No Stupid Questions - Presenting “Smart Girl Dumb Questions”

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Nayeema Raza describes her podcast as “a curiosity party.” In this episode, she asks chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt whether cooking is an art or a science — and whether brunch is a scam.

Hey there, Stephen Dunder. I hope you've been enjoying our weekly replay of the No Stupid Questions archive based on your emails and reviews. Some of you think it's even better the second time around. And if this is your first time, that's good too. Today we've got a bonus episode. I want you to hear a new podcast that I think you'll like. It's called Smart Girl Dumb Questions and it's hosted by Naima Raza.

The episode you're about to hear is a conversation between Naima and one of my favorite people, the scientifically inclined food writer, J. Kenzie Lopez-Alt, who's the author of The Food Lab. We've actually had Kenzie on Freakonomics Radio a couple times over the years. After you listen to this episode with Naima, you might want to check out Freakonomics Radio a couple times over the years. After you listen to this episode with Naima, you might want to check out Freakonomics Radio, episode 226, called Food Plus Science Equals Victory. And now here is Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

Is brunch a scam? Is brunch a scam? No. In order for something to be a scam, there has to be an element of deception. With brunch, you know what to expect. Yeah. Avocado toast. Yeah.

And good chatter. Yeah. And part of the chatter is discussing, is this $17 avocado toast a scam? Exactly. But that's part of the experience of it, right? Smart Girl, Dumb Questions Welcome to Smart Girl, Dumb Questions. I'm Naima Razza, and my guest today, the great brunch defender, is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Kenji is a James Beard Award-winning chef, cookbook author, and what I'd call a recipeologist.

He really came to fame for his very scientific approach to cooking. He used to write a column called The Food Lab and Serious Eats, and The Food Lab is He really came to fame for his very scientific approach to cooking. He used to write a column called The Food Lab and Serious Eats, and The Food Lab is also the title of Kenji's first number one New York Times bestselling book. Now, Kenji is seen as something of an authority when it comes to food. The New York Times had an Ask Kenji column, and if you look in the comment section of various videos, you'll see people say, Kenji says to do this or Kenji says to do that. But as I think you'll see in this interview, Kenji is not one to be some kind of food autocrat.

He's actually much more of an explorer or an experimenter. Even his path to food seems unlikely. He went from playing classical violin to getting into MIT to deciding to become a line cook before he started writing and blogging. These days on his YouTube channel, Kenji cooks up all kinds of yummy experiments for millions of people in his Seattle houseboat kitchen. I had so many dumb questions for Kenji, like, am I a bad Asian if I need a rice cooker, and do eggs actually expire? But I also had deep questions for him, like, why is it so hard to create those food memories from our childhood again? And is cooking an art or a science? Can everyone do it?

Finally, I wanted to ask him about choices because so much of food seems to be about that. How much salt? What do I order? How much do I tip? And if anyone can talk about navigating choices, it's Kenji, who I think is a polymath and someone who's taken unlikely turns in his own life.

Here's my conversation with Kenji Lopez-Alt. Thank you for doing this. I'm excited to be here. I also have a lot of dumb questions for you. Great. I want to start with the talk of the town, which is the price of eggs. Eggs, everybody is talking about eggs these days.

I wonder if anyone in the industry of food is also talking about eggs or if this is a political conversation. Oh, sure. I mean, no, it affects everybody. I recently sort of relaunched, soft relaunched my YouTube channel. And when we were doing that, where I historically, every time I've launched a new project, I've started it with eggs. Okay.

And so I was like, oh, let's just do like every type of egg you can cook, you know, like we'll make like a dozen videos over the course of like two or three months and it'll all be eggs. And so we shot, we scripted and shot all those videos. And then after that, the prices of eggs started to go up. And so now every video people are like, how are you affording the eggs? Like how are you affording eggs in this economy? I have a hot take here.

Okay. I kind of wonder if eggs are grossly underpriced and have been. Oh, sure. I mean, almost all food is grossly underpriced, particularly restaurant food in major cities is grossly underpriced. Eggs in particular, the nutritious value of an egg is like so much higher than a lot more expensive food. And the fact that you can get like a dozen of these things that are really fragile, very

aesthetically pleasing, like to a grocery store. They need like delicate custom designed packaging. They need to be individually inspected and weighed. Like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes into an egg. I mean, you know, a lot of that cost comes down to just economies of scale and also our willingness to exploit animals for our for cheaper prices. Okay, quick lightning round on eggs. Do eggs actually expire?

