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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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