J. Kenji López-Alt says you’re cooking just fine | Hacker News Reader

J. Kenji López-Alt says you’re cooking just fine

newyorker.com

196 pointsnkurz169 comments

> But, even before that, I remember when I first started thinking about the way I behaved. I was still living in Boston. I had been out of kitchens for a couple years. I think I was working at Cook’s Illustrated. I had two roommates in Cambridge—one of them was my best friend. She and I had lived together since college. We had a friend visiting, and my roommate had woken up, gone to the corner store, and bought a box of pancake mix and was making pancakes. I came out of my room that morning and basically just berated her about using pancake mix when we had all the ingredients already. Our mutual friend was, like, “Kenji, you’re being an asshole. Why are you judging a person for making pancakes?” And I realized at that point, Oh, crap, why am I belittling one of my best friends in the world for wanting to make pancakes at home? I had to make a conscious decision not to be that way.

> You can train yourself, I think, to be a better person just by thinking about it a lot, and acting on those thoughts.

I liked his stuff, he really can be an asshole on reddit (and Twitter which he deleted). Kind of turned me off to him.

His last tweet seems pretty fitting to your comment:

> Be good to each other. Stop arguing in short bursts and getting mad at strangers because they had to trim complex thoughts down to a single sentence. Make your words meaningful, rather than clever. Call someone you love or someone you don’t and have a conversation. Quit this.

Why take advice from someone who doesn't even follow it

If it's good advice, does it truly matter if the giver follows it?

So far it has worked for 0 out of the 1 people we know who've tried it. Maybe it's not good advice

What makes you think it hasn’t worked out? Leaving Twitter seems like a pretty good start.

He brings up politics in his videos occasionally and it clearly still gets to him. He left twitter because it made him feel bad. It hasn't changed how he sees the world.

edit: or just look at his reddit account lol

I assume people who give advice they don’t follow are just talking to themselves.

Yes, I've actually had a (what I intended to be friendly) conversation with him on twitter where he was definitely an asshole. Glad he is becoming more introspective (or it was just an off morning for him).

Could you link to it? It's probably easy to find; just search for

    (from:yourname)(@kenjilopezalt)

This is consistent with the above quote. Someone who's naturally somewhat of an asshole has to always actively keep that in check to be nice. Other people are naturally pleasant.

I’ve only recently gotten into Kenji but he doesn’t come off as an asshole to me. Perhaps he’s grown up a bit since you last read/watch him?

According to the article maybe(especially if he's drinking less), I don't really seek out his stuff. I formed my opinion after he showed up and started something responding to a comment on reddit about recipes that had nothing to do with him.

You could just provide a link. Then you wouldn't have to paraphrase or explain.

I'd be really cautious about attributing people's personality traits to drinking; as insults go, that one's pretty grave.

I managed to dig it up for you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/pwmw4u/lpt_some_re...

He shows up to flex his credentials, tell me my opinion is wrong? It was odd and rubbed me the wrong way. There's a thread in ramen about making tonkostu broth in a pressure cooker where I thought he came off arrogant.

I'm not insulting anyone, it was brought up in the article

I think he shows up to explain that you're wrong about what "chili powder" means in American recipes, not so much to flex his credentials, but either way, thanks for the link!

A link would indeed be helpful, I'm falling to understand what sounds like just acting like a member of the community, and participating in the forums even when it's not his recipe. (People do someone's argue about recipes on Reddit, after all.)

> I formed my opinion after he showed up and started something responding to a comment on reddit about recipes that had nothing to do with him.

Because this thread you're in has so much to do with you?

I shared that his self admitted asshole behavior makes his content less appealing to consume. What's so bad here?

He was just participating in an online community, the same way you were both in that thread and we are in this one. I saw your link; he wasn't being an asshole - he was providing clarifying information.

Clarifying what? I was sharing my opinion, you don't get to tell me my opinion is wrong. Or clarify my opinion for me? That's pretty egotistical...

He does seem to be a complete cock, he is revered and yet often wrong.

He's your classic home-cook-gone-famous and with his support everyone thinks they're a god in the kitchen.

Nothing turns me off a recipe or yt vid quite like "Kenji says".

Kenji takes some quite overt political stances that seem to flip some people out. I've never seen him be anything but gracious. He does pop in here occasionally when articles discuss him.

I never perceived him to be any kind of asshole on Twitter, even as I disagreed with him pointedly about stuff. I think there's a pretty significant "tall poppy" thing happening with Kenji online.

Yeah from what I’ve seen of him always came across as someone who was a jerk but completely oblivious to it and his on camera persona is very fake once you’ve seen him off camera in comments.

I used to be anti mix. Now I'm 100% on the train. The simple fact is that the extra stabilizers and emulsifiers that are added to the mix don't detract from the flavor and texture at all, if anything enhancing the texture. Mixes are engineered to consistently reach a desired result. Krusteez pancake mix is a permanent staple in my house. If I feel like baking something like brownies, or a cake I'll go out to buy a mix on my next shopping trip. Cookies are probably the only thing I won't bother due to their simplicity.

We make a batch of Alton Brown's mix maybe every other month:

https://altonbrown.com/recipes/semi-instant-pancake-mix/

I don't think we have any trouble with consistency.

For baking, my go to recipe site is Smitten Kitchen.

It's not that we're anti-mix, it's that it's easy to stock the staple baking ingredients and then we can make whatever we want.

> Mixes are engineered to consistently reach a desired result.

That’s pretty much exactly what I dislike about mixes and ready-made food. It’s not that they’re bad, but they are the same every time. Your pancakes taste like my pancakes. That’s boring. I like tasting other peoples pancakes. I usually stock some ready to eat food for times when cooking is just not and option, but I rarely end up reaching for it.