They do, but very slowly. So I'm gonna give you a long answer and a quick lightning round. If you travel outside the US, you might notice that eggs are stored on the counter, room temperature. So there's a natural sort of waxy cuticle on the egg that protects it from moisture loss

and protects it from moisture loss and protects it from outside contamination. In the US we wash that off with the idea that we're washing off any potential contaminants with it, but that does mean that after we do that they have to be refrigerated. So there's two parts to this question. There's one which is like how long does an egg last without when we don't wash off that cuticle, like if you're getting it from your chicken in the backyard, for example. So in the US, they can be sold up to 30 days

after they're collected, but they can be collected up to 30 days after they're laid. And so there's that period when they still have the waxy cuticle on them, where they can sit. In reality, it doesn't happen that way because nobody's gonna leave 28 days worth of eggs sitting in their chicken coop. And then once you wash that

Off and sort of decontaminate and decontaminate them and put them on the supermarket shelf. That is another 30 days So that's a sell-by day and then that's all about that And then there's that phrase people say like oh it smells like rotten eggs Most people have not really smelled a run. I don't think I've ever really smelled a run neck It's really hard to make an egg go rotten And so I have an egg in my fridge right now that I'm purposely aging. Like I have a dozen eggs that I've had in there now

for since October. You're growing an egg? I'm trying to get them to go rotten. I want to see how long it's going to take these eggs that I bought from the supermarket to actually go rotten enough that they smell like rotten eggs. Okay.

You know, cause it's always weird to me that that's our yardstick for bad smelling things when it's something we smell so rarely. Yeah, as opposed to like bad fish. Well, how long does it, how long has it's always weird to me that that's our yardstick for bad-smelling things when it's something we smell so rarely Yeah, as opposed to like bad fish. How long does it how long has it been in the? Since October so what six six months six months and it doesn't so far I the last one I opened was a month ago, and it didn't smell okay, so we'll we'll see legal disclaimer Don't try this at home, but we could you eat that egg you think uh? Yeah, no I cooked it and ate it. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Six months you cooked it, ate it. I cooked it and ate it, it was fine. Yeah. How long do you think you'll go? Will you go until it rot? Until it rot?

I mean, I want to go until it smells like what I imagine people say, oh, this smells like rot. I want to be able to set a bar for what that yardstick is. Like when someone says, does it smell like rotten eggs? I want to be able to say, I have smelled rotten eggs. And, and yes, this does. Or no, this doesn't, you know, going a little past the expiration date is not going to, I mean, the thing about expiration dates is they're not

really, they're not really expiration dates. They are sort of sell by dates and they're, they're a voluntary thing that companies put on their own products. Um, as an estimation of when a product is going to be sort of at its best freshness. So like they basically don't want you to get to a point where something tastes stale, like a Ritz cracker tastes stale, and you judge it based on its staleness. It's not about food safety.

It's just about sort of what a company thinks is going to be a product is going to be at its optimal quality before it starts to decline. So their incentives for them they don't want you to complain and they also want you to buy more of the product. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The only case where an expiration date is about sort of the nutritional or edibility of it is in baby formula and that's where it's sort of like mandated, government mandated, but for most food products the expiration date is voluntarily put on there and it's estimated by the company producing it. You are somebody who has like, who has built a career around experimentation and recipes.

You come from a family of scientists. My father is a biologist. Your father is a biologist and Your father is a biologist, and your grandfather was an organic chemist. And so you had that kind of science in your DNA, you think? I'm sure, because my dad was a scientist. Like, it just interested me, so I was always

real interested in science growing up and at school. I don't think I have, like, scientific blood. I think it would be unscientific to say that I have scientific blood. But through some combination of nurture and nature, I fell into science. Early in your career at places like Serious Eats, it seemed you were, I mean, you ran a column called the Food Lab.

You seemed like there was a perfectionism to your food, like a kind of getting to a sort of precision. I mean, so there's precision around the testing. I wouldn't say like my day-to-day cooking was very precise. It's like I wanted to know the answers to something so that you can then decide for yourself how much you want to apply that to your daily cooking or to find out, okay, I'm doing this thing that I don't actually need to be doing or there's a faster, easier way to do it.

Certainly in that time, there were a lot of recipes that we called like the best X. So anytime a recipe on Serious Eats in those days said the best X, it meant like this is the type of recipe where we're going to really test every single variable and show you like how it makes a difference. And you know, and I always try to make sure to say at the start of an article say what my definition of best is. So it's like I want my burger to have like a big beefy flavor. I don't want like a lot of other ingredients in there interfering with the flavor of the beef. Like I want it to have like a nice salty crust. I want it to be tender and juicy and have like little pockets of it. So I would explain what I wanted so that people can then

say, okay, I agree. Like that's the destination I want to arrive at. Like I want my chocolate chips to be gooey or not. So they can know what they're getting before they go and make it and then find that. Right, and so chocolate chip cookies is a good example. So if I want my chocolate chip cookies to be soft in the center but have like little crispy, sort of caramelized, lacy edges.

