j kenji meatloaf
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PPS - for perfect grilled cheese, listen to this playlistRecipes mentioned:
]]>J. Kenji Lpez-Alt Says Youre Cooking Just Fine
Since time immemorial, a person who wanted to cook herself a thick, beautiful, medium-rare rib-eye steak for dinner followed more or less the same procedure: drop the slab of cow over a hard, hot flame so the outside caramelizes to a mahogany hue while the interior remains sunset pink. To reliably nail that balance takes both practice and prayer: too much heat too quickly, and you get a raw steak encased in char; not enough, and your pricey two-inch prime cut runs the risk of turning into a gray, dried-up dish sponge. I was convinced that there was a better way to cook thick steaks, a new method that would give them the tender treatment they deserve, J.Kenji Lpez-Alt, the author and recipe developer, wrote in a 2007 article for Cooks Illustrated. That new method, which Lpez-Alt dubbed the reverse sear, launched a stoveside revolution. In-the-know gastronomes began cooking their steaks gently, slowly bringing the interiors to temperature without regard for any sort of crust. Only once the inside hit exactly a hundred and thirty degrees would the meat be exposed to a blasting heatthe browned exterior achieved as a flourishing finale, rather than a starting point.
The reverse sear was arguably Lpez-Alts first viral cooking technique. In the years since, hes built a career based on upending the received wisdom of the kitchen. After leaving Cooks Illustrated, Lpez-Alt, a graduate of M.I.T. who had spent time working in Boston-area restaurants, returned to his home town of New York City to work for the food Web site Serious Eats. In his column The Food Lab, he broke down popular American recipes and rebuilt them better, faster, stronger. His pieces became an anchor of the publication, and Lpez-Alt became virtually synonymous with the site. (He is no longer involved with Serious Eats day to day, but he remains a culinary adviser; since 2019, he has written a cooking column for the Times.) Lpez-Alts first book, The Food Lab, based on the column, sold more than half a million copies, and his YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers. On online cooking forums, he has attained mononymity, and his most avid followersmany of them youngish, male, and self-consciously science-mindedrepeat Things That Kenji Says with the solemn weight of holy writ. Kenji says that red miso paste is just as good as shrimp paste for making kimchi. Kenji says that crab cakes should be cooked to between 145 and 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Kenji says that cornstarch will only work for hot dishes. Kenji says that you dont really need to bring a steak to room temperature before cooking it.
In 2014, Lpez-Alt moved with his wife, Adriana Lpez-Alt, a software engineer and cryptographer, from New York to the Bay Area, and in late 2020 they decamped with their young daughter from there to Seattle. Lpez-Alts second cookbook, a nearly seven-hundred-page volume titled The Wok, will publish in March. We spoke recently by phone over several days, as he took walks with his second child, who was born in September. After two years of holing up and cooking meals for his family (some of which he broadcasts, via a head-mounted camera, on YouTube), he was gearing up for a fresh publicity run. In our conversations, which have been edited for length and clarity, we talked about the responsibilities of fame, owning up to being a jerk, and the fraught idea of calling a recipe the best.
Theres something very much against the trend, in the current cookbook landscape, to write a whole book focussing on a tool rather than on cultural context. I dont mean to imply that you are just, like, Heres a piece of metal. Lets only talk about its structural properties. You do include your own life and other context in your recipe writing, but its rarely in that cultural-deep-dive, personal-narrative way which is so prevalent in cookbooks right now.
That was something which actually troubled me early on when I was writing this book. How do I, as someone whos not ChineseIm 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? The context I try to give in the book is always about that. I always try to place the recipes that Im writing about in the context of how they fit in my own day-to-day life, and also memories I have about eating them with my family. My very white father from Pennsylvania loved Chinese food and took us all around Chinatown, trying to find really good Chinese American Cantonese stuff. I built my own connection to wok cooking through my interest in the cuisine. So its not that the book doesnt have any cultural context or personal context. It does. Its just, I think, a different type of personal context than, sayis it Eric Kim who has a new Korean cookbook?
Yeah, its called Korean American.