Also, they’re single use, they can not be disassembled to build something else. With eggs, milk, flour, butter, I can make pancakes - American and German style, Dutch Baby, Kaiserschmarrn, waffles, … A pancake mix is a pancake mix, it’s pancakes, nothing else.

It's almost as if you can tweak mixes or something.

Seriously, you want to change pancake mix? Use some buttermilk instead of milk. Mix in a bit of sourdough starter. Add some fruit. Cook down a can of fruit with some sugar and lemon juice and make your own syrup. There are tons of things you can do.

If I go to a fancy restaurant that specializes in pancakes, THEN I expect them to do their own thing. But waking up at morning and getting pancakes that someone has prepared for me is better than waking up in the morning and eating a bowl of cereal or a pre-wrapped muffin. MOST people don't have a go-to pancake recipe... they'd just look up and use the first thing they found online that they had ingredients for.

If you have all that on hand why would you not have eggs, flour, and milk as well?

As nobody in my household drinks white milk, I only have it on hand if a recipe specifically calls for it. And I suspect they wouldn’t quite be the same with chocolate milk, of which there is almost always a supply thanks to kids ..

A while back I switched to using powdered buttermilk for this exact reason. It's been a game changer. I used to avoid buttermilk based recipes as I'd need to find excuses to use it up over the next few weeks.

Your post made me realize I'm the same way with milk. I know powdered buttermilk is considered a valid substitute for standard buttermilk when cooking. I wonder if the same is true of powdered milk.

For baking, yes, many recipes can be converted to use powdered milk.

For non-baking used it can be trickier, I believe. The powdered milk doesn't always act the same.

Let’s not get religious about it - it’s food and you do what you do. I’ll eat your pancakes, mix or not. But the parent I was responding to was extolling consistency as a virtue and I don’t consider consistency (as in “tastes the same every time”, as opposed to “tastes great every time”) a great thing.

And if you start adding sourdough to anything, consistency goes straight out the window. At least my sourdough is anything but consistent.

You can straight up use the sour dough starter that you would normally throw away as scallion pancake mix. Seriously, just pour it onto a greased pan and throw scallions on the other side, then flip and cook til done.

Yes, I know. But my point was that sourdough, at least the one I keep, are living things and are not consistently the same. Mine depends on the time I kept it in the fridge, the temperature it’s kept outside (which depends on the weather), on how active the last generation was and many other factors I have more or less under control. And that manifests in taste difference, raising power etc.

I would assume mixing in buttermilk for milk would mess things up since it messes with the acid ratios, which is one of the things that really matters in baked goods with chemical leavening agents. Usually something with only milk would use baking powder, whereas something with buttermilk would use some portion of baking soda.

100%. I used to cook a lot from scratch. I had a few things that I made a lot and knew how to balance the flavors of. Then when I suddenly found myself with a lot less time to cook, but still with the same picky taste buds, I started buying premade, prepackaged TV dinners from Publix and Whole Foods and doctoring them up with added spices, or chopping an onion or pepper to add to it, after microwaving them for half the time to defrost them.

Like, you can buy anything and make it good.

Your pancakes taste like my pancakes. That’s boring. I like tasting other peoples pancakes.

Then again, some people just want to make reasonably good pancakes for their kids or before heading off to work, without too much thought or effort. Or having to be "creative" or think about how they compare with other people's pancakes. Are you OK with that?

Look, I’m not advocating banning pancake mixes or canned or frozen food. I absolutely understand that people have constraints and not everyone has the time or energy to cook every day. I just say that I personally, don’t consider “it consistently produces the same result.” a good thing in all cases. Are you OK with that?

That's great, of course. Bon appetit.

I was just trying to get back to the point of the original article.

That's not a mix problem, that a you problem. You can very easily customize and build on top of a solid base. Add fruits (berries, banana, etc), add chocolate chips, nuts, etc. Add cocoa powder, cinnamon, etc.

The powder is just a base.

Look up Adam reguseas video about why you can never beat a cake mix in your home. Sometimes it’s just smart to use a mix. And as Sagan said, if you wanna make an apple pie from scratch, you’d have to create the fucking universe.

Further, the most important thing to get right in a pancake (imo) is to get the flour baking powder mix right. Why bother with a scale and everything, if you can just buy a premix that is at best marginally more expensive?

Your point about the same thing being used for multiple is semi valid for some people. For the majority of folks, If they want pancakes this week, odds are they’d like it once more at least. Have you seen a pancake mix box? It costs two bucks and will last a single full serving or two for a family with kids.

A lot of (american) pancake mixes can be used for both pancakes and waffles, but your point stands about other similar preparations.

But I would say that while it's true that the pancakes will be the same every time with a mix, I don't really eat pancakes enough for that to matter.

Pancake mix is my one and only bugaboo. The fact that you need your own eggs and milk mean the box is basically saving you from adding a bit of salt, sugar and baking soda to flour. Ingredients I always have on hand. And while I've never done a taste test for pancakes, I'm very loyal to King Arthur flour.

It was a famous result that cooks rejected early mixes that required just water. Snopes marks it as "false" but there's enough of a grain of truth to it to make it relevant:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

I too find it weird that people buy that when it's so easy at home, with ingredients most people have. I suppose if you never bake you don't have flour or baking powder on hand. Eggs and milk are something everyone has.

For folks with no actual interest in cooking, and who live in a place with obnoxiously large kitchens (i.e. USA), they're fine. Also, it helps to be well off, as they're basically a scheme to mark up simple ingredients by a significant multiplier.

People that are interested in cooking are going to have that stuff around, aren't going to be put off by 60 seconds of measuring things out, and like the ability to tweek the composition -- plus making things from basic ingredients increases the understanding of how ingredients work.

