‘I like to think of recipe development as a sort of engineering problem.’
An interview with Kenji Lopez Alt
Kenji Lopez-Alt is the chief creative officer of food website Serious Eats, where he pens the cult Food Lab column. He’s known for applying scientific rigour to the process of developing recipes, whether it’s turning 32 pounds of flour into over 1,500 cookies to create the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe or cooking dozens of steaks to debunk pesky old wives’ tales. I spoke to Kenji about his background as a restaurant chef, his recipe development process, and a memorable incident with an immersion blender.
R: You went to college at MIT. What did you study there?
K: I started as a biology major. I actually spent many summers in high school and a bit through college working in biology labs, and that’s basically what I was going to do, until I realised that I really dislike biology lab work. I find lab work to be extremely slow. So I switched to architecture, and I graduated MIT with an architecture degree.
R: You’re really known for your rigorous, almost scientific approach towards developing recipes. Would you say that a lot of that comes from your time in laboratories?
K: I think it’s more the other way around. My grandfather is a scientist, so I was raised in a very science-oriented household, and I think that’s what made me want to go into biology in the first place. But, you know, once I realised that the actual day to day work of biology was not something I enjoyed I started looking for other things.
Once I realised that cooking is a field that really interested me, and working in restaurants was something I really loved, it was then that I realised that there’s not as much science going on in cooking as I thought there should have been. You know, there’s certainly a lot of research going on in food technology as it applies to products and safety and things like that, but there wasn’t actually that much science applied on a more basic level in a restaurant or in a home setting. Like, how do you make food taste better, what is and isn’t necessary.
And, you know, for someone with a sort of scientific background, who was raised to question things, that just didn’t really sit right with me. Things are definitely changing now. It’s much more common for chefs and cooks who are being trained to actually question the things that they were taught, whether it was in school or in restaurants.
R: You just mentioned food technology. Do you read or engage with much of that research in your day-to-day work?
K: Not so much. When I’m trying to answer a sort of really detailed question I might go into the literature and see what research has been done, but that stuff tends to all be secret. But there are schools that study food science and there are people who specifically test those kinds of things, but they tend to write technical papers that aren’t really designed with a home cook in mind.
So I feel like a lot of the work that I do is actually translation. Here’s this technical paper, how do I explain these concepts in a way that makes sense to a home cook, and how do I help them apply it to their everyday cooking. So yeah, I would say that I’m a writer first and foremost before I’m a cook or even a scientist. I think my main skill, my craft is definitely being able to convey complex ideas in a way that people understand.
R: So how did you transition from MIT into food world?
K: Well, when I went to college I had really zero interest in food. I remember when I was a freshman my girlfriend and her parents took me out to dinner to some fancy restaurant in Boston, and I remember looking at the menu and thinking oh my God, there’s nothing I want to eat. And, you know, I was the kind of person who liked hamburgers and steak and Chinese food and hated fish, hated vegetables. I wasn’t really much of an eater, and I didn’t develop that palate until I started cooking.
I got into food because the summer after my sophomore year in college, I was sick of spending all those summers in a row working in biology labs, so I decided to take a little bit of time off academic work. So I went around looking for a job as a waiter or a bar back, a summer job, and one of the restaurants I walked into said all of their server positions are filled, but they had a prep cook who just walked out, do you want a job cooking. And I was like okay.
So I just accidentally fell into it. I accepted the job and it turned out that I really loved the day-to-day work of a cook. From there I basically spent the rest of my time, all through college working, part time in restaurants, working summers in restaurants. As soon as I graduated I went full time into it.
And once I started cooking the appreciation for food followed. I learned to cook before I learned to actually enjoy what I was cooking.
R: What do you think it was about cooking that made you enjoy or appreciate food differently?
K: Well, I think it was because in a lot of ways it’s actually a lot like working in a biology lab, except rather than taking months to get results it takes minutes or hours, and at the end of the day you can eat your results and they taste good. So I think it was the instant gratification aspect of it. And the idea of knowing that something that I’m producing in this kitchen right now is something that, on the other side of the kitchen doors, somebody is paying whatever it is, forty dollars a plate to eat something that I just made. That idea was really cool to me at the time. I mean it is still kinda cool to me.
I also just like the adrenaline rush, and the always-busy aspect of working in a kitchen. It’s just a thrill to work in a restaurant kitchen, the speed and organisation and just basic skills required. It’s a very demanding job, but also a very rewarding one for the right type of person.
R: Do you miss anything about working in professional kitchens?
K: Yeah, I loved doing it. I would still enjoy doing it. The reason that I stopped doing it — well, there are a number of reasons, but the main reason is that it leaves you zero time for family and friends. All the times that people are normally free are exactly the times when you’re not free, like nights, weekends, holidays, those are the times that you have to be in the kitchen. So for the many years that I was working in restaurants I didn’t really get to see my friends much, I had to miss family holidays, things like that. There’s not much of a life outside of the kitchen if you get into it. That was one of the big things that made me go out.