That book is super personal: These are my family recipes. For me, we didnt have family recipes growing up, but that doesnt mean I dont have thoughts about what I grew up eating. Also, in this book, as much as possiblemuch more than in The Food LabI try to make sure that Im consulting experts, either through their books or by directly reaching out to them. I make sure I cite my sources.
The Food Lab was mostly based on recipe testing, rather than research. If you were doing that book now, do you think you would do the sort of research and reporting youve done for The Wok?
I dont think I need to speak as much to the cultural context of meat loaf or mac and cheese to an American audience as I do about dry-style beef chow fun, because I think its something that the audience of The Food Lab is much more familiar with. Part of the point of that book was: here are these foods, and now Im going to explain all the different elements of technique and food science that you can think about while youre cooking them. The science, I think, was the point, and the dishes themselves were really just the hook.
My read of The Food Lab, which I think is not uncommon, is that its a book built around the idea of optimization. Theres certainly, as you said, unpacking the science, and explaining why this or that recipe works. But it also implies that a recipe can have a platonic ideal, or a perfect state.
Certainly, I understand why you would read it that way, and why a lot of people would read it that way, but thats definitely not where I am right now. My views on a lot of these things have changed in the last six or seven years. Even when I was writing The Food Lab, when I said something like the best, what I really meant was: Im going to give you some basic descriptions that I think a lot of people would agree are what the best mac and cheese is. There are certain things that maybe not everybody agrees on, but here are my specific goals right now, which I think probably a lot of people agree are good goals to have for macaroni and cheese. And now Im going to show you ways you can optimize those specific things. If you disagree that those are good things in mac and cheese, well, I want to provide you with enough background information so that you can then modify the recipe to make it to what you think is best.
Even then, what does best even mean? I think back then I used it a lot more just because I was writing for a food blog every day, and best gives you more clicks than really good. These days, I dont really care about clicks, and so I very rarely say something is best. I generally go out of my way to say, This is just what I felt like doing today. I dont cook the same thing the same way every time I make it, or order food the same way every time. Sometimes I want really crispy, double-cooked fries, and sometimes I want a soggy, salty, greasy, limp pile. One is not better than the other, but its good to know how to get to those places, if you want to.
My kids book, Every Night Is Pizza Night, was actually about thatabout the concept of best, and how the best has context, and people have different reasons for liking things, and those things can change. These are things which, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, I ignored. I think that, as you age and mature as a person, there are things that you come to internalize a lot better, and understand better. I was an asshole! Im still one! But Im less of an asshole now, and at least I recognize it. The kids book was, in many ways, a response to the way that some people take my work. Especially online, Ill see somebody post a picture of a stew they made, and then they explain how they did it. And then someone else, in the comments, comes in and is, like, No, thats crap. Kenji said to do it this other way. Therefore, your stew is terrible. Thats not at all how I want my work to be used.
/usr/local/lib/python3.8/html/parser.py:171: XMLParsedAsHTMLWarning: It looks like you're parsing an XML document using an HTML parser. If this really is an HTML document (maybe it's XHTML?), you can ignore or filter this warning. If it's XML, you should know that using an XML parser will be more reliable. To parse this document as XML, make sure you have the lxml package installed, and pass the keyword argument `features="xml"` into the BeautifulSoup constructor. k = self.parse_starttag(i)The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt Book Review
If I would have the time & space and plenty of people to eat all the food, I wouldnt make just one or two batches of ice cream at a time. I would make 10, varying all those parameters Id be interested in to understand. Different flavours, different structuring agents, yogurt vs cream cheese, with aging and without aging. The same for pancakes, bread, muffins, etc.
(Un)fortunately, I dont. Instead, I make one or two ice cream batches at a time, always changing something and learning as fast as we can eat what I make.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on the other hand, has managed to make this his job. Trying things over and over again and debunking food myths as he goes. Hes been writing on Serious Eats for some time and theres quite a bit of posts on this blog that refer to his posts when were trying to figure something out!