But if you want your cookie to be real soft, if you like it crispy and like toffee like the whole way through, in the article I'm going to show you what variables affect that so that you can read my recipe. If you read the recipe in the article as a whole, then you can say, okay, like if I increase the ratio of white sugar to brown sugar, it's going to make the cookie crisper. Over time, it seems like you have moved away from best, more into play. I'm past the phase where I care so much about like empire expanding.

You know, it's like I don't need to pull all the eyes. I don't need to play the SEO game. Like I don't want to, like I'm pretty comfortable where I am right now. And so I can avoid that kind of language and get the audience that I want. And people like who know the kind of work I do are able to find it. Part of it's also that like, yeah, I have kids now. You know, I've got kids, I have employees, I've got more things going on. And so those days when I was married but not a parent, I could devote 100% of my time to just sitting in the kitchen.

And I was also younger, had more energy, so 100% of my time meant like 7 a.m. till 4 a.m. And you were tinkering all day basically with recipes. Yeah, or I would run out in the middle of the night to get more flour to make more chocolate chip cookies. Were you obsessive about it at that time? Yeah, at that time for sure. Yeah. And now? I am obsessive about delivering recipes that work for people and making sure that anything I put out there is going to work.

But I do also feel these days take a little more balanced approach to, you know, are you putting in 90% more work to make it 5% better? And making sure that if you are going to, you know, are you putting in 90% more work to make it 5% better and making sure that if you are going to, you know that. But also that it's like, it's fine not to do it. Yeah. It's like, it's OK to buy the instant mashed potatoes. For a lot of people, myself included, cooking can feel daunting. Like, and recipes in particular can feel, I think, daunting because you it's like it never turns out the way that I expect it to

turn out. So a recipe to me is like is like turn by turn directions that you're getting from one place to another. And if you just see if you're in a brand new city, a place you've never been before and you just see a set of turn by turn directions, it's like 20 things long, a bunch of I don't know this street. I don't know like you look at it's like, I don't know where that's taking me, but I'm just going to trust it will get me there.

You have to be you have to put a lot of faith in it. You also have to be really good at reading instructions and sort of following along precisely, and you have to have your head buried in it to get from point A to point B. But if you give someone a map and say, OK, like, this is point A, here's point B, and you get a full picture of it, and this is the route you're going to be taking, like, that's a lot easier for you to then grasp your, like, OK, I get it. I'm heading that general direction. If I don't take this one little alley here, I can still go around this way and get to the same place. Or I can get to this place

that's close by that I might like even better. And to me, that's like what understanding sort of technique and science behind cooking is. So I wrote this in my first book that I feel like it's far more important, at least with my work, to read the surrounding material as opposed to just the specific recipe. Because the recipe is like a set of turn-by-turn directions that doesn't give you context. It's like MapQuest, when they used to have MapQuest. Oh, yeah.

And do you remember when you used to get it texted to your phone? Yeah, or you would print them, because I remember going on road trips with my parents and I would print them. I would use this Google service. There was like a Google Maps service. You could text like, take me from here to here on your phone. And then you were limited by the length of SMS messages. And so you would get like a message like 18 out of 24 to get you to here.

And they would always come in the wrong order. So you had to like scan through your messages, like figure out, like piece it together like a puzzle. Sounds very dangerous for driving. Recipes are like MapQuest turn-by-turn directions. Techniques are like looking at the map and getting a sense of where you're going. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson had this thing where he talked about the difference between knowledge and wisdom and insight with me. And it seems kind of similar. Like he would kind of say recipes are like knowledge. Yeah, just the facts now. Technique is like wisdom. And then insight, is there something else that's above technique?

Like craft or? I mean, I would put craft and technique under the same umbrella. I mean, with food, there's an amount of artistry that you can get to, which is intentionally evoking feelings in people that are eating things beyond just like, oh, this tastes good. And making people think about a different point of view. And I think with certain chefs, you get there where they're expressing something of themselves in their food,

either sharing a part of them and their story that people can then understand or challenging the way people think about things, to think about things in a new way. And I feel like, first of all, you have to have a good mind to get yourself out there and a certain vulnerability and openness to put yourself out there. But then you need to make technique and craft work for you.

It's like if you're a musician, like a jazz musician, you could be listening to a chord progression and thinking of amazing melodies or amazing things to do in there. But if you can't translate that into actual vibrations that go out into the air and get into someone's ears. What are you doing? What are you doing, yeah, exactly.

So you need the craft element, like you need to be practiced enough with your craft that you can actualize what's in your head. And it's the same in cooking, it's like I can have this flavor memory or I could say, hey, I wanna make this taste X, like a certain way that's going to evoke a certain feeling in people, but if I don to make this taste X, like a certain way that's going to evoke a certain feeling in people.

But if I don't know how to actually physically make that come to reality. Yeah. I want to talk to you about food memories in a second, but I do. So to use your analogy, it seems like there's like turn by turn directions, there's maps, and then there's like urban design, which is this artistry or some kind of creation of the world around you actually. Yeah, world creation or yeah. Does anyone just suck at navigation? Like are there just people creation or, yeah. Does anyone just suck at navigation?