It’s also just a very physically demanding job. You know, I’m not old but I feel like if I went back into kitchens right now at thirty five I’m not sure my body could take the same abuse I put it through when I was, you know, nineteen, twenty years old
R: I read you had kind of an incident with an immersion blender.
K: Oh yeah [laughs]. I mean physical accidents are one thing. I was very stupidly washing the immersion blender that we used to make this lobster bisque, and this was the blender that we used to grind the lobster shells. It took lobster shells from whole shells and turned them into liquid, basically. So it was a really, really powerful industrial grade immersion blender, and I was wiping out the blades one day and I very stupidly forgot to unplug it. So while I was cleaning the blades the blender turned on, sort of blended one of my fingers, which has since healed, mostly.
Those are the kinds of kitchen mistakes you only make once. Pretty much every major accident I’ve had in a kitchen, and I’m sure any cook will tell you this, I can trace back like to the exact point in time when I made the stupid mistake that lead to it.
But that’s not the kind of physical trauma I’m talking about. Being on your feet for sixteen hours a day is really a strain, and constantly flipping pans is a strain on your joints. Like, I know cooks who’ve been in the business for fifteen, twenty years, they just throw out their shoulders from flipping pans too much.
R: So how did you make that jump from chef to food writer? I’m really intrigued about how you got involved with Cooks Illustrated.
K: Well, I’d always been interested in science. I had a pretty strong liberal arts background also through high school and I think I’ve always been a fairly strong writer and well read. It was something that had interested me for a while, and I was looking for a way to get out of restaurant kitchens. Cooks Illustrated was appealing to me because it’s this science based food publication that is aimed at home cooks, and that’s really exactly what I was looking for.
So I applied for a job as a test cook and got the job, and so spent a lot of time testing recipes and writing about the results. They have a unique operation. At most food magazines the test kitchen is different from the editorial department, so one group of people will test recipes and then another group of people will write about it, whereas at Cooks Illustrated it’s an all in one. The people who cook there also write the stories.
That’s really how I got into the writing. I was at Cooks Illustrated for a little over three years, ended up as an editor there, and was also doing freelance work for magazines and newspapers, writing on the side. Almost all of it was about home cooking and the science of cooking, and that’s really been my interest.
R: And how did you meet Ed Levine and get involved with Serious Eats?
K: A burger recipe I had developed for Cooks Illustrated, which showed you how to grind meat in a food processor , got reviewed on A Hamburger Today , which is a part of Serious Eats. And so I first started reading Serious Eats because I saw that this recipe I had worked on had been reviewed there. I liked the site a lot, so I started doing a couple of freelance things for them. I think I wrote a big article about Heston Blumenthal’s burger recipe . Actually, it was mostly burger and pizza things that I was writing for them at the beginning.
I moved to New York and was working freelance for them more and more often, and eventually I met with Ed and he suggested I do a food science column, because they’ve always wanted to have a food science column . That turned out to be a really big hit and turned into a major part of the site. It’s basically what my brand identity is now.
R: What’s your most popular Food Lab post so far?
K: Most popular so far? I think the post I did in December about chocolate chip cookies is now the most popular Food Lab post. For a long time there was one about veggie burgers , there was also one about foolproof pan pizza , which is perennially popular. That recipe goes around the Internet like once a month or so, so we see a big spike in traffic because someone discovered it and shared it with all their friends. So, yeah, I’d say probably the pizza recipe and the chocolate chip cookies are the two most popular.
And it makes sense, you know. That’s really the type of recipe that I try to focus on for The Food Lab. My goal is to always first identify the sorts of recipes that people look for and enjoy making and then treat them in a way that other people aren’t treating them. Simple recipes looked at through a more scientific lens with the idea of making them more delicious and more streamlined and more foolproof in the end. Generally I find that when you really focus your efforts on achieving those goals you can find ways to improve upon classic recipes that are generally considered to be unchanging.
R: Like how you’ve transformed so many Americans into turkey surgeons around thanksgiving.
K: Right, I’m a big proponent of spatchcocking. Well, poultry in general, turkeys specifically. It cuts your total cooking time by more than half and also gives you the crispest skin and the juiciest meat. It’s really, a magical way to do it. The only downside is your turkey doesn’t look like that Norman Rockwell plump juicy turkey.
R: Yeah, it looks like a murder victim.
K: Yes, it ends up looking a little bit pornographic, I think. But I think good tasting food is more important than good-looking food, to me at least. Once you carve it up and put it on your, plate who cares how it looks.
R: So if you could ban one tool or ingredient from every home kitchen in America, what would it be?
K: I really hate slow cookers. I know people love slow cookers, and there are certain situations where I can see slow cookers helping busy cooks, but there’s nothing you can cook in a slow cooker that wouldn’t be better if you just did it in a Dutch oven in a low temperature regular oven.
Slow cookers are almost custom designed to produce bland results. And I think the reason people love them is because they produce results that are just good enough that they say you know what, this is convenient. But if people were to actually just perform the simple test of cooking something side by side in a slow cooker versus in a Dutch oven stuck in the oven people would be throwing out their slow cookers, because it’s just as easy and the end results are so much better and so much more flavourful than what you can get out of the slow cooker.