Also, for those of us without ginormous kitchens (mine is huge by urban European standards, tiny by suburban American), there's just a limit on how much stuff you can store that you can reliably recreate in under a minute.

> plus making things from basic ingredients increases the understanding of how ingredients work.

That’s a bit of a stretch. Following a recipe doesn’t necessarily imply you understand how ingredients work.

I would say I’m an “above average” cook (define as you will), and yet I still use Krusteez pancake mix. They’re very good from the mix and I’d prefer to waste my time scrolling endlessly or other crap instead (I’m not fooling anyone, time saved making pancakes from scratch is entirely time wasted elsewhere).

The "wasting time" is literally adding three spoons of stuff to flour. (Two for me since I use a full package of baking powder.) It's literally in the 30 seconds range. If you were doing it a lot, you could even pre-mix them in those 30 seconds, and have enough for as many batches as you cared. It's a pretty weird micro-optimization.

You don't learn about how the ingredients work by making one thing from a recipe, but you do if you make a bunch of related things from similar ingredients. On the bread / cake spectrum, one learns to pretty reliably distinguish between things based on leavening agent and if they contain eggs.

Also, I wouldn't say that most above average home cook actually has much interest in cooking. But the average J. Kenji Lopez-Alt fan does. Most people cook because they need to eat. What I'm calling "interest" I'm imagining people where it's at least a hobby -- there's active effort in improving one's understanding of it and technique.

You don't have to be well off to afford a couple dollar box of pancake mix

I used to be anti pancake mix as well. Then I got a cabin where pancakes are almost a mandatory weekend breakfast and I realized I often forget to bring fresh ingredients (mainly milk). Krusteez was a hit and I became a convert.

I swear bisquick is my favorite pancake, it has some intangible quality that I can’t replicate with household ingredients. That said I make sourdough pancakes for health, but I totally agree that flavor wise, mixes taste fine.

try the NYTimes buttermilk recipe. it's outstanding.

You mean this one? https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018180-perfect-buttermi...

I was confused when you mentioned that cookies are simpler than pancakes, then I remembered: American pancakes. I was thinking crêpes which is literally just flour, eggs, milk, butter and salt. The "mix" is literally just flour.

American pancakes are the same with the addition of baking powder.

Though if you're making buttermilk pancakes I would imagine most people do not have buttermilk on hand if they're not baking.

I would bet the average American that says they 'cook' are actually just taking frozen meals like pizzas, chicken tenders, biscuits in a can, etc. and heating them in the oven. Households don't typically have even have flour, fresh milk, butter or other staples on hand here.

I would gladly take that bet. There's certainly a subset of Americans who effectively never cook (generally young and urban), and Americans do eat a lot of convenience foods, but everyone I've ever met who says they "cook" is able to prepare at least some dishes from scratch and has ingredients on hand to do so.

I exclusively make pancakes with store bought mix, and in my kitchen I have flour, fresh milk, butter, eggs straight from a farm, and other fresh picked fruits from a farm (that are now stored in a freezer). It's easy to make sweeping generalizations about Americans, but keep in mind that a lot of us Americans that aren't lucky enough to have high paying jobs don't have a lot of time to cook. Deep urban residential areas also experience a phenomenon called "food desert" where grocery store density is extremely low, making it inconvenient to go shopping by car, and downright impossible by public transportation.

This simple 5m cake recipe changed my mind on mixes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sjv3LRVubo

Adam also goes into the science of cooking, and him breaking down why mixes are good has convinced me.

Check out The Cake Doctor cookbook. it is chock full of great recipes that start with box cake mixes with ammendments. My wife bakes a half dozen birthday cakes from it each year and they are all great!

I also like instant mashed potatoes because they’re pleasantly shitty like your hometown’s lager, or the pizza place you started going to because it was cheap and close.

Sometimes you want the dish cooked from the choicest ingredients on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Sometimes you just want the end product.

I can see where he was coming from, even as I agree that it's a dick move to complain that someone's using mix. It gets to the ethos of pancakes. I can't remember his exact words, but Bittman wrote that you can essentially bind any kind of starch with any kind of liquid and an egg and have a pancake; it's approximately the simplest thing you can make, and it's incredibly forgiving: wildly different ratios of ingredients will still produce cromulent pancakes.

It's hilarious that the replies in this thread are mostly people arguing bitterly about how to make pancakes

Kenji's channel and writing are great windows into how cooking does not need to follow rigid rules and precise measurements to make great food. He substitutes ingredients and uses what he has on hand all the time. Unless it's something like bread or pizza dough, where he needs the correct ratio between flour and water, he never measures or weighs anything. He frequently leaves something baking in the oven or simmering on the stovetop, promising to come back in X minutes, but it's usually Y minutes later because he's been off doing something with his wife/kid/dogs. It seems like he says things like "oops" and "but that's ok" a lot. Cooking shouldn't be intimidating. He shows how approachable and forgiving it can be.

Yeah I got a kick out of watching his videos and seeing him every so often pull out some slightly wilted vegetables to make his dish. Quite the contrast to seeing all the pristine ingredients on TV cooking shows.

He has an episode in which he absolutely mangles his pizza and it looks horrendous.

He literally says while recording "Doesn't matter, still pizza. Actually, that's what I'm going to name this episode."

It doesn't matter that it was very not Instagram-worthy. What matters is that it's still pizza and he's still going to feed his family with it.

Yeah, something I like about Kenji's approach (and Pepin before him) is that while they know the "proper" way to do things they don't treat it as a straight jacket.

Yup, he articulated very clearly why I often like the US-style recipes which tend to deal with cups and tablespoons, which are far less precise than grams: sometimes having less precision is freeing.

Don't get me wrong, I own a kitchen scale and it's indispensable for many baking tasks.