Like, are there just people like, you know, people who just suck at navigation? Are there people who are just gonna suck at cooking regardless of how hard they try? I don't think regardless of how hard you try. You know, I think everybody has certain, certain innate, the way their mind works, or the way their bodies physically work

and their minds connect with their body is different. And that's going to change the way you approach cooking. But there's different styles of cooking, right? There's cooking in a restaurant, which is very much about sort of structure and making sure that the food is exactly the same every time. But then there's home cooking, which is real different from that.

And you can cook the same dish different ways every time. You can try and make it taste just like your grandmother's. That's great, but you could also experiment and realize that the onion that I'm using today is not going to be the same as the onion I buy from the farmer's market in two weeks from now. And so the food's going to taste a little different. And when you work at smaller scales, those differences,

those subtle differences in flavor that come through sort of technique and ingredients are going to be bigger than when you're producing it in a large scale. So no, I don't think there's anybody that can't cook. There might be people that just aren't interested in cooking and don't want to put in the time and that's fine, right? The thing, like Pakistan, where I grew up, there's a, women there use this thing called indazase.

We say indazase, in Urdu it means your judgment. So there's no recipes really. Like it's very frustrating, because I will try to learn from my mother something. And I'll say, well, how much? Like I'm making dal at home. And I'm like, how much of this to use? And my mom's like, oh, just in-da-za-se,

which is so unhelpful. It's like from your own gut, from your own instinct. And it's a way that like, I felt like people hoard their recipes. You know, it's like like your aunt will be like, I can't tell you how to make, you just have to come over to have my kebabs, you know? And so-

Or guarantee time with their nieces and nephews. Yeah, but also I think there isn't, it's like that artistry. There's something about that tradition of home cooking and a family friend of ours, Asma Khan, made a whole restaurant, Darjeeling Express in London, which is around us, like women that have never cooked at restaurants.

She was like, why do all these women cook at home? But when you go to subcontinental restaurants, it's all men. But they go home and their wives cook for them. So clearly, and so her whole restaurant is run by kind of at-home chefs. And I think the food tastes really different. I don't know, it just feels more at home.

It feels more at home. Yeah, food that's heavily spice-based in particular, that feel of balancing spices is really important. You know, if there's these new spice companies that are dedicated to bringing you the freshest, most flavorful spices, right? And it's like, okay, so if this spice company's cumin has a much more intense flavor,

and I'm using it like teaspoon for teaspoon or ounce for ounce with the cumin that I've been buying from the supermarket, like of course the dishes are gonna taste different, right? And so like is the amount I'm using here the right amount or is that amount the right amount? No, the right amount is like what tastes good to you or what tastes good to you. You're doing it with intentionality. And it's like my, you know, like my mother, she moved out of an apartment that, the apartment that I was not born in but moved to when I was four years old.

So it was an apartment in New York. She lived there for 40 years. She recently moved out of it and with her came a can of McCormick cinnamon that was 40 that she had moved there with from Cambridge. What was the sell-by date on that? Oh, I don't know, but it was like a 40 year old plus can of cinnamon that doesn't smell like anything in this, right? Like, you'd have to use like two cups of that if you want to get the same cinnamon flavor that you get out of like a quarter teaspoon of something else. So spices like anything that... The potency.

The potency, the way it's grown, the environment that it's grown in, like all those things really affect the flavor of it. And so one of the things that you learn with experience from cooking is what are the parts that are essential, like a mechanically essential part of the recipe? What is the bit, like the engine that's making this run? And what are the bits that are your choice, like the tint or the finish on the seed? And it's like very rarely are the spices the things that make the engine run. You know, it's like... Right. Those are the tint. The things that make it run are like what...

The ratio of eggs to flour, the temperature that you're frying at. Like those are the things... The type of thing you're cooking it in. The vessel you're cooking it in can often be... Yeah. And the way you cook it. It'll vary from recipe to recipe. But it's like, yeah, it's like getting, generally getting the ratio of the sort of, you know, the active ingredients is more important than just the flavorings.

