of the ingredients and of each step in the recipe.
I bought a “tortilla pan” in Spain which prevents this. It’s basically two pans with an interlock on one side. You cook the tortilla on one side, grab the other pan and lock it on, then flip it over and put the other pan on the heat to cook the other side. Foolproof and worth it when you cook as many as I do!
He remains a delight to watch!
Kenji has other pie crust recipes where he talks about encouraging gluten formation.
Of course it's possible that there are some recipes where you want to encourage gluten formation and some where you want to discourage it. But I'm starting to get skeptical about this stuff, considering I've never once seen actual data tables about gluten levels, or even a clear indication that the final results were compared with an unbiased methodology.
That said, serious eats is the only website I get recipes from, and I love all Kenji's recipes. This is just something that bugs me about every popular "food science" source that I can recall.
It just bugs me a bit that this is called "food science", when experimental design and significance testing are the core of what science is.
At the same time, I don't want to be the science police and go around discouraging people from trying to methodically make their recipes better. I love every one of Kenji's (and Stella's) recipes that I try, so much so that I don't really bother getting recipes from other sources than Serious Eats.
(I may be misremembering some of the debate, so don't hold me to specifics).
McGee presumably didn't do "science" to reach that conclusion (I assume he got there axiomatically, like any good HN scientist would) --- though I'd note that Kenji frequently triangle-tests recipe specifics with panels, which is more science than most food writers employ. But he used science to get there. You don't get a journal article out of that, but it's a more scientific approach than the common alternative, which is why we call it that.
(Kenji graduated from MIT, for whatever that's worth.)
I appreciate the sort of knowledge creation Kenji's engaging in. And I agree that it's the most rigorous I've seen presented in a remotely accessible way.
In some ways that just makes me wish he'd take it a step further. I don't think it takes any special equipment or money or MIT degree to follow the scientific method. It seems likely that Kenji already does record data of some kind somewhere. I'm not saying he needs to look at pie crust with an electron microscope, you could simply list a more detailed procedure and qualitative scoring data in a footnote.
I do think equivocating different forms of knowledge with science wastes a great way to introduce people to important scientific concepts. And I think one could argue it risks contributing to confusion about what science is, what it's capable of, and what it's limitations are.
Of course, "be the change you want to see in the world" is great advice. And at the risk of seeming to make an insincere "compliment sandwich", I really do like Kenji and his recipes.
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-roast-potatoes-ever-rec...
I doubt he invented it, but I don't doubt he tested and researched it exhaustively. For me it comes down to three things: the baking soda eating the exterior and making a "fluffy" (surface area) result, the infused oil for flavour without burning the herbs, and the placement on a bare metal baking tray for crisping.
But they are work… for what amounts to potatoes.
Definitely worth the effort for me, I probably wouldn't bother making roast potatoes any other way anymore.
Huge fan. We need more like him. :)
My two favorite things about him are firstly, everything he talks about is backed by a scientific approach, and secondly he has a decidedly unfussy "but you can do it your way if you like" attitude as well. He's like Pepin meets molecular gastronomy.
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-p...
I'll send them some feedback—hopefully it was just a side-effect of the redesign, and they can re-add one without too much trouble.
This was useful as recently they've been republishing a lot of old content, and it was easy to see if that was the case by hovering over the URL. They've even changed the date on the recipe page to "last edited" - a couple of old ones I was looking up yesterday from 2016 now have 2020 at the top.
But a few popular ones that I follow are:
Vegan black metal chef Peaceful cuisine Hot for food
While I'm pretty sure that they might have meat based foods in their video lists, but they do have a really healthy collection of vegetarian foods as well.
On that note, his bean burgers are phenomenal: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-black-bean-burger-recip... :)
[1]: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-why-mcdonalds-burge...
[0] https://www.thrillist.com/eat/portland/stanichs-closed-will-...
If you watch old episodes of Jacque and Julia you will see how they could easily and happily disagree on what makes something special, and there is nuance there. That nuance is lost in translation with cults of personality.
Kenji's videos show how creative and open minded he is with cooking, but I've also had plenty of online encounters with folks preaching the food lab gospel.
Whatever his stuff is, 'whimsical opinion' is pretty rare.
None of this is bad -- the food lab is the cook book most often open in my kitchen and I love his videos -- but develop your own taste and understand the palates of those you're cooking for, don't just assume that whatever Kenji does is right.
But I think “whimsy” is just really off target. Most or his stuff (notwithstanding some retractions, we all learn as we go) is either pretty well researched and backed up or he’ll be very clear it’s just the way he is doing something, not canon. He has strong opinions about some things - especially cookery myths - but they tend to be backed up with a bunch of data, otherwise not so much,
That's why watching his videos is really important. If there's any recipes he ignores completely the most, it's his own.
If you go through his old recipes though on SE, you'll see "The science of the best XYZ" or "Perfect XYZ" all over the place:
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-5118015
I stopped following him a few years ago on Instagram because it was tiring. It looks like he's changed a bit.
Sure, he could put "in my opinion" and "to me" all over the place, but that would just be useless clutter. Everyone knows that "best" when referring to an aesthetic experience is always a subjective matter.
Now that he's more into videos and his presence is about instruction and eduction through example as opposed to making a splash with authoritative longform pieces and deriving the perfect recipes and guides through Serious Eats he comes across as more welcoming to all approaches but there were times in the past when he pounded the foodie gavel.
For example: chinese braised pork belly. Generally you cook the pork belly in the sauce until the sauce itself reduces and coalesceses around the pork belly, giving it a reddish appearance. Then you serve it over rice.
