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.
That seems like a terrifying amount of power, to be the person who decides what a good stew is.
I moved to Seattle in 2020, and one of the things I noticed when I came here was that there are really good bagels. I did a piece with the Seattle Times about my favorites—the headline was “Kenji Says That Seattle’s Bagels Are as Good as New York’s,” which is technically true based on what I said, because I said that the best ones here are as good as the ones in New York, but it’s a very misleading click, that headline. And then the subhead says, “Here are his top five bagels in Seattle.” And people are, like, “But he didn’t mention this one. He didn’t mention that one.” People get angry about this stuff online. You know how it is.
I do know.
I do find it frustrating that people take everything I have to say so seriously. I understand it, but I grapple with it. It’s surreal. It’s a weird thing to acknowledge to yourself—that people take your words seriously. You have to be really careful about what you say. And then, even when you try to be really careful, there are always ways that people are going to get angry.
Was there a particular moment when you realized, like, “Oh, my God, I really do have a megaphone”?
I think the more popular I got on social-media platforms, the more difficult it became for me to manage my feelings. When you have a hundred people following you and you have some emotion-fuelled outburst, you’re not talking to that many people. But when you have a hundred thousand people following you and you have some emotion-fuelled outburst, and it’s directed at a single person, then the number of people who are going to pile on and act cruel to this person, who doesn’t deserve to have cruelty inflicted upon him, just increases. You realize, Oh, crap! You do have this responsibility to try and be positive. Whether or not I think people should be following me and listening to what I say, people do. And so the way I interact with other people is magnified. Just realizing that fact has had a lot of impact.
There was the time that I tweeted something about how I didn’t want to serve people wearing MAGA hats at my restaurant [Wursthall, in San Mateo, California], which for unrelated reasons I’m no longer associated with. I didn’t really have the authority to say something like that because, although I was a partner there, I still had two other partners. And then, of course, I completely discounted the feelings of every employee there, every staff member, every other customer there. I tweeted that because it was a personal, emotional response. My partners called me, and they were, like, “We get it, and we know why you said it, and we agree. But you’re putting our workers at risk.” People came and parked their cars outside and started staring at the window. We got calls people from people saying that they were going to call ICE [on our employees]. All this real-world backlash to some dumb two-hundred-and-fifty-character message I wrote that was probably inspired by something dumb Trump had said that day. It branched out into the real world, and it affected real-world people, people I cared about and people who made their livelihood through our business—people whose safety I put in jeopardy.
The fact that you have a public platform which your partners don’t have means that, even if you say exactly the same thing in exactly the same room, you just end up being louder.
One of the things I’ve been doing for the past couple years now is to reach out to former co-workers, because of exactly that dynamic you’re talking about. Especially at Serious Eats, a lot of people saw me as the public face of the site. Carey Jones and Erin Zimmer were the managers there. I was just in charge of the recipes. But people still mistakenly say that it was my site, or that I started it—none of which is true. But it doesn’t really matter whether that’s technically true or not. Things that I said, and the ways that I behaved, reflected directly on the site, and affected all these other people who worked there. It’s made me think, currently, about what else I may have done in the past to people that negatively affected them that I wasn’t aware of.
That, and also just my general behavior. I spent a lot of time working in restaurants, and I built up this repertoire of behaviors which, in restaurant settings, were O.K. Or at least back then they were O.K.—now I also realize they were never O.K. in any situation. But it happened all the time in restaurants that people were just abusive assholes to one another. When I shifted more into the writing world, I brought a lot of that stuff with me. I’ve recognized now that the way I treated people, the way I interacted with people, was not always good. Especially now, as a father responsible for other human beings, who really wants to reflect the best possible behavior, I’ve been trying to reach out to former colleagues. I’ve been having phone calls with them and conversations with them about our interactions in the past, the good and the bad—trying to know what I can do now to change and grow.
What kind of response do you get to these invitations to talk about how you were, as you say, an asshole?