Has there been a food memory that you had that you were unable to recreate in a recipe? Or do you sometimes start recipes with that? Yeah. We grew up on 125th and Riverside, which was a beef neighborhood. Like there was a bunch of meat packing plants around there. And so there was a lot of beef around him. And you you know, so like my mom would buy me, there was, if you stopped at the stoplight there at 125th and Broadway, um, a guy would come by with a, a cooler that he had probably stolen meat from the back of a warehouse, um, and would sell you meat

out your window while you're stopped at the stoplight, you know? So we always had a lot of ground meat at home, uh, which she used for everything. Um, and she was a very frugal cook. And so she would make, her dumpling filling was ground meat and then whatever frozen vegetables she had. So often it was, sometimes there might be fresh cabbage, but often it was like frozen spinach. It would be like the end of a carrot that she, that she would grate and mix in there. So it was a bunch of like, and it was slightly different every time for me,

like, yeah, replicating that flavor is like really impossible because it wasn't it wasn't um it wasn't a fixed recipe. My other favorite food growing up was Mapo tofu. Mapo tofu is typically a dish that combines um beef and tofu it's a Sichuan dish but she made uh her version of of the Japanese version of Mapo tofu. Mapo tofu was brought to Japan in the 70s by... From China? From China, yeah, by a Japanese Sichuan chef. If you watch Iron Chef, Chen Kenichi, his father is the guy who brought Sichuan cuisine to Japan. And once it came to Japan,

it got adapted to suit Japanese tastes, which don't run so spicy, a lot less garlic. They tend to be sort of sweeter and milder. So Japanese mapo tofu is a lot sweeter, milder than Sichuan mapo tofu. And my mom, my mom's mapo tofu is a further depart from that because she would make it out of this like dumpling filling that she also used to make her like Italian meat sauce.

She is such an efficient cook. She's like, your mom could have done blue apron. She's like, use every last piece of it. So have you been able to recreate the Mapu tofu or no? In my book, The Walk, there is a sort of recreation of it. But again, it's never going to taste quite the same because mine doesn't have those random bits of freezer stuff. I think about this a lot.

There's something so different to when I go see a play versus a TV series or a movie. A play is never the same twice. Every production, something happens that's different. And are recipes like that? Or is food like that? They'll never be the same twice? Yeah, I mean, because even if a fast food restaurant, McDonald's, does its best to make sure that every hamburger, no matter where you get it, is going to be identical.

And that would be sort of the closest I'd say to coming. That's like the blockbuster movie. It's like a certain quality level, something that most people will find. Yeah, this is delicious, even though I know it's not like a work of art, but it's predictable, like a Marvel movie. And people know what they're going to get when they go there. And so that's the closest you get. But even then it's like, you're going to be in a different headspace, you're in a different mood. My kids, what we always say at the dinner table, aside from don't yuck someone's yum,

is that if you don't like something right now, don't think or say that you don't like it. Just say, I don't like this right now. You don't know who you're going to be in three years. What we perceive as flavor is something that we make up in our heads, right? Your tongue takes in certain sensory data, your nose and soft palate take in certain olfactory sensory data, but then that data also gets combined with the sound of the food, the way the food looks,

our mood and all of that gets jumbled into this, through this matrix in our brain that then comes out and says, this is the pleasure you're feeling. This is the experience of eating this right now. I worry about like we're losing our food memory because we're taking all these pictures of food. Like when you go into concerts, you see people like you're watching the concert through somebody's phone and when you go into restaurants, it's like people take, I don't know, there's like

a lack of presence in some way because you're taking pictures. Do you worry about that? I try to recognize that there's definitely like a certain like old man yelling at clouds element to this that just because like I experienced food in a certain way growing up, that doesn't mean that like the way my daughter is going to experience things is less valid like through the lens of a new technology. It also changes the thing that's being observed, the act of observing, which is like plating

has become such a thing in culture. Or maybe it's always been, but is plating, like is this food performance? Is this like cosplay with carrots? Is this really an art when it's plating? No, I mean, I think plating was always important because we do eat with our eyes. No, I was at restaurants plating food in a fancy way

before I ever even had a cell phone. And yeah, you go back and look at food from the 80s and it's still plated really nicely. Yeah. So not cosplay. Even historically, even pre-photography days, food was presented nicely. They shove the apple in the pig's mouth. While we're here, can we do a quick lightning round on restaurants? Sure.

Okay. What are the days not to order fish? There's no days not to order fish. Just don't order fish at a restaurant that doesn't have big turnover. Yeah, that whole idea that I think it was from Kitchen Confidential. He was talking about one, you know, a particular subset of restaurants in a particular city that got their fish deliveries on X, Y, and Z days. But especially these days, like deliveries come daily, year round.

Uh, fish get flown in, fish get trucked. It's like, it's, there's no day not to order fish. What is the worst food to order on a date? It depends where you want the date to go afterwards. But for me, it's like anything that's gonna, like, lower your energy. Like, uh, make you feel lethargic afterwards. So I try to eat light on dates. And if you're gonna eat something that smells bad,

make sure your date also eats the same thing. So you can be equally bad smelling. Speaking of dates, is not being an asshole to the waiter a good test of a person, you think? Or can assholes be nice to waiters too? There are a lot of surreptitious assholes in the world, right? People who reveal themselves to be assholes. But it's safe to say that if someone is an asshole

to the servers, or not even an asshole, if someone sees the servers as servants, that's probably a good indication that they're not a good person. What about the people that are overly nice? Overly nice in a patronizing way? Yeah. Have you ever experienced that? Like an exampleizing way?