Problem for me?
I'm cajun/creole. While I'm perfectly fine with eating plain white rice by itself in the asian tradition, it's just not how we do it back home. We smother things so that the sauce mixes with the rice. So I added more of the liquid ingredients and brown sugar. I added some korean red pepper to up the pepper flavor of the sauce. I addded some cinnamon sticks because I felt it complimented the other ingredients.
Side by side, my pork tastes a little better than theirs. It's got more flavor. It also has sauce to pour over the rice.
It's not authentic (and not as red), but it's also something that everyone who has ever tried it has enjoyed.
Then again... if I see someone put tomatoes in a gumbo or jambalaya... or sprinkle seasoning on top of seafood after they've been pulled out of the boiling pot... that is a friendship breaker lol.
He is opinionated, but explains why he does things (often offering a scientific reasoning/experiment), especially if he's not following the traditional way, he seems to give context on what would be more traditional, and is quick in communicating "but you do you"...
If you like science of cooking you might enjoy Cooking Issues/Dave Arnold quite a bit more. I generally prefer Dave's cut of the jib.
what science isn't :)
I'll take a look at your recommendation, thanks
But Dave Arnold's slogan is "you're an enemy of quality", a title you can obtain by doing almost anything differently than he might, including not precisely measuring the displacement of ice and water before mixing a G&T. He calls things "garbage products" all the time. He is far, far more opinionated than Kenji is.
If Dave's opinionated demeanor isn't a problem for you, then opinionation (is that a word?) isn't really your problem with Kenji.
I highly, highly, highly recommend Arnold's book, Liquid Intelligence.
Cooking Issues is fundamentally a podcast about failures and attempts first and foremost, so it tends to skew a bit more towards scientific method I suppose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ZsYUPkXQ8
Skip to around 13:30, at the marker "Hose discussion becomes rant" (I assume Nastassia wrote that). He's not kidding. (He's often kidding about "enemy of quality", but sometimes he isn't, and it's a far blunter thing to say than anything Kenji has said.)
I love him so much.
A great example would be his obsession with crispy potatoes in all things potatoes. Sure, sometimes I love a shatteringly crisp fry. Other times I want something mushy. Same with roasted potatoes. But I don't ever feel put down by him for wanting mushy potatoes.
"The best" and "Perfect" sounds a heckuva lot better than "way over the top" :)
IMO, a lot of the material from Kenji, Babish for example tilt more on the food snobbery side that demand several hour long recipes[1] and vast number of expensive ingredients.
[1] Compare https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-chili-recipe with https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/244558/beef-bean-and-beer-...
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-make-the-best-chili-ever-...
What's useful here is that you can make less ambitious versions of the full recipe (using canned beans and/or cheaper meat, using ground spices rather than grinding your own, etc.) while still benefitting from some of the tricks he found (chocolate, vinegar, liquor, soy sauce/Marmite, etc.).
I also want to point out that not all of Kenji's Serious Eats recipes are "the best X ever". Some are simpler and quicker, like this chili recipe. This is much closer to Chef John's recipe in terms of complexity.
https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-pork-three-bean-chili-food-...
One distinct event that stuck out to me was when they were cooking kale. I think it was going into a quiche or something but that didn't matter. It was such a perfect dichotomy and juxtaposition, the French man was preparing it using the contemporary American method of sautéing it directly in a pan touting the benefits of nutrition retention while the American woman was for the traditional French method of boiling it and nutrition be damned for the sake of it being less bitter.'
I miss programs like that, now when there's more than one chef it's a full on ESPN level competition.
It’s a pragmatic, and opinionated general purpose cookbook.
Ginger is incredibly cheap and comes in quantities larger than I need for almost all preparations. The loss that comes from cutting it into a rectangular prism is worth the time for me, since I'm going to be throwing some of it in the trash anyway.
What’s the benefit to dirtying both a spoon and a knife to mince garlic?
López-Alt wrote that “it hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served, same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.” He added, “MAGA hats are like white hoods except stupider because you can see exactly who is wearing them.” Both tweets have since been deleted. [1]
[1] https://www.grubstreet.com/2019/02/j-kenji-lopez-alt-maga-ha...
Why even bother posting this?
And even if they did, popularity doesn't make you different from the Nazis or the KKK, both of which had fairly high peaks of popularity in their respective geography.
(To be clear, I'm not claiming equivalence and don't dispute that most of the blame rests with Trump's divisiveness.)
There is something slightly obnoxious about him that I can't quite describe that really irks me about his attitude (slightly elitist, mostly deserved, but not great if you're someone who cares about these things).
What is very interesting to me is how Seattleites are hanging on his every post and recommendation. Seattle has one of the least exciting and lackluster food scenes out of any "food city" I've ever lived in. It's honestly great for him as Seattle (I feel) lacks a food identity, so he is well positioned to influence a lot of young and well paid followers on social media
I'm a native of Washington, moved away in my teens and returned to Seattle 10 years ago, from Atlanta. Comparatively Seattle has a much less interesting food scene than Atlanta, and I don't think Atlanta is even considered to be a 'food city'.
To think that by the size of his channel he would put someone in charge of this. Perhaps the "guys, gals and non-binary pals, I'll see you next time" came from someone telling he was not inclusive enough when saying goodbye?
This article also mentions that he lives, specifically, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Cap Hill is Seattle's rainbow flag district, and anyone living there is probably gonna be encountering enbys on a regular basis.