There are some people who don’t want to talk. In some cases, people have said, “Yeah, I want to talk about it, but I need to think about this more and I’ll get back to you,” and then haven’t got back to me. People who seem reluctant, I don’t want to force them to talk about something they don’t want to talk about, just for my own benefit. Of the people who do want to talk, and that’s been most of them, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. I think they really appreciated coming back and being able to talk about that experience which they had at Serious Eats, and I think also appreciated knowing that I was recognizing [those behaviors] in myself and trying to not do those things anymore.
That sounds like an uncommon level of self-awareness for a person whose career is still on an upswing. I mean that as a compliment, I suppose, but I also mean it as a neutral observation. The pattern that we more often tend to see is ego inflation. What inclines you toward the opposite?
A lot of it is that my wife is very honest with me, and I have friends who are also very honest with me and who care about me, and care about my mental well-being and my mental health. I don’t think it’s publicly known, but I had a little mental-health crisis a couple years ago. I was depressed, I was self-medicating with too much pot and alcohol—it almost ended our marriage. It made me stop and think, What the hell am I doing? Why am I behaving this way? Part of it is you get into a crisis and you have to figure out what put you in that crisis in the first place. I think acknowledging your past behavior and your past self is the way to get out of that, or at least the way to stop making those mistakes going forward. That was a critical moment.
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.
Iterating on your personality the way you iterate on a recipe?
Testing it out, like, “Well, maybe being more of an asshole would work better.”
If you want to truly pursue the scientific method, I guess that’s the way.
I remember reading an article about Rick Moranis—“Where did Rick Moranis go?” He was in all those movies, and then he disappeared. The answer is, it turns out, that he said, “The movies were fun, but I realized that being with my family and doing stuff that interests me brought me more happiness than becoming more famous in the field that people knew me for.” That really resonated with me, especially when my wife was pregnant with our daughter. That’s how I try to make my decisions now. Do I need to be more famous? I could do a lot harder work on my YouTube channel and probably get a bigger following if I wanted to, but do I want to do that? Right now it’s easy for me, it’s fun for me, it doesn’t feel like a job, and people seem to like it. So why would I add stress to my life if I’m happy with how it’s going?
I think, for Rick Moranis, it was also that his wife had died, and he wanted to be there for his children. You’ve been really open about being a primary caregiver to your kids, and I don’t know if you still describe yourself as a full-time parent—
I was. Right now it’s a little different, because my older child is almost five, so she’s in pre-K, and then next year she’ll be going to kindergarten. We’ve just hired a nanny, so I’ll be a half-time full-time—I don’t know what you call that. I mean, parents are always parents. But my wife will be working full time. I’ll be working whenever time allows, and taking care of the kids all the other time.
When you talk about your partnership with your wife, and the ways that you participate in child care—is that something which you are intentionally trying to communicate to your fans?
Yeah, I’m definitely aware of that. I like sending the message that, hey, it’s cool for dads to be involved intimately in their kids’ lives. And it’s also cool to have a full-time working mom, who’s the one who has the full-time nine-to-five. In general, that’s a positive message to send which maybe doesn’t get sent enough. It’s the truth of our day-to-day lives, and I also think it’s worth sharing.
There’s a pleasingly precise inversion of the traditional heteronormative gender roles in your marriage: the wife works full time outside of the home, and the husband stays home and cooks.
I stay home and cook, and I food-blog on the side.
Do you still think of yourself as a blogger?
I think of myself as just a writer now. And a YouTube creator, which is actually my main source of income now, which I never expected pre-2020.
You were saying earlier that you would probably walk back your use of the word “best,” because it’s such a click magnet. But I feel like YouTube, almost more than the print Internet, really reinforces hyperbolic, almost histrionic headlines. Do you feel beholden to the algorithm?