The best thing you can do is treat a server like what they are, which is like a human doing a job. If they look like they're in the mood to sit and chat with you, sit and chat with them. If they look like they need to get to that other table or the restaurant's real busy, then don't take up all their time. When is it acceptable to request a substitution? That's always acceptable to request. If you want to.

I mean, you could make an unreasonable request and they could deny it. I always ask for hot sauce everywhere I go, or spicy something, like extra chilies, whatever variation. And there are certain places that like they don't carry, they're like, we do not carry any kind of spice. And you'll be like, but there's fresh bird's eye chili here, can you bring me more?

And they're like, no. So that's, yeah, if it's something that you're gonna have to ask someone in the kitchen to change their flow of operations for, like they have to go get a cutting board, cut it out, chop some chilies, and put it in a thing for you, unless the restaurant's real slow. That's the kind of thing that can throw off a whole kitchen.

Wow. I've just learned I'm an asshole. It's not an asshole to ask for it though. If you insist on it and say, I'm going to write this in my Yelp review, then you're an asshole. How much did you tip? I tip a minimum of 20%. I know tipping is a real controversial subject.

This is also one of those things that I feel like will have to be legislated away if we ever want to get rid of it because as much as people like to say, oh, just like pay your staff a fair wage and we'll pay the prices, it's not true. You know, like some chefs that have some status can do that, right? And say, hey, like they have a strong... Yeah, Danny Meyer. Yeah, he can do that and know that his restaurants are still going to be packed. But you can't expect like the mom and pop that's just opening, trying to make a name

for itself and everybody there is living paycheck to paycheck and hoping for customers to come in like to take that kind of risk. The harder thing about tips these days is that is times that you're now asked to tip when you weren't historically were not. And sometimes you're even asked to tip on already what was traditionally untipped labor. Yeah. Like the apps, right? It's the apps.

It's like the default. And then the default being like 20, 25, 30. Those are the times where it's like, are you expecting me to tip? But now it's like, I just bought a Coke at the convenience store. Yeah. How do you expect it to tip on this thing that I went and got out of the fridge case by myself? Oh, I'm just waiting for like that, like the vending machine at the airport to like ask me for the tip.

Well, I guess, I mean, now we've reached like peak simulation at that point. Why are the portions so big in America versus elsewhere? Is that just? I'm not a sociologist or, you know, I would guess it has something to do with this American promise of prosperity and abundance. And people want to feel that when they come

and they want to have that represented on the plate. I mean, food costs are the lowest part of a restaurant's budget. Food costs, generally in a restaurant, is around 25, 28% of the price that you pay. So if you're paying $10 for a hamburger, generally $2.80 goes to the actual cost of ingredients. So adding an extra patty to your burger,

making it twice as big as a person next door for another 70 cents seems like a much bigger value to the customer than the cost to the restaurant. So increasing the portion sizes is a cheap way to increase revenue. The thing you just said about food is grossly underpriced at restaurants, that's something that just like blows people's minds because people think it's so expensive. Why really is food underpriced in restaurants?

It's because it has to capture real estate and labor and all those costs? Real estate and labor, yeah. So people, like people, when they look at the cost of a hamburger, they're thinking, okay, I can make a hamburger at home for four bucks. Or like McDonald's can make a hamburger for five bucks. Like, why am I paying $16 for this?

And it's because you're not paying for the ingredients. You're paying for the salary of the people who are making it. You're paying for the, all the overhead, the rent and the utilities. You're paying for the salary of the people who are making it. You're paying for all the overhead, the rent and the utilities. You're paying for the whole experience and not just the food. So like, I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle

and both of these are cities where cost of living has gone up massively in the last 10 years. But the cost of a hamburger hasn't gone up to match that. One of the things I love about you is like you're an antidote to our consumers culture. I trust you to like tell us the shit we need and don't need. And I like that in your house you live in a houseboat. Not for much longer. It was a rented place and they are putting the boat on the market.

So we're moving out. It was a fun experiment for a year. Yeah, but you have like a normal size, like for a person living in a New York apartment, you have a kitchen that I can relate to. It was a normal size, yeah. Versus like I've been inside Martha Stewart's kitchen and I cannot relate to her.

She has like a pot that's the size of me. I like picked up the thing. Yes, I've been in her kitchen. Yeah, you know. So here, I wanna know what I actually need. Fuck, marry, kill. Air fryer, stove, oven. Kill air fryers. Okay.