R: And save some counter space.
K: And save the counter space, yes.
R: I was hoping you could walk me through your recipe development process. What sparks that idea?
K: A lot of times it comes from my own cooking. Like, I’m making something and I think to myself you know what, why am I doing it like this, is there a better way to do it? More often than not, though, it will be something that readers have requested, or it will be something that’s super popular on the Internet or that people are making all the time that I feel could probably benefit from a little more rigour.
I’ll find a super popular recipe, like beef stew, and my initial development process is to research the history of it. Basically doing a lot of research on the history of the dish, trying to go on Internet forums to find out what problems people have, finding out what people’s favourite recipes are. So it’s just a lot of data collection, and once you’ve seen what people are doing, and once you’ve seen enough recipes, that’s when you can start saying okay, here are the basic problems.
And sometimes the problems are there’s a really finicky step that takes a lot of practice to get right. So in cases like that I’ll be working on some sort of foolproofing. Other times the problem might be that the recipe takes a really, really long time to make, so then figuring out a streamlined way to get similar end results with less time will be a priority for me.
Other times I’ll go the opposite route and say you know what, my only goal is to make this taste the best it can possibly taste. When I’m working on it like that I’ll, to a large degree, ignore efficiency and time period and say you know what, this is going to be a project recipe. This is something that somebody is going to spend an entire Saturday working on, but they’re going to be rewarded with the very best possible beef stew ever.
I like to think of recipe development always as a sort of an engineering problem, where I have a set list of parameters, like saying, right, the recipe has to take less than 30 minutes, the ingredient list can only be this big, and it has to have this level of skill. So I’ll go in with a set of parameters, and then identify what the problems are and then come up with tests to find potential solutions.
And then there’s actually performing all those tests, analysing the results and coming up with new tests. It’s really a sort of scientific slash engineering approach to recipe development.
R: And then finding homes for all those cookies.
K: Yeah, getting rid of leftovers is usually not a problem. I did end up having to throw away a lot of cookies, but it’s usually not a problem.
R: So what was your last kitchen disaster?
K: I was preparing a thousand sandwiches for this event. These were muffuletta sandwiches, a classic New Orleans sandwich made with layered cold cuts and then seasoned with this olive salad. The olive salad is basically chopped olives, capers, parsley, garlic and lots of olive oil.
You can imagine a thousand sandwiches worth of olive salad. I had it divided between these two five gallon buckets, so it was about ten gallons of olive salad, and I dropped one of the buckets in the middle of my kitchen in my apartment. I managed to pick it up fast enough that maybe only a gallon or two spilled out, but basically a gallon of olive oil spilled onto my kitchen floor, which is not fun to clean up. We had to throw out a few rugs and carpets because it leaked out.
R: I want to end by asking about your vegan experiment. What got you interested in going vegan for a month?
K: I’ve always had an interest in food policy and particularly animal rights and the way animals are treated in different food systems. For a long time I was sort of the voice, at least amongst my friends, of eating meat, but keeping meat within certain standards. I’d always tried to explore various aspects of that, including what it feels like to slaughter my own animals, butchering, hunting and all those things. Basically, anything that got me closer to understanding what it meant to eat meat and what it meant to take an animal’s life.
And so veganism was something that was interesting to me because of those aspects. Honestly, the first year that I did it I did it as an exercise, partly as a writing exercise but more as a thought exercise to put myself in situations that I normally wasn’t used to. And it turned out that, after doing it for a month, it actually really significantly changed the way I eat and the way I think about things.
And so actually, my wife and I, outside of work-related projects, so unless I’m testing a recipe for a hamburger or unless I’m reviewing a restaurant that serves meat, we actually stay vegetarian at home. We cook vegetarian. And that’s the result of those vegan experiments, and experiences in veganism.
And so it’s something also that I’ve decided to continue to do every year, just to remind myself of the issues and make myself think harder about them. I can’t say that I’m ready right now to commit 100% to veganism, but honestly I feel like my life would be easier and the world would probably be a better place if there were more people who were committed to veganism. And if I could find the audience to do what I do while maintaining a 100% vegan or vegetarian lifestyle, that would actually be pretty great for me. I think I’m currently not in the place professionally where I can do that.
You know, it is something that I’m going to continue to think about and expand on.
Kenji recommends
- An immersion blender. I use it probably ten times more than my regular blender. I keep it basically mounted above my stove and it’s great for making quick and easy soups in the pot, it’s great if you have a sauce that breaks, it’s great for making mayonnaise. It’s something that I use basically all the time.
- ‘Always question why you’re doing something in the kitchen and never take anything for granted. In the end it will empower you and make you a better cook and lead you to a place where you can improvise more easily in the kitchen, if you know the hows and whys behind why you’re doing what you’re doing.
This post originally appeared on Let Me Ask You a Thing, a series of long form interviews with interesting people.
