Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

His Youtube is very, very good. Two Kenji videos that changed my life a little during the pandemic, in that I now make these things all the time:

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".

I'm a Spanish person, living abroad and with a penchant for cooking, and I was too very gratefully surprised by Kenji's Spanish tortilla video. Also by his other Spanish recipes such as Gazpacho[1] or Paella[2].

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD3WyeqCDHw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASP74I0B7zo

His wife is Columbian, IIRC.

Yes she is

Not sure to understand the point made between European Spanish cuisine and the Colombian one ?

Presumably there’s some similar food culture between Spain and Spanish-speaking countries?

Not really, not at all as far as I can tell as a Spaniard. Cuisine in Spain is remarkably similar to that of France, though.

While there is obviously Spanish influence in Latin American cuisine, I wouldn’t say the food cultures are similar. Furthermore, the culture can vary a lot between different (or even neighboring) Latin American countries.

Why does it matter if someone is Spanish to be able to cook Spanish food (or Columbian)? It is neither a sufficient, nor a necessary requirement.

Where did I say it was?

I can't believe I didn't know about Spanish tortilla before. Easily the best egg dish and also maybe the best way I currently know to prepare potatoes at home now. And they get better when they're cold! I've wasted my life!

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.

I am very surprised it's not a more popular dish in the US - it seems like it would fit well the Denny's, IHOPs or even some fast-breakfast drive-throughs, and work as breakfast or appetizer or dinner.

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.

The potato chip Spanish tortilla is supposedly a Ferran Adria thing.

It’s in his cookbook “The Family Meal”.

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.

Huh, it's weird, I have The Family Meal, and even remember reading the potato chip omelette thing, but never connected that to a Spanish tortilla.

I've made his Spanish tortilla once a month or so since that video came out... However, I once dropped the whole thing in the sink while doing the "flip". (Maneuvering a hot cast iron pan isn't easy.) I've never felt more disappointed in myself than I did at that moment; I was making it for breakfast and I basically just turned the stove off and went back to bed. So now I'm always a bit wary when I start on it, knowing that it has the power to destroy me psychologically.

This has happened to me a few times, and I imagine many others!

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!

Just as a point of order (and because I don't like giving Gordon Ramsay credit for things either), Jaques Pépin popularized that technique for scrambled eggs when Ramsay was ten years old.

He remains a delight to watch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqKq0bQHnZU

I've watched this Jacques Pépin video countless times and the ease with which he casually prepares the two styles of omelets in ~5 minutes and narrates the process amazes me every time. I still can't perfectly replicate the second "classic French omelet" style even after years of effort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1XoCQm5JSQ&t=8s

That video is amazing and taught me how to make omelets. Of course, Pépin is also responsible for the single greatest cooking video on the Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfY0lrdXar8

I’ve been following Kenji for a very long time. One thing I like is on the subject of adaptations. I have made his beef stew a few times, it’s quite involved. But I love how the recipe on the site adapts over time to take into account how people in the comments find different ingredients and tooling. For example, his original recipe works great on his super nice restaurant quality oven, but not as much on your regular persons oven. He adapted the recipe for the audience to take this into account, which I absolutely loved.

If I may share a recipe, his par-boiled baking soda roasted potatoes are a simple but amazing addition to my kit.

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.

Those are far and away the dish that people are most shocked at how good they are when I serve.

But they are work… for what amounts to potatoes.

Like most things, it's not the cooking work that bothers me (I find it relaxing), but the cleaning. It adds up to a lot more to clean (boiling pot, strainer, pan for herbs, strainer for herbs, etc). But that's not too bad since I can do all that while they're in the oven, and we have a dishwasher.

Definitely worth the effort for me, I probably wouldn't bother making roast potatoes any other way anymore.

I know him from Serious Eat's "The Food Lab":

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:

https://www.seriouseats.com/perfect-french-fries-recipe

Oyakodon is worth it just for the little chuckle over its name alone ("oya": parent, "ko": child, and the dish includes both chicken and egg). Like many sources describing this dish, Kenji mentions this basically immediately, as they well should.

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 also worth it because it is bananas easy to make, maybe the fastest possible chicken thigh cook, and there is something deeply magical about the combination of eggs, rice, and dashi/soy.

I'd like to see an as-blind-as-possible test of water vs vodka in the pie crust.

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.

I don't ever use the vodka recipe any more; Kenji linked once to Stella Parks' pie crust recipe, which is a very simple water-based crust, and it's worked every single time for me. The vodka was just a neat trick, is all.

That's kind of my point though. I haven't seen sufficient evidence to confidently believe the vodka played a role in the crust. To be fair, I haven't seen sufficient evidence that no difference exists either.

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.

It's science in a different sense than you're using the word; it's cooking informed by science rather than by craft tradition. A good illustration of the distinction is in the debate between Marcella Hazan and Harold McGee, about the value of cooking with good virgin olive oil --- Hazan, from the Italian craft tradition, took umbrage at McGee's observation that heat denudes good oil of most of what makes it good.

(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.)

If you disagree that science should, in modern parlance, be interpreted as a reference to the scientific method, I guess I have no basis for argument. It's not my intent to be the grammar (semantic, I guess?) police.

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.

Stella is to baking as Kenji is to everything else: someone whose recipes and writing I place a great deal of trust in. Bravetart is every bit as good as The Food Lab.

Important true fact: Daniel Gritzer, the current editor at Serious Eats and a Kenji's former colleague there, is also a practically bulletproof recipe writer and is very underrated. It's Gritzer's Roman pasta technique I use, not Kenji's.

My first search when I want to make something new almost always includes "serious eats" it doesn't seem to matter which author wrote the recipe, but they are almost always excellent. When there are so many websites with bad recipes out there, it is always nice to be able to have a place where the recipes just work.

Yes. He created the vodka pie crust recipe at CI. After Cooks he started showing up here and there on Serious Eats (iirc "A Burger Today"?) before going all in there.

I've used that recipe for years! I only just recently learned he was behind it this whole time.

I like his recipes and style but his videos make me nauseous bec of the POV. I wish he would just use stable cameras.

Same, but I gut it out, because the dishes are pretty much always worth it.

I did that vodka crust pie recipe when I was young and used every clear instead of vodka. Big mistake it ended up making a combustible mix in my oven and When I opened the door the sochometic ratio was just right and POOF.

Wait, he made the vodka pie dough recipe???

That is an awesome recipe I use all the time, it is brilliant.

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