But sometimes seeing a pasta sauce that calls for "one onion, 175 grams" I cringe, and just imagine someone delicately shaving off bits of their onion until it weighs right, or, worse, going back to the store because their onion was 162 grams, and they thought it mattered.

I love recipes that are written in grams specifically because I don't have to be precise: just shake in some flour til I hit roughly the requisite grams. Eyeball a quarter cup of oil by just watching the scale til it hits 50 or 60g. And at the end of the day, I don't have to wash a half dozen measuring utensils.

As for the onion comment, I actually appreciate grams rather than recipes that call for "one large onion" - usually the onions I have are small, so then I just have no idea - could be equivalent to 3 small onions, could be 6. With grams, I can just chuck a couple on the scale to see how many I should dice up to get roughly the right amount.

> But sometimes seeing a pasta sauce that calls for "one onion, 175 grams" I cringe

That's fair; but keep in mind that the size of "one onion" can vary drastically by region, so giving an objective measurement is still helpful.

> someone delicately shaving off bits of their onion until it weighs right

Maybe if you're just learning how to cook for the first time (and self-teaching); it doesn't take long for someone to graduate beyond 101 in this respect.

Kenji shines on his YouTube channel. He has a fantastic capability to teach in a fun, nurturing manner that almost feels dad-like (this is reflected in many of the comments on his videos). I view myself as a pretty seasoned home-cook but I always learn a thing or two from his videos. Recommend!

The biggest thing I love about his videos is both showing and highlighting the interstitial moments.

A huge amount of cooking isn't actually cooking, but counter space management, dishwashing, measuring, etc. Doing that well makes cooking easy and enjoyable, as time becomes less limited. Screwing it up multiplies stress by orders of magnitude. Zen, indeed.

The head-mounted-camera format he uses is a big part of that, I think. Seeing the process from the perspective of the cook really gives you a good sense of everything involved.

I do watch his videos but honestly have never tried to make any of his recipes. Pretty much all his recipes look at least slightly worse than a competing recipe in YouTube for the same dish. Or he’ll use something I will never want to keep in my kitchen.

Such a pretentious comment.

Why is it pretentious? I didn’t comment without watching? I’ve seriously considered and compared multiple of his videos to other videos to find the best recipe and his always looked inferior on comparison. Look up his Chile relleno video.

Obviously you gotta make it, then eat it to know whether a recipe is good? You are just looking.

It’s pretentious by almost overtly missing the message of this article, which is: you don’t have to be the best home chef, your food doesn’t have to be the best. Part of that is that “best” is subjective, especially when it comes to food and taste, but more so: Kenji promotes an idea that having some basic kitchen skills and an understanding of the ingredients you’re cooking with is more valuable than the “best” recipe, because it gives you a foundation to develop a dish that is the best in your subjective option.

I haven't read his book or followed him online extensively, but I credit Kenji with my first breakthrough in cooking food that was better than what I can get in a quality restaurant. His "Late Night Cheeseburger" video produced one of the best hamburgers I've ever eaten, and I made it myself!

Since then I've been cooking a lot more for myself, mostly using Joshua Weissman's recipe's. His videos get annoying quickly (lots of overdone, repetitive, "meme" humor) but his recipes include exact seasoning amounts and the low end cooking time he lists is always perfect, never overcooked.

My mother cooked almost every night for us as children, but when I eat her cooking now I'm almost always shocked at how underseasoned and overcooked everything is. I'm not sure most people know how to follow "season to taste", they just throw some salt in and set the table without tasting anything, and keep some good ol' iodized salt in a shaker handy.

Joshua Weissman has brilliant information that adults want to know, packaged in a format designed to make adults want to murder Joshua Weissman.

I believe it's some kind of social experiment. Like his entire online persona is an experiment.

> I believe it's some kind of social experiment. Like his entire online persona is an experiment.

I like the theory, though as someone that's been exploring content creation I really think it's often just necessary to act different to stand out. Often that's just narcissism though if I had to pick between narcissism and weirdness I'll take weirdness.

That's funny because I was watching some Joshua Weissman video for a few minutes and my wife said "I never want to see that guy again" and I agree that he is pretty aggravating.

The deep, burning question I want to figure out is whether it's real or not. Like in other things- the Binging with Babish episode he did for example- he seems like an okay guy.

Is he acting normal for other videos and does what he likes for his own? Or is he a normal person but has some kind of insane SEO strategy that involves making people want to punch him in the face?

For me, what really revitalized my interest in cooking at home was discovering Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street:

https://www.177milkstreet.com

They have a bunch of free videos on YouTube:

https://youtube.com/c/ChristopherKimball%E2%80%99sMilkStreet

Kenji used to be part of Milk Street and occasionally is still a guest on their videos or podcasts.

I’ve had many cookbooks at home over the years but their recipes are far more practical for the home cook and are tailored to ingredients you can usually get at an American supermarket. Plus they have a lot of recipes that from start to finish are an hour or less including prep time.

Kenji used to be part of Cooks Illustrated, that produces America's test kitchen, which had Kimball as his boss there. Kimball was fired from ATK and his image scrubbed from there. Kenji seems to still be friends with Kimball and has had a couple guest appearances.

Whether Kimball was fired from there depends on who you ask -- Kimball says he was fired, ATK's board claims he refused to continue to be involved, etc. Not a pretty situation; Wikipedia has more about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Kimball

With that said, I highly recommend Milk Street. I've cooked hundreds of their recipes at this point and it's incredibly rare that I don't enjoy one of them. They have a great staff and guest appearances from many of the people (Alex, Kenji, et al.) referenced in the comments on this story.

Also yes, sorry, I had watched an episode recently where Kimball mentioned Kenji used to work for/with him and assumed that was Milk Street but it looks more likely it was Cook's Illustrated.

