Several times while reading “The Food Lab,” the new cookbook from J. Kenji López-Alt, I wished I had the text in a keyword-searchable format—I wanted to put on my Internet goggles and surf. López-Alt’s native format is the blog: he is the managing culinary director at Serious Eats, a Web site geared toward the dedicated home chef. His column, which shares a name and many recipes with the book, comprises an extensive body of work on the science behind cooking. Both are long and jaw-droppingly thorough—perfect for scanning and scrolling. Among digitally inclined amateur home cooks, Kenji’s methods and recommendations have become indispensable kitchen wisdom. As Eater’s Helen Rosner puts it, “When I need to make sure I’m using the best possible technique, my usual m.o. is to google the thing I’m trying to figure out, plus the word ‘Kenji.’ ” (Like Martha, he is known by his familiar name.)
So to call “The Food Lab” a cookbook is not quite accurate—it is more of a hybrid reference text, somewhere between Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” and Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything.” The volume’s subtitle—“Better Home Cooking Through Science”—echoes the famous DuPont slogan, and part of Kenji’s culinary philosophy is that “science” shouldn’t be a scary word. At first glance, the book looks like a text for avant-garde, high-end cooking. The cover design (sans serif, line art) is reminiscent of Eleven Madison Park’s twenty-eight-word “grid” menu. The frontispiece, a full-page photo of two dozen eggs “boiled for 30-second intervals from 0 to 12 minutes,” recalls some of the stark photography from Nathan Myhrvold’s five-volume epic “Modernist Cuisine,” and could very well be sold as a wall print. Kenji’s recipes, however, are not the stuff of experimental tasting menus but of everyday basics. He doesn’t call for any fancy chemical mixtures or suspensions (the only things he considers staples that I didn’t have in my kitchen were buttermilk and gelatin powder). He is interested, instead, in perfecting gooey mac and cheese or the platonic scrambled egg, but he’s not afraid to cite how the pH of an egg affects the way its proteins will behave in various foams or emulsions. Kenji’s appeal is that he channels the shameless geekery of hobbyists everywhere into inexpensive, everyday foods—the ideal pancake, the perfect burger. “The Food Lab” ’s introduction begins with a proclamation in large type: “I’m a nerd, and I’m proud of it.”
Kenji, who is thirty-five and lives in California, comes from a family of chemists and biologists. While attending M.I.T. as an undergraduate, he had one of the most common revelations a science major can have—he loved science but hated the practice of it. In lieu of tedious lab work, he took up cooking in kitchens across Boston (arguably a different kind of tedious lab work). After working as a test cook and editor at Cook’s Illustrated (the original bastion of culinary wonkiness), he moved over to Serious Eats, where he churned out the blog posts that are now considered part of the Kenji canon: a French-fry opus, a deep dive into pie crust, an ode to his Due Buoi Wide Spatula, which he called “exceedingly sexy, in that mostly platonic inanimate metallic object kind of way.” With no apparent constraints on word count or tone, he developed his distinctive voice and style, combining the patience and discipline of a research scientist with the enthusiasm of an algebra teacher. (This past July, he launched an on-demand “Food Lab” video series, co-hosted by Katie Quinn, which feels like a cross between Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” and a Bill Nye-type science show.)
Indeed, the very formatting of his book resembles a high-school or college-level textbook. It uses mathy symbols like curly brackets and oversized asterisks, which lead to snappy footnotes that begin with prompts like, “Alright, Smarty-Pants . . .” or “remember levers from fourth grade?” (No.) But Kenji’s book is not for strict novices—he assumes his audience already knows about the polarity of water, and that eighty per cent of them have read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential_.”_ He speaks from one smarty-pants foodie to another; if you don’t relate to it, or at least sympathize with it, his tone is likely to annoy you. He breathlessly invokes the bell-curve distribution to explain why you should salt your food from on high, and he likens breaded foods to Mandelbrot fractals (crumbs add irregular edges, creating more surface area). Now you know that using a droplet of water to test whether a pan is preheated employs the Leidenfrost effect, and that soy sauce is a protease (an enzyme that breaks down proteins). You’re welcome.