I don’t. But, again, it’s because I very consciously decided, when I started doing regular videos, that I was not going to pay attention to what YouTube is telling me to do. I briefly entertained it at the beginning: Should I get sponsors? Should I research what titles work better? There was a brief period where I was, like, “I could win at YouTube,” and then I very quickly realized that I don’t want to win at YouTube. I don’t like talking to a camera, and I definitely am bad at working off of a script. But what I am good at is basically just cooking, and talking about it as I cook. So I stick a GoPro camera on my head and cook whatever I was going to cook anyway. I don’t plan it. I don’t go shopping specifically for it. If I’m making dinner for my family, I’ll stick a camera on my head and then post that video, basically with no editing. It’s like the anti-cooking show, because there’s nothing staged and there are no talking points to hit. There are no beauty shots of food. Every time I make a mistake, it just stays in there.
Do you draw a distinction between yourself as the product and your content as the product?
One of the things that I like about my YouTube format is that my face is virtually never on camera, so people who watch my videos are generally coming to the food content and not because I’m the one talking to them. I feel like I could very easily become—well, I know the personality type I had when I was younger. I was much more of an “I want to be famous, I want world domination”-type personality. In the last ten years or so, those feelings of wanting to do that have gone away a little bit, but I also know that it’s still in me. If I allow myself to do things that feed my ego, then I could very easily be controlled by that. I don’t want to be controlled by that, so I try to do things to suppress it. I try to make sure that when I post content it’s something that I think is going to be useful for people.
Do you have any models for that?
Bob Ross. I think he did it right. I grew up watching him, and I’ve always liked his message. Bill Watterson—he had this body of work which he produced. He never marketed it beyond the strip itself. Anytime you see “Calvin and Hobbes” outside of a book, it’s bootleg.
He didn’t go down the “Garfield” path.
I feel like he was very sort of uncynical. He said things in his comics, there were these messages, and, from what we know of his relatively private life, he seems to also live by those standards. In food, Jacques Pépin is an idol of mine—I think also because he’s always stressed his occupation over fame and fortune. He just seems to genuinely care about enriching other people’s lives and living his life in a way that I think is happy and humble.
Do you think cooking is a good medium for transmitting that sort of attitude?
I feel like it can go either away. I grew up in the era of Food Network, an era when chefs became celebrities. I think the current landscape of food media is still very much derived from that. If you go on YouTube and just look at cooking channels, there are a lot that are just people in their homes teaching you their family recipes, but the super popular ones are always these super bro-y, macho things which I think are very much about using food to be cool, using food to impress people and as a way to make yourself feel superior to other people. It’s, like, “Here’s this secret technique which I got from so-and-so,” as opposed to “Here’s a way to improve your life.” With any medium, it depends on who’s presenting and what they’re doing it for.
I have to say, if I think about a somewhat bro-y audience bragging that they have a secret technique—that feels very much like your scene.
It does. I get that. That’s one of the biggest issues I have with my own body of written work, as it exists on Serious Eats and as it exists in the first book. The way I used to write is, unfortunately, very effective.
It’s definitely the case that the Internet—and by “the Internet” I suppose I just mean “people”—people love secrets, they love the idea of “this one secret trick.”
When I’m working on a recipe, or I’m testing something, I don’t intentionally set out to try and disrupt agreed-upon cooking techniques. I don’t set out to myth-bust. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, you just confirm that whatever Escoffier or Pépin said works, works. But then, one per cent of the time, it’s, like, “Oh! Actually, here’s a better way to do it,” or “Here’s a place where maybe the existing knowledge on this subject has some flaws.” But, of course, those are the ones people pay attention to. If you’re putting out two hundred recipes a year, you need only ten of those to be “one secret trick” recipes for people to then latch onto those, and to know you as the “one secret trick” guy.
Are you really telling me that you don’t go looking for those? You really just happen upon them?