Kill air fryers. Marry the stovetop. Yeah. Fuck the oven. No, other way around. Marry the oven, fuck the stovetop. Really? I would marry the stovetop. How are you going to make noodles and stuff? Yeah, it's hard, but also having kids,

like having kids and like, it makes... Having kids and, like, more hands-off stuff. I would say I use the stovetop more, but ultimately I rely on the oven for certain situations. Yeah, because you don't have to be at it the whole time. That's a real tough one. Okay. It's okay, you can be polyamorous. What about a rice cooker? I always fuck up rice,

which I think makes me a really bad Asian. Right, me too. It's always gooey. You don't get rice cooker? I always fuck up rice, which I think makes me a really bad Asian. Right. Me too. Like, it's always gooey. You don't get rice right? Over the years I've gotten better, but the rice cooker makes much better rice than I can make. Yeah. And rice cookers, I mean, they're cheap and if you use them a lot, they're like a real, you know, you can get a $25 rice cooker that works great. You don't need a rice cooker, but if you're from a culture that eats a lot of rice, or you love rice, like my kids love rice. I love rice.

It's really easy to just have a rice cooker. I know now what type of rice I have, the ratio of water. I can measure it out with a juice glass. And that's like a 30-second task that I just push a button, and part of my meal is taken care of for me. Does it matter what knife I use for what? I use a chef's knife or a Chinese cleaver, depending on my mood, for virtually everything. Sometimes a Japanese santoku knife.

But my choice in that is not about functionality. It's just like, what am I in the mood for? Because I'm like a knife nerd and I collect knives. But functionally, you need one chef's knife, maybe a bread knife if you cut a lot of bread with a hard crust. Maybe a paring knife if you like doing fine, intricate work and you find the chef's knife, maybe a bread knife if you cut a lot of bread with a hard crust. Maybe a paring knife if you like doing fine, intricate work and you find a chef's knife to be too involved for that. But when I worked in restaurants, like 90% of what I did was chef's knife.

So the best knife is the one that you feel comfortable using. So if you buy yourself a knife that's too expensive, it feels like an art piece and you're never going to, you're worried about dinging it or never going to use it, then the knife is useless. You want the knife. But like that 18 knife set. That 18, you don't need an 18 knife set, no. You just need one good knife that feels comfortable

in your hand that you can see yourself using day after day. All right, sorry, Caffeelon or whoever. If it's only one pan. Everyone makes knife sets. Everyone makes them. If one, only one pan, are you gonna say the wok because you have a wok on the wok? It really depends what you cook. It really depends what you cook. It really depends what you cook.

For me, it would be the wok. But, you know, my other favorite pan would be like a deep, either saute pan or braiser. So, something that has a wide bottom surface area for like searing a lot of meat, but can also double as something you can braise in. But you could also like fry an egg in it or whatever. That's a real versatile pan,

like something that's like a few inches high, real wide and nice and heavy. Are the following things scams like licorice cookware? No. I mean, licorice makes really fantastic. I'm saying it wrong. That's okay. Yeah. Licorice cookware, they make really fantastic things.

They also have really good warranties. You buy it once, you pay a lot of money, but then you're guaranteed to have this pot for life. And you know, and they're, yeah, they're really well made. They're beautiful. They're fancy. They're the Dutch oven thing. What you're talking about.

Dutch ovens. Yeah. Yeah. Is brunch a scam? Is brunch a scam? No. I don't think anything's a scam. I love brunch because I don't think anything's a scam if you enjoy it.

Brunch is about hanging out with your friends, I think. I love brunch food. Anything that you can add eggs to, I enjoy. No, again, I think you might feel like, okay, am I just overpaying for pancakes and waffles that I can make real cheap at home? Yes, but the point of brunch is not necessarily just food. Brunch is a thing.

I'm gonna go, I'm gonna wait on the line with some friends, we're gonna hang out. There's gonna be other people also waiting on this line and it's gonna be fun, we're gonna chill and we're gonna have Bloody Marys or version Bloody Marys and it's gonna be an experience. You opt in for the brunch experience. Yeah, yeah, you have to align on it.

Like there are people who love having, I don't like brunch. I find it like it's like a weird time of day, I'm not a bruncher. But you know, I feel like in order for something to be a scam, there has to be an element of deception to it. Like you have to not be getting what you're expecting to get. That's true. And with brunch, you know what to expect. scam, there has to be an element of deception to it. Like you have to not be getting what you're expecting to get. And with brunch, you know what to expect.

Yeah, avocado toast. And good chatter. Yeah. And part of the chatter is discussing, is this $17 avocado toast a scam? Exactly. But that's part of the experience of it, right? That's brunch. You grew up in this extended communal household a bit.

I think your grandparents lived above you. Lived a floor below us, yeah. A floor below you. One of the things I loved about your book, above you. Lived a floor below us, yeah. A floor below you. Uh-huh. One of the things I loved about your book, Every Night is Pizza Night, the kids' book, which I have bought for my godkids, is like growing up, I used to be really kind of embarrassed about some of the food I had, especially when I moved to America from Asia. I'd be like, oh, my mom would make me these burgers that were kebabs, and they would smell a certain way.

