![]() ![]() 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. We spoke recently by phone over several days, as he took walks with his second child, who was born in September. López-Alt’s second cookbook, a nearly seven-hundred-page volume titled “ The Wok,” will publish in March. 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. Kenji says that you don’t really need to bring a steak to room temperature before cooking it. Kenji says that cornstarch will only work for hot dishes. Kenji says that crab cakes should be cooked to between 145 and 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Kenji says that red miso paste is just as good as shrimp paste for making kimchi. 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. (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. His pieces became an anchor of the publication, and López-Alt became virtually synonymous with the site. In his column “The Food Lab,” he broke down popular American recipes and rebuilt them better, faster, stronger. 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. After leaving Cook’s Illustrated, López-Alt, a graduate of M.I.T. ![]() In the years since, he’s built a career based on upending the received wisdom of the kitchen. The reverse sear was arguably López-Alt’s first viral cooking technique. 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. ![]() In-the-know gastronomes began cooking their steaks gently, slowly bringing the interiors to temperature without regard for any sort of crust. That new method, which López-Alt dubbed the “reverse sear,” launched a stoveside revolution. “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. 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. 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. ![]()
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