14 ms·

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

196 points by nkurz 5y ago

kaycebasques 5y ago
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/1048624474126540800 https://mobile.twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/104862447412...
- isatty 5y ago
  Or Wursthall in San Mateo, which is his restaurant. The food is excellent.
  - donarb 5y ago
    Kenji is no longer an owner at Wursthall.
    - karlding 5y ago
      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_wursthall/h6ungy4/ https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_... [1] https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_wursthall/h6unqat/ https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_...
  - peferron 5y ago
    I went to Wursthall twice and found it to be mediocre. Backhaus is indeed excellent, and in a completely different league.
    - chrisdhoover 5y ago
      Yes, mediocre and derivative.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        "Derivative"? It's called "Wursthall".
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      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.
simonw 5y ago
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.
- tylerflick 5y ago
  The Food Lab is a must have for any kitchen. Best cookbook I’ve ever owned.
- anthomtb 5y ago
  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.
  - rustyfe 5y ago
    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.
    - simonw 5y ago
      +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.
- jeffwilcox 5y ago
  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.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  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.
luxurytent 5y ago
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!
- ethbr0 5y ago
  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.
  - yissp 5y ago
    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.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  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.
  - guynamedloren 5y ago
    Such a pretentious comment.
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      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.
mhb 5y ago
130 degrees inside? I don't think so. Seems like a New Yorker mistake.
- chabons 5y ago
  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.
  - karlshea 5y ago
    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.
    - mandeepj 5y ago
      > 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.
      - karlshea 5y ago
        Agree, that really helps!
      - balfirevic 5y ago
        Incidentally, that does almost nothing according to this article by... Kenji Lopez! https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-steak https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-st...
chair6 5y ago
Mmm, Kenji's really good scrambled eggs are really good (and really quick) .. https://youtube.com/watch?v=CXTnq7srJRs https://youtube.com/watch?v=CXTnq7srJRs.
- analog31 5y ago
  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. ;-)
  - nestorD 5y ago
    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.
dylanz 5y ago
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.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  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
  - kenneth 5y ago
    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.
jt2190 5y ago
> 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tayo42 5y ago
  I liked his stuff, he really can be an asshole on reddit (and Twitter which he deleted). Kind of turned me off to him.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    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.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    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.
francislata 5y ago
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.
gullywhumper 5y ago
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.
- gyc 5y ago
  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.
- mabbo 5y ago
  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.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  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.
- SamBam 5y ago
  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.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
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 https://thetech.com/2020/02/20/kenji-lopez-alt Enjoyed this article and how personal it was. Helen Rosner is a great writer.
xdfgh1112 5y ago
Kenji's cooking methods are always 10x more effort for 10% better food. Great for supertasters, not necessary for most of us.
- roughly 5y ago
  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?
  - xdfgh1112 5y ago
    Yeah that probably explains why I don't appreciate him as much as other people do!
- tshaddox 5y ago
  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.
- jghn 5y ago
  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
- mabbo 5y ago
  Do you have an example of something he showed the takes 10X longer? I find most of his recommendations made me a faster cook.
ripper1138 5y ago
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.
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  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.
  - ripper1138 5y ago
    He had claimed it in the past. you’re right the virtue signaling was annoying too.
- mabbo 5y ago
  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?
  - ripper1138 5y ago
    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.
eschneider 5y ago
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. :)
ngngngng 5y ago
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.
- mabbo 5y ago
  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.
  - ngngngng 5y ago
    > 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.
  - chihuahua 5y ago
    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.
    - mabbo 5y ago
      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?
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> 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.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  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.
anamax 5y ago
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?
porknubbins 5y ago
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.
- tptacek 5y ago
  That's how I felt about PBS and Julia Child.
turkishlurker 5y ago
I wish Kenji did a piece on the components of an "ideal" salad.

196 points by nkurz 5y ago

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/1048624474126540800 https://mobile.twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/104862447412...

isatty 5y ago
Or Wursthall in San Mateo, which is his restaurant. The food is excellent.
- donarb 5y ago
  Kenji is no longer an owner at Wursthall.
  - karlding 5y ago
    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_wursthall/h6ungy4/ https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_... [1] https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_wursthall/h6unqat/ https://reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/oszuh0/made_it_to_...
- peferron 5y ago
  I went to Wursthall twice and found it to be mediocre. Backhaus is indeed excellent, and in a completely different league.
  - chrisdhoover 5y ago
    Yes, mediocre and derivative.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      "Derivative"? It's called "Wursthall".
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    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.

simonw 5y ago

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.

tylerflick 5y ago
The Food Lab is a must have for any kitchen. Best cookbook I’ve ever owned.
anthomtb 5y ago
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.
- rustyfe 5y ago
  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.
  - simonw 5y ago
    +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.
jeffwilcox 5y ago
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.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
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.

luxurytent 5y ago

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!

ethbr0 5y ago
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.
- yissp 5y ago
  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.
ramraj07 5y ago
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.
- guynamedloren 5y ago
  Such a pretentious comment.
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    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.

mhb 5y ago

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

chabons 5y ago
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.
- karlshea 5y ago
  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.
  - mandeepj 5y ago
    > 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.
    - karlshea 5y ago
      Agree, that really helps!
    - balfirevic 5y ago
      Incidentally, that does almost nothing according to this article by... Kenji Lopez! https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-steak https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-st...

chair6 5y ago

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

analog31 5y ago
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. ;-)
- nestorD 5y ago
  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.

dylanz 5y ago

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.

aniforprez 5y ago
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
- kenneth 5y ago
  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.

jt2190 5y ago

> 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.

deleted 5y ago
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tayo42 5y ago
I liked his stuff, he really can be an asshole on reddit (and Twitter which he deleted). Kind of turned me off to him.
- tptacek 5y ago
  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.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  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.

francislata 5y ago

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.

gullywhumper 5y ago

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.

gyc 5y ago
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.
mabbo 5y ago
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.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
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.
SamBam 5y ago
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.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

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 https://thetech.com/2020/02/20/kenji-lopez-alt Enjoyed this article and how personal it was. Helen Rosner is a great writer.

xdfgh1112 5y ago

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

roughly 5y ago
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?
- xdfgh1112 5y ago
  Yeah that probably explains why I don't appreciate him as much as other people do!
tshaddox 5y ago
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.
jghn 5y ago
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
mabbo 5y ago
Do you have an example of something he showed the takes 10X longer? I find most of his recommendations made me a faster cook.

ripper1138 5y ago

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.

aerostable_slug 5y ago
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.
- ripper1138 5y ago
  He had claimed it in the past. you’re right the virtue signaling was annoying too.
mabbo 5y ago
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?
- ripper1138 5y ago
  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.

eschneider 5y ago

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. :)

ngngngng 5y ago

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.

mabbo 5y ago
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.
- ngngngng 5y ago
  > 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.
- chihuahua 5y ago
  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.
  - mabbo 5y ago
    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?

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> 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.

slothtrop 5y ago
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.

anamax 5y ago

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?

porknubbins 5y ago

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.

tptacek 5y ago
That's how I felt about PBS and Julia Child.

turkishlurker 5y ago

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