If you read between the lines on the two competing lawsuits, ATK hired a CEO to manage Kimball, who had one foot out the door and was already preparing to start a competing company which he'd own, unlike ATK where he was a minority partner. One way to read the situation is that he was "constructively" terminated --- that ATK would keep him on the books, but had planned to remove all his authority.

I’ve been watching Kenji’s YouTube channel for quite a while and it’s one of my favorite channels. One of his favorite chefs is Jacque Pepin (and mine!) and it shows. He’s not pretentious, mellow, substitutes ingredients the recipe calls for with ingredients he actually has in his house, and geeks out on history and science. Lastly his dogs are pretty darn cute and get to taste some great dishes.

I've found Ethan Chlebowski and Kenji's videos really put in a lot of great, simple tips that make for some good cooking. For the most part, their videos aren't necessarily about the dish itself but the processes whilst cooking them. Kenji's boiling eggs video and Ethan's risotto-like pasta video have helped me immensely and just watching them cook has added some great techniques to my own repertoire. It really does help that they're quite honest about making mistakes and tend to include how and why they failed sometimes

I watch an absurd amount of cooking YouTube, and I follow a bunch of creators for different reasons. They each have their appeal:

- Kenji → got into him because of Food Lab optimization articles, but discovered I enjoyed the unique perspective of his food videos done in real-time first-person

- Alex (french guy cooking) → basically a YouTube native version of Kenji's food lab where he does series where he goes really deep into topics beyond just the recipe level, but really figuring out every aspect that affects a dish or style of cooking. He also does a ton of custom builds to test his ideas.

- Adam Ragusea → incredibly practical home cooking, optimizing for what the average person might care about vs. doing things "right" -- combined with deep dives into various scientific topics, aided by interviews with experts (usually college professors). The recipe videos are good for getting a sense of how he throws things together on the fly

- Pro Home Cooks → he focuses on making everything from scratch, which is interesting in dishes where people would use pre-made components (bread, pickles, noodles, etc.)

- Joshua Weissman → very entertaining, highly ridiculous, with various series focused on affordable foods, recreating fast foods concepts, etc. makes a lot of things from scratch

- Ethan → comes up with some interesting novel techniques, and is highly specifics in his recipes an outcomes, focused on healthy food. He certainly has his quirks which can get a bit grating, but he's very consistent in what he produces.

- Babish → almost purely entertainment and less educational, but well produced videos

- About To Eat → also has some interesting series, like the ones focusing on specific ingredients, tools, or techniques

- Epicurious → has interesting series pitting amateur cooks vs. chefs that end up showing various levels of complexity of the same dishes

- Muchnie "why we eat" → experienced chefs explain the cultural roots and history of dishes while showing how they're made

etc. etc.… I watch too much food YouTube.

Probably my favorite, that you're missing on this list (mostly likely cause his channel only recently "blew up"), is Brian Lagerstrom, formerly called Weeds & Sardines. Another recent fave is Middle Eats. I probably make his lentil fatteh recipe every couple of weeks.

I tend to avoid cooking "entertainment" a la Babish and Weissman. Weissman is frustrating cause it used to be a legit cooking channel, but at some point a few years ago he stopped trying to make recipes that you would actually want to eat and focused on food porn. Then he got super lazy where you can tell he doesn't even test his recipes before filming.

Actually I recently discovered Brian Lagerstrom and have enjoyed his videos so far, but I haven't been watching him for long hence my forgetfulness. Good call.

If you follow those creators, you may want to try Glen And Friends Cooking (https://www.youtube.com/c/GlenAndFriendsCooking) for interesting takes on cooking and recipes, with new episodes every few days. The subjects are fascinating and vary widely, but they do have some regular segments.

On Sundays, for example, they do "The Old Cookbook Show," in which they pick quirky recipes from old cookbooks, typically 50 to 100 years old, but sometimes going back centuries. They cook the recipes and then describe how the resulting dishes taste—sometimes with disastrous results but other times with the rediscovery of a forgotten dish. For example, one recent epsiode is on a "100 Year Old Mississippi Cheese Pie Recipe," believed to be the precursor of the "chess pie" of southern United States fame.

This list is awesome. Thanks for posting it!

It’s funny, I actually find Babish quite educational because his videos are so tightly edited. Explains the techniques and recipe in seven minutes flat. My wife and I have made many of his recipes (that he usually borrows from others) because he makes them so appealing, shows common mistakes, and does it so quickly.

You should check out Jack Scalfani (Cooking with Jack). He cooks stuff you'll never see from the guys you've listed.

Oh and another I forgot to mention that's a favorite is "Not another cooking show" by a NYC creator who perfectly makes videos of primarily Italian-American fare. Love the way he edits.

I'd like to add one of my smaller favourites: Internet Shaquille[0], his videos are short and to the point and highly un-pretentious.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/internetshaquille

Since other people are linking their favorites to this comment, I thought I'd add mine:

https://www.youtube.com/c/middleeats

Middle Eastern / Levantine cuisines don't get enough love on YouTube (or in English speaking spaces in general) so I love learning about new dishes through Obi's well made videos.

This list is pretty good, though I've found Alex to be quite grating and very low on the information side of things for a long time(that noodle tier list was an absurd waste of time). Still sometimes entertaining to watch and I just yesterday cooked the carbonara he outlined in his last video.

There is also "My name is andong" who is really good imho. Informative and fun, more trying to showcase new things or in different lights.

There's also Chef John who is one of the OG food tubers. His narration style is a 1:1 template for how Joshua weissman talks in a lot of his recipes. He's mostly on the recipe side less on information but still enjoyable.

Gotta add Refika to the list.

She's way more natural and earnest than most of these bros. Weissman is insufferable.