In 2015 he published a massive, cook/science book: The Food Lab (affiliate link). Whereas its not my favorite book in our collection, it is definitely really nice and unique. Lets explain why
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The author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
We already quickly introduced Kenji at the start. But hes not been writing for Serious Eats forever. He has a degree in architecture (after starting biology) but already during university discovered that cooking was his true passion. Once graduated he started working in kitchens and did so for several years.
One of the things he noticed, combining his science background and cooking experience, is that a lot of kitchen wisdom is more myth than fact. Over time he became passionate about exploring this further and the book, the Food Lab (appropriate name for sure, affiliate link), is a clear example of it.
Tip: Want to get to know Kenji better? Hes done two great interviews with one of my favorite podcasts, Freakonomics: Food+Science=Victory & Why you shouldnt open a restaurant.
Design & Lay out
First of all, the book is big. Its a whopping 958 pages long and theres probably only about 300 recipes (still a lot of course, but for such a long book you might expect more). However, keep in mind, that a simple rcipe for scrambled eggs easily takes up 5 pages. As well discuss in the next section, it really is all about the content, not necessarily about appearances.
That doesnt mean the book doesnt look good of course. Its got nice photos, although theyre probably more made with a scientist in mind, than a perfect Instagram setting (which I find perfectly fine). One of the first photos in the book is a top shot of 24 eggs boiled at 30 second intervals, from 0 to 12 minutes. Its a great photo! Throughout the book there are a lot of photos explaining phenomena and techniques.
Content
The book is dived in 9 sections (not counting all the introductions on kitchen gear, a basic pantry, etc. which so many books contain, although Kenji definitely goes a level deeper in explaining everything). There are three sections on meat, a section on vegetables, frying and pasta to name a few.
Within each section Kenji first gives a general introduction to the topic, which is alway interesting to read. In the section on soups and stock for instance he starts with a quick introduction on the importance and stocks in the French kitchen. They take a lot of time though, so he then goes on to explain how to make one if you dont have as much time. Next follows an extensive explanation of chicken and how to make it into a wonderful stock.
The recipes
After these introductions follow the recipe for the chapter. These can be 1-page long or over 5 pages. Kenji has definitely tried to find the perfect version of every recipe in the book. Even though Im not a big fan of perfect recipes (theyre never going to be perfect for everyone), I like how he really explains why he has chosen to do a recipe the way he has done.
In a lot of cases hes done a bunch of trials to get to the recipe he has and has actually thought it through. As you might have noticed when reading this website, I dont think its important to follow a recipe exactly. Its most important that you understand whats going so that you know where to freestyle or substitute, while it still turns out good.
The recipes Kenji has developed (such as the meat loaf at the bottom of the page) are definitely American focused. That said, even if you dont cook American food, the science will be the same. You might not want to follow the recipes exactly, but you might find his observations useful and interesting.
Meatloaf
As shown in the photo above, one of the recipes we made was the meatloaf. Even though we didnt follow the recipe exactly (making a simple calculation error), it still turned out great and we learned a ton along the way (which is why its evaluated in a separate post).
Overall evaluation
Kenji is not a big dessert fan, he mentions so himself in the introduction and he has thus left the dessert section out. I myself am more of a dessert/baking fan, so I sometimes try to look up a baking recipe in his book for guidance, but wont find it. That said, Im glad he sticks with his strengths and hasnt decided to just add some mediocre ones.
Aside from that, this book isnt one you should buy for the recipes itself. You should buy it to learn and then perfect your own recipes using Kenjis tips, tricks and ways of thinking.
I must admit that I dont use the Food Lab (affiliate link) very often, but now that I leaved through it again, I definitely should, because I came across fascinating articles on frying french fries and pancakes again.
One of the reasons for not using it as often as I should, is that I dont find it that easy to look things up if Im interested in something. The organization of knowledge via recipes is probably the reason for that. But, thats me comparing the book to On Food and Cooking which has that more encyclopedia feel to it.
If youre into food and really understanding it, kenjis book is an accessible way to do so. It goes very deep into the why of recipes and clearly a lot of time and effort have been put into it. Things werent just tested once, they have been tested until perfection giving you a lot of lessons along the way.
