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Kenji López-Alt studied architecture at MIT, found his way into restaurant kitchens in Boston and later began writing The Food Lab column for Serious Eats. The book grew out of it, ran to 960 pages and won a James Beard Award in 2016.
He tests everything, including things nobody asked him to test. He has cooked hundreds of eggs at different temperatures, made 30 batches of scrambled eggs to find out what actually matters, and also reports the experiments that did not work. That is the unusual part. Most cookbooks make assertions; this one shows the work, which also means you are free to decide that he is wrong.
Quite a lot of what he discovers is that old kitchen wisdom is exactly that: old. Searing does not seal juices into meat. Meat does not need to sit out and come to room temperature before cooking. And if you salt your pasta water until it tastes like the sea, you have added roughly twice as much salt as you need.
Around 300 recipes, organised by technique and ingredient rather than by meal. And it is funny, which is unexpected for something that weighs about as much as a small household pet.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 960
Language: English
First published: 2015
The Kitchen Lab Selection
This is the book you turn to when something has not gone the way it should. It rarely contains the exact recipe you are making, but it explains what is happening in the pan, and once you understand that, you can rescue almost any recipe.
Showing the experiments matters more than providing the answers. An answer can become outdated; a method does not. Some of López-Alt’s conclusions will be revised, either by him or by someone else, and because he shows how he arrived at them, anyone can repeat the test and check the result. That is unusual in a cookbook.
In practice, it is a reference work that happens to contain recipes. It is organised by technique, which means you can consult it for years without ever having read it from cover to cover. What sets it apart from other reference works is that this one was written by someone who quite obviously finds the whole subject fun.
