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 López-Alt, the author and recipe developer, wrote in a 2007 article for Cook’s Illustrated. That new method, which López-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 heat—the browned exterior achieved as a flourishing finale, rather than a starting point.
The reverse sear was arguably López-Alt’s first viral cooking technique. In the years since, he’s built a career based on upending the received wisdom of the kitchen. After leaving Cook’s Illustrated, López-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 López-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.) López-Alt’s 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 followers—many of them youngish, male, and self-consciously science-minded—repeat 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 don’t really need to bring a steak to room temperature before cooking it.
In 2014, López-Alt moved with his wife, Adriana López-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. López-Alt’s 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.”
There’s 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 don’t mean to imply that you are just, like, “Here’s a piece of metal. Let’s only talk about its structural properties.” You do include your own life and other context in your recipe writing, but it’s 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 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? The context I try to give in the book is always about that. I always try to place the recipes that I’m 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 it’s not that the book doesn’t have any cultural context or personal context. It does. It’s just, I think, a different type of personal context than, say—is it Eric Kim who has a new Korean cookbook?
Yeah, it’s called “Korean American.”
That book is super personal: “These are my family recipes.” For me, we didn’t have family recipes growing up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about what I grew up eating. Also, in this book, as much as possible—much more than in “The Food Lab”—I try to make sure that I’m 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 you’ve done for “The Wok”?
I don’t 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 it’s 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 I’m going to explain all the different elements of technique and food science that you can think about while you’re 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 it’s a book built around the idea of optimization. There’s 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 that’s 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: “I’m 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 I’m 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 it’s good to know how to get to those places, if you want to.
My kids’ book, “Every Night Is Pizza Night,” was actually about that—about 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! I’m still one! But I’m 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, I’ll 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, that’s crap. Kenji said to do it this other way. Therefore, your stew is terrible.” That’s not at all how I want my work to be used.