Sometimes, Kenji’s conversational voice veers into dad humor—he employs cringeworthy puns (“_eggs_act science,” “obsessive-emulsive”), rhymey phrases (“Don’t dine on swine?”), and standard pop-culture dork fare like “Star Wars” and MacGyver. Instead of a standard kitchen timer, he recommends wearing a stopwatch around your neck. In one analogy, flour proteins are likened to “hippie revelers forming a dance circle during a rare dry, sunny moment at Woodstock 1969.” But Kenji’s most cloying tendencies—uxoriousness and excessive reference to his dogs—are also his most forgivable. Corny earnestness is part of what makes his hyper-detailed lessons memorable and accessible.
The organization of the cookbook is unorthodox but clever. His recipes are grouped according to technique rather than ingredient. Meats and poultry both appear in chapters on fast and slow cooking, whereas deep-frying and emulsions enjoy sections of their own. This can lead to some confusion. Clarified butter is in the eggs-and-breakfast chapter (it is a key ingredient in Hollandaise Sauce) rather than the one on emulsions, and a two-page sidebar called “All about shrimp” is marooned in the pasta chapter. The over-all effect is not unlike that of walking into a Bed Bath & Beyond—the layout appears neat and orderly but is in fact based on complex groupings with many exceptions to the rules. Sprinkled throughout the book are pullout sections like so many end-of-aisle displays: a recurring series on knife skills covers how to chiffonade basil, carve a chicken, or mince a shallot. (The latter, a most basic kitchen skill, is relegated to page seven hundred and eighty-one.)
Appropriate to its title, but also furthering its likeness to a textbook, “The Food Lab” is studded with experiments that Kenji enjoins home cooks to try. To illustrate the difference between temperature and energy, he tells you to “open the oven door, stick your hand inside, and keep your hand in the oven until it gets too hot to withstand.” Then you are to repeat the same test, but with your hand in a saucepan of water. (Hot water contains much more energy than hot air, and so is harder to withstand at lower temperatures.) To prove that fat equals flavor, Kenji suggests forming three different lean-beef burger patties, with added fats from beef, lamb, and pork. He has no fewer than six different executions of hot buttered peas, which read like a list of Outlook contacts in bad need of the “merge duplicates” function.
Kenji’s most valuable contributions are the experiments and side-by-side comparisons he has tirelessly performed so that we don’t have to. He provides simple explanations of common problems with easy fixes: pork chops tend to twist and buckle during cooking because the fat and lean tissues shrink at different rates; scoring the fat will help. Sometimes, his techniques fly in the face of common practice. His poached eggs don’t call for vinegar, which provides a chemical solution to a problem that he solves mechanically, by straining the whites and stirring constantly during cooking. Many of his findings are helpfully arranged in charts, like the best ways to cook various cuts of beef, and the smoke points of common cooking oils. Four pages of cheeses and their melting points and flavor profiles may seem excessive, but no cheese lover could begrudge it.
Kenji’s crucial gift is an extreme patience—a culinary passion channelled into endless tinkering and repetition. Perhaps he was always destined to be a scientist. Of being a biology student, he complains about “the slowness of it all, the months and months of experimenting that would finally reveal results that showed you were wrong all along.” In the end, he has devoted his career to that very brand of painstaking investigation. But who wouldn’t be more interested in fried chicken than gel electrophoresis? As I read on about the science of ground meat and how surfactants are the key to a good salad dressing, I began to think of each chapter as a module or unit in a biochemistry class I never took but wish I had. I will probably not remember that vegetables must be heated to at least a hundred and eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit in order for the pectin to begin to break down, but I could probably have retained the information for a semester, just long enough to be tested on it. Kenji’s lessons are the kind you keep going back to, long after the course is over.