Another one I'd put in this list is Not Another Cooking Show, which has solid advice in a very low key format, and a bit of an emphasis on Italian American cuisine specifically.

Come on, you have to mention FoodWishes.

Chef John of Foodwishes pioneered the "food channel on youtube" and regularly referenced in recipes used by folks like Babish or Adam.

Chef John is the most no-nonsense cooking channel on YT, where you learn exactly what you need to to cook and nothing more. He has built a treasure trove of recipes over 14 years on youtube, and all of them are consistently great. To top it all off, he always has great suggestions for substitutions.

A few others:

Helen Rennie is also an excellent youtube channel in the same vein as Kenji. Very science oriented, incredibly detailed, a proper teacher and a little bit of the Adam Ragusea-esque snark.

Chinese food : Chinese cooking demystified (english) & Chef WangGang (mandarin)

Thai food : Pailin's kitchen

Indian food : VahChef (Indian Food channels are notoriously hit or miss when they step out of their regional specialties. Vah Chef's strength is in the consistency. For others, find the right kind of regional mom's youtube channel

Apart from About to Eat which has some female hosts and Epicurious/Munchies who have no set of hosts, every single one of the individual creators on your list are men.

Here are some great women creators on the platform that are also worth a follow:

Beryl Shereshewsky - tests how different ingredients/techniques are used around the world with a particular emphasis on personal stories from fans and highlighting lesser known cuisines.

Helen Rennie - Similarly science based cooking focused on approachable home recipes with a Eastern European slant.

How to Cook That - Baking channel that does a lot of viral video debunking and science based explanation of baking.

Maangchi - One of the first popular Korean food YT channels.

Pailin's Kitchen - Popular Thai recipes.

With Trial & Error - Science based breakdown of how popular industrial candy is made and replicating at home.

Claire Saffitz/Carla Lalli Music/Sohla El-Waylly/Gaby Melian - Refugees from the implosion of the BA Test Kitchen who have all managed to establish independent YT careers.

I get way too excited about the end of the videos for the summoning of his four-legged food tasters :)

Mmm, Kenji's really good scrambled eggs are really good (and really quick) .. https://youtube.com/watch?v=CXTnq7srJRs.

I never heard of the cornstarch idea before. I'll have to try it.

My mom's comment that I think she heard from Julia Child: Anything tastes good with enough butter in it. ;-)

Yes. (salted) Butter is magic.

I am French and a few friends have remarked that I use a lot of butter in my cooking before tasting and telling me it is the best ... they had.

Cooking is the Perl of life activities in that "There are many ways to do it." and we all tend to optimize for different things.

I live with people with dietary restrictions, so I tend to make everything from scratch because I optimize for not killing my housemates. But I have found it's an added advantage in that if I'm mostly getting staples and assembling things myself, I both have a simpler time shopping and much less trouble meal planning because I can late-bind what I'm making since I've got ingredients for most common (for our household :) meals handy.

But that doesn't mean mixes/pre-made stuff is bad. If it's optimal for you, go for it. :)

I've been looking forward to his new book The Wok so much.

I've been following his stuff on Serious Eats (and The Food Lab book) for years. I've never had a recipe of his let me down.

The Food Lab is a must have for any kitchen. Best cookbook I’ve ever owned.

Agreed. If anyone is looking to make a classic dish, browse right to Serious Eats and avoid the SEO recipe spam on Google. You’ll save time, bypass the big-data overlord and end up with better-than-restaurant quality food.

Worth calling out that Serious Eats is a publication with many recipe developers. Not all of them are equal to Kenji (although Daniel Gritzer is unequal because he's even better!).

Serious Eats is overall great, but definitely trust the byline not the publication.

+1 to Daniel Gritzer - but Serious Eats generally has earned my trust now, they must have a really good editorial process over there to keep the quality so high.

So excited! We're seeing Kenji on Saturday in Seattle at a book launch event, so cool seeing him get so much press and excitement around all this.

Never had a recipe of his let me down, but his chicken adobo recipe (where you simmer a sauce of sugar, soy sauce, and vinegar for like an hour) practically destroyed my wok's seasoning. The sauce was almost caramel like by the end of it, which let to a ton of caked on burnt bits I could only scrape off aggressively, and then the vinegar evaporation created what I can only call steam bubbles in the patina that caused them to flake off like paint chips. I had to pretty much scrape everything off and start from scratch on reseasoning the wok after that. It's still not quite back to what it was before "the Adobo event" (as my girlfriend calls it).

Still a delicious recipe, but, I learned to use my deep saute pan for it in the future.

If it’s the one I’m thinking of then the first line of the recipe is “Place the soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, black peppercorns, and bay leaves in a large, nonreactive sauté pan”, i.e not something that requires seasoning

Yes, a wok is a somewhat strange choice for that dish. I'm not really an "expert" on Pinoy food but my partner is Filipino and I've seen this made many times by him, his family, or even friends of his when we have visited the Philippines and never once did a wok come into it. Either a dutch oven our a large saucepan is what I've seen used, since you really want to cover it so it braises evenly. The sauce is always fairly thin as well, nothing approaching a caramel-y consistency.

When he did the video for it I think he was using drumsticks, so I guess his idea was that the sloped sided wok allowed you to minimize the amount of braising liquid needed, since the drumsticks can lay meat-side down in the middle and have the bones stick up out of the liquid.

But since I mostly use boneless chicken thighs anyway, that didn't help too much. They needed to be uniformly covered.

I'll put in a plug for some friends of friends. Check out Backhaus if you're ever around San Mateo. Gourmet bread and pastries and whatnot. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is one of their financial backers / advisers [1].

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/104862447412...

Or Wursthall in San Mateo, which is his restaurant. The food is excellent.

Kenji is no longer an owner at Wursthall.