Yeah! I mean, my process is definitely trying to figure out why things worked, very “let’s see what’s going on under the hood.” So, in that sense, I’ll definitely go looking for answers and looking for explanations that make sense from first principles. If someone just says, “It works because I say it does,” or “It works because Gordon Ramsay says so,” well, I don’t want someone to just tell me what’s there. I want to take it apart and see it for myself.
Are there any discoveries—I’m hesitant to say “hacks”—that you’re particularly proud of?
Reverse-searing steak and prime rib—that’s everywhere now, and that was something that I did at Cook’s Illustrated. It’s just become part of normal cooking now. Not everybody would know of it, but I feel like most people who eat meat under the age of thirty or thirty-five have heard of reverse searing. That’s pretty cool.
I 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.
It’s Leibniz and Newton both inventing calculus. Are there any techniques that you wish you’d come up with?
In my new book, there’s this technique for getting smoky wok hei flavor into certain dishes where you use a blowtorch—you basically stir-fry things in small batches, spread them out on a tray, and then pass over them with a blowtorch. I had this in the manuscript for my book, and I was, like, “Oh, yeah, this is going to be the one. People are going to think this is so cool.” And then Tim Chin published virtually the same technique on Serious Eats, maybe a year ago. It’s another one of the situations where we both came up with the idea.
There’s something very publish-or-perish about that. It feels very academic arms race.
These days, I’m just kind of over it. I have ideas, and I know what I’m good at doing, and I’m fine with publishing my work and being proud of it. I try much harder these days to acknowledge other people’s work than I did when I was at Serious Eats. Especially in the recipe space, people seem to have a difficult time saying where they got their idea from. On some level, I understand why, but also, when you think about it, there is no downside. People aren’t going to judge you worse because you’re generous with crediting other people. If I see someone use one of my recipes without citing it, that used to bother me a lot, and I would make a public thing about it. But it doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m not the thirty-year-old YouTube guy. I feel like I’m edging toward being more part of the Old Guard. So it just seems petty to care about things like that, when I’ve already had as much career success as one could wish for.
What is the difference to you between explaining a technique and explaining a recipe?
The technique is something that has wide applications. It’s a method, as opposed to a recipe, which is just the one thing. If I ask my phone, “How do I get from here to the post office?,” it gives me a recipe to the post office. I can just stare at my phone and see how many feet I have to walk this way, which way I turn, and then I get to the post office. Whereas learning a technique is like being handed the map. It allows you to choose other destinations—it allows you to choose alternate routes. That’s basically the difference to me: a recipe is turn-by-turn directions, a technique is a map.
Is one more valuable than the other?
It depends on who you are and what your goal is in the kitchen. There are people who don’t really care about learning to improvise, but there are also people who enjoy the creative outlet, the problem-solving. I don’t think one is better than the other. Different people have different needs in their lives.
In terms of “The Wok,” which is an entire book dedicated to a single tool—
Is it a tool?
A vessel?
Vessel’s great.
Do you think that any given pot or pan in someone’s cabinet could stand up to six hundred pages of analysis and recipes, or is there something particular about a wok?
There’s something particular about a wok. It’s a pan that was never designed for one single specific use. Early cooking vessels were made of clay—they were made for drying grain, and then people realized, Oh, we can also sear things in this, and we can boil things. And then eventually they started being made of metal, so then, O.K., we can put this over high heat. The techniques that you use it for came after the tool, as opposed to it being a tool that was designed for one specific technique. It’s not going to sear a steak better than a cast-iron pan, it’s not going to necessarily braise your short ribs better than a Dutch oven, but it’s going to do all these other different things. The variety of uses you can get out of it and the variety of techniques you can use it for outstrips any other pan in my kitchen. It’s much more versatile than any other pan that I’ve seen. You can pan fry, deep fry, steam, smoke, spray, simmer—the number of things you can do with it is incredibly high.
This one secret food hack will change your life, and that secret food hack is: buy a wok.
Ha, exactly. “Chinese restaurants hate him.”
An earlier version of this article did not include Adriana López-Alt’s full name.