Yeah, see Kenji's comment on /r/seriouseats [0]:

> I am not an owner any longer! I gave my shares to my former Sous chef Erik who still lives in the area. My involvement at Wursthall is only a friendly one, not a business one at this point.

However, in the same thread Kenji also says the following [1]:

> it’s still my recipes (and one of Stella’s!) there, as well as quite a few Serious Eats-inspired techniques.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_...

[1] https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_...

I went to Wursthall twice and found it to be mediocre. Backhaus is indeed excellent, and in a completely different league.

Yes, mediocre and derivative.

"Derivative"? It's called "Wursthall".

I’m not particularly picky or discerning at all when it comes to restaurants, but I also found Wursthall to be mediocre. I didn’t try the sausages, so maybe that was my mistake.

For fellow MIT nerds you might enjoy this article about Kenji from Feb 2020 in The Tech https://thetech.com/2020/02/20/kenji-lopez-alt

Enjoyed this article and how personal it was. Helen Rosner is a great writer.

I love Kenji’s cooking videos! You definitely learn a lot. I love how he brings his experiences and knowledge learned into his recipes. I remember watching a Japanese Chicken Katsu video of his, and the fact that he compares how salting affects the juicyness of the final product gives a simple homecook the knowledge they need to know that can possibly be applied to some other recipe later on.

I’ve followed Kenji since Food lab and was delighted to discover his youtube channel during the lockdown, but is it just me or it kind of scary that after all he has done most of his income comes from youtube now? Another tech monopoly with incredible power hoovering up all sorts of value just because its so useful and dominant.

That's how I felt about PBS and Julia Child.

It's interesting to read "if you use mixes, you don't understand ingredients" from people who then use "flour" without any specifics.

There are hundreds if not thousands of flours and each cake mix has a mix of flours.

How many people have more than four flours? How many emulsifiers?

130 degrees inside? I don't think so. Seems like a New Yorker mistake.

From someone with no knowledge of reverse sear: Why does that seem like a mistake? 130F is how you get medium rare with a sous-vide setup. If you're talking long and slow using an oven, it seems reasonable to me that you'd aim for the same internal temp as sous-vide.

The original reverse sear recipe is 115° for med-rare, 125° for med, assuming you’re gonna pump a lot more heat into it getting the crust (plus carryover).

Edit: to maybe answer your actual question, I think sous vide has a different goal. Different final textures, maybe more refined? Reverse sear is more fixing the common “the outside looked good but the inside is raw” problem if you don’t have a lot of steak experience.

I think if you were going to crust up a sous vide steak on a charcoal grill you’d probably want to cook it at 115-125 as well.

> the outside looked good but the inside is raw

make sure you don't start cooking it right away after taking out from the refrigerator. I normally let it rest for 30-45 mins, sometimes even an hour.

Agree, that really helps!

Incidentally, that does almost nothing according to this article by... Kenji Lopez! https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-st...

From his Cook's Illustrated recipe:

Cook until instant-read thermometer inserted in center of steak registers 90 to 95 degrees for rare to medium-rare, 20 to 25 minutes, or 100 to 105 degrees for medium, 25 to 30 minutes.

https://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/3564-pan-seared-thi...

> 130F is how you get medium rare with a sous-vide setup

This also depends on what cut the steak is. 138F is a better target for something with more fat, like ribeye, because 130F won't really break it down.

I don't think this is true. Fat does start to render at 130, but "rendering" is a collagen conversion process, and has as much to do with time as with temperature (for the same reason, you can't just turn the temperature up to cook a pot roast faster). You probably shouldn't cook your steaks to medium (unless that's how you like them) just to try to render more fat.

I think the best way to handle the fat in a ribeye is to hit it hard with high heat after you've brought it up to temperature, in either a hot pan with barely-smoking oil in it, or over a lit chimney starter in your grill. (You're still not going to render all the fat into oil, but you will make it crispy and delicious).

> 3. Place steak(s) in the oven and cook until an instant-read thermometer registers 105°F (41°C) for rare, 115°F (46°C) for medium-rare, 125°F (52°C) for medium, or 135°F (57°C) for medium-well. This will take about 20 minutes for rare steak and up to about 40 minutes for medium-well; cooking time can vary dramatically depending on many factors, so check often.

* https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO8TUuSv7HA&t=3m10s

~130F / 55C is not crazy.

I remove from the oven between 115 to 120 degrees, then let rest for 5 minutes under foil. Let carryover cooking do the remaining work. Then pan sear for about 2-3 minutes, flipping occasionally, spooning butter and the rendered fat over the meat.

For what cut of steak, what method? E.g. sous vide ribeye works best at 138F, every time. But other cuts are better a little cooler. And reverse sear is not sous vide. Etc.

I wish Kenji did a piece on the components of an "ideal" salad.

> How do I, as someone who’s not Chinese—I’m half Japanese, I grew up in the U.S.—write all this stuff about Chinese recipes with any authority? Why should people trust me? And why is it O.K. for me to be doing this?

Why do the Chinese get to wield supreme executive authority over throwing some random ingredients into a thin pan on high heat? What kind of Food Holocaust do people think is going to happen if some random food blogger who isn't Chinese writes about woks? Chinese food (as if you could say exactly what is and isn't Real Chinese Food without starting a Food Holy War) isn't going to be obliterated by it.

The whole cultural appropriation thing is dead to me at this point. Yes, your book's sales might tank if some lunatic with millions of fans decides to excoriate you for being ignorant or disrespectful to some cultural trope like "the right way to stir-fry" or something. But they might also ignore you. I don't think it's worth giving yourself anxiety just to make sure you "have the right" to write about some subject. Just try to be a good person, do your work, and stay off of Twitter.

Add to the fact, professional chefs often specialize in different cuisines. Hiroyuki Sakai's specialty for example was French cuisine. They aren't feigning to know about something foreign to them, they're literal experts in their domain. This is a passion.

The catch with "cultural appropriation", if you read the frequently updated definition on wikipedia, is it's deemed as such if it's done with disrespect (or, alternatively, if you're white, with the rationalization that it's "colonial". Yes, words have lost meaning). Taking the care to learn something in depth as it is traditionally done is not disrespectful. However, spinning off other cultures as "exotic" consumables for personal gain can be. But we already have a word for this: disrespect.

I was into his videos for a few months but I couldn’t stand how much of a narcissist he is. He literally says he invented the reverse-searing technique.

Did you read the article at all?

> do remember some folks taking issue with the idea that the reverse sear was your creation.

> There’s a competition barbecue team, Iron Pig BBQ, who were doing a similar technique, but it wasn’t published anywhere. After we published it at Cook’s Illustrated, some people were, like, “Oh, yeah, this chef is doing it.” There were people concurrently doing it. The more generous claim would be that I independently came up with the idea, and certainly Cook’s Illustrated popularized it.

How is this narcissistic?

Course I didn’t read it, it’s a puff piece about him. I guess he changed his tune, good for him. The nail in the coffin for me personally was that his restaurant in San Mateo was a huge letdown.

He didn't claim that, nor does he deserve to be called a narcissist for it. He fully credits those who came before him.

Now, not calling Kaffir Lime leaves by their name because some hypothetical person might be annoyed is just pompous virtue signaling BS. It's insufferable.

He had claimed it in the past. you’re right the virtue signaling was annoying too.

Kenji's cooking methods are always 10x more effort for 10% better food. Great for supertasters, not necessary for most of us.

I think the divide is the craft & process vs the outcome. If you like cooking as a hobby, Kenji’s methods are fun. If you’re just cooking for an outcome, you’re right, his methods aren’t the fastest. Think of it like any other weekend project you do - odds are a generous application of money or existing expertise gets the job done faster than you poking around and trying stuff, but is that really the goal?

Yeah that probably explains why I don't appreciate him as much as other people do!

To some extent, yeah, the whole point is to exert more effort to get better food, although I suspect your numbers are exaggerated (10x sounds extreme). But I don’t think many well known chefs would recommend doing that if you don’t at least somewhat enjoy the effort required to cook.

I’ve seen him state that he doesn’t expect people to do all of the extra labor intensive steps. He’s showing you all the things you can do and how they enhance, you choose how far you want to take it.

I’ve been following his stuff since the aughts. At this point I almost never make his recipes as stated. I’ve learned which techniques I find worth it, which I don’t, and in others I’ve folded in things he came up with later on his own journey

Do you have an example of something he showed the takes 10X longer?

I find most of his recommendations made me a faster cook.

Grinding your own bespoke mix of beef for a burger is a huge increase in time and complexity for a burger: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-burger-lab-the-worlds-best-b...

Will it make an amazingly tasty burger? Yes, when you also spend as much care with the prep and cooking.

Is it worth it when you want a burger on a late weeknight? It depends...

He's writing that article because readers want to read about grinding their own meat, because it's interesting. But if you watch his smashburger videos, he's not grinding meat a la minute to make burgers on the regular. Smashburgers work just fine with pre-ground meat, and Kenji is as responsible as anyone for popularizing them for home cooks.

> Will it make an amazingly tasty burger? Yes, when you also spend as much care with the prep and cooking.

Sometimes that's exactly what I want to do.

It's worth putting in extra effort every once in a while. I don't just down a bottle of Soylent™ every meal: I cook because I enjoy cooking - it's not merely a way to keep myself alive.

Huh, you know, I thought you were being hyperbolic, but that actually is a great example.

That said, I really had a lot of fun grinding my own meat to make burgers. Doubt I'd do it every time, but I'd definitely break it out for a BBQ with good friends. Cooking is a fun skill to learn!

> Kenji's cooking methods are always 10x more effort for 10% better food. Great for supertasters, not necessary for most of us.

I think he may have that tendency somewhat but it's not as nearly as bad as some other places like Cook's Illustrated (where I guess he used to work) which really tend to add unnecessary steps for very small improvements.

At serious eats he sometimes made multiple versions of recipes, an easy version and a more complicated version, to make it possible for people to decide which they want to make. On his videos he often explains optional steps that can be omitted.

Also, FYI that's not really what "supertasters" means (it doesn't mean people who have a discerning palate and can pick out subtle flavors, it means people who are hypersensitive to certain bitter flavors).

That's just the food lab/serious eats stuff IMHO. Those things are purpose built to be "what if we turned everything up to 11 and made the best possible X/Y/Z?". If you read Modernist Cuisine it's exactly the same thing and you'll spend two days making a single cheeseburger (with from scratch bread, cheese, mayo, grinding your own beef, sous vide cooking the patty for hours, etc).

Watch his youtube channel and more recent stuff, it's a lot more toned down and accessible to everyone.

Coincidentally, if the idea of spending two days making a single cheeseburger from scratch is appealing to you, check out Alvin Zhou - https://www.youtube.com/c/AlvinZhou1

His videos skew meditative - generally little to no talking, just relaxing music, the sounds of cooking, and beautifully cinematic shots of every step in the process.

This is definitely true of some of his methods, but not all. His 3-ingredient mac and cheese was a game-changer in my household. A recipe that simple has no business producing such good results.

I use his Food Lab book a lot, and I think most of the recipes are very practical. There are a few over-the-top recipes but they're usually paired with easy versions.

Like, you could make his bolognese recipe that takes a bajillion ingredients, or you could make the quick+easy bolognese recipe on a weeknight. Same with French onion soup, or chili...

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