And I always feel like the girl with the smelly lunch food. Right, right. I don't know if that is a memory that other people had. Is it? Oh, I know lots of people have had that memory. It wasn't one that I necessarily grew up because my mom really bought into American food culture when she moved. She moved here when she was a late teenager,

but then when she started cooking for her kids, it was, a lot of it was Japanese food, but it was also like Italian American know, Italian American meat salad. Like she made New York Times recipes and Betty Crocker recipes. And so we had a mix of food at home growing up. No, for me, the cultural element was more, it was, you know, kind of like this third culture thing where I didn't, when I went to Japanese school every Saturday as a kid and like, I got relentlessly made fun of by the kids there because I wasn't fully Japanese. But then I also did feel Japanese as I grew up like

Japanese was my first language and like my grandmother didn't speak any English and I saw her every single day. But then when I went to an American school, not American enough, not Japanese enough. And so for a long time I kind of like denied my Japanese-ness because it's like, okay, well, I guess I clearly don't fit in with the Japanese culture because they're not letting me fit in. But it took a long time before I was like, no, you know what, I am Japanese. Just reclaim it. It's like, no, I'm Japanese.

I'm not gonna let someone else tell me what I feel like or the way I grew up. And I get that reaction online sometimes. People will say, oh, you made this Japanese recipe and it's so untraditional. It's like, well, I learned it from my grandmother who learned who started making it this way when she lived in the US And so yeah, like maybe it's non traditional to your experience but it's like a hundred percent authentic to my experience and

And I think that's like a perfectly valid way to cook so I was fascinated by your upbringing of growing up kind of with this extended family because it seems to me such a difference from current modern life, especially modern American urban life. Oh yeah, I mean I live with my two kids who split time with me and their mom and my mom lives on the East Coast. My mom lives in New York, my dad lives in Boston, I have two sisters in the Rockies. So yeah, I don't have that extended family. But you know, you build it, you find friends and a support network.

You go to brunch on Sundays with the same crew and talk about the avocado toast. I don't do brunch because I think it's a scam. See? You do. I knew you would think it was a scam. Do you actually not do brunch? No, I don't do brunch because I just don't like lines. But some people don't mind them. I used to live across from Plow in San Francisco. My boyfriend would always wake up and go to Plow,

put our name in, and I was like, I'll go, because there's no line, and it was so good. Plow's great, the potatoes. Oh wow, Plow is a Kenji approved potato? Oh yeah, so Plow, they boil their potatoes, and then slightly smash them, and then they have time in them, and then afterwards they deep fry them. I'm having a total food memory right now.

They're almost mashed potato-y, creamy inside, but really crispy on the outside, and like, have all these nice craggy edges, and they catch like the salt in the time. They're really good potatoes. They're beautiful. They're beautiful. How do you think our culture of living alone and loneliness affects our food?

Well, you know, when I wrote the food lab, my first book, what I found is that a lot of the audience that my books appeal to are people who grew up in sort of the same era as me where maybe they had two working parents and so they didn't grow up cooking and they grew up like taking food out or eating a mix of many different foods. I wouldn't say that loneliness or living without without an extended family... Or a family at all.

Or a family at all necessarily leads to a lack of a food culture. I think it just leads to a different kind of food culture and you find your people in a different place. You know, over the years I've connected more with accepting like, okay, what my mother was doing is what my mother was doing. And my food experiences are also, it's like, okay, my dad was really was doing is what my mother was doing. And like, and you know, my food experiences are also it's like, okay, like my dad was really into Chinese food and Mexican food in New York, and like we would go to Chinatown every weekend. So that's part of my food culture. You don't necessarily have to grow up or live in a extended family

or in a strong, or with a family at all to be able to experience food and share it with other people. But it's definitely like changed, like I just, like it's like instead of family style cuisine, we're having a single sweet grain salad. Yeah, that's true. And you can order and get the exact right quantity of ingredients for one serving of a dish these days,

which is not something you used to be able to do. Which is kind of wild. Yeah, I mean, in that sense, it does sort of change the way people approach cooking, because you don't have to be as adaptive. You don't have to think about, okay, what am I going to do with these leftovers? So I think of your life as like a kind of study in choices, as I was reading about you and prepping for this interview.

Like, you made a choice. You loved violin. Yeah. And you thought about pursuing music, but you got into MIT. Yes. You could pursue architecture, and you decided to pursue food. Right. Yes. How do you make choices? It is always blindly based on what appeals to me most. It's like I'm very lucky in that I feel like I have a good,

you know, I grew up with a pretty good safety net. It's like, you know, we didn't grow up rich or anything, but it was like I knew, okay, like if this fails, I can move in with my mom. It's not, you know, I can take some risks here. And so I always had this idea like, okay, I know that when I'm passionate about something, when I'm really into something, I'm going to put my best work forward.

All I have to do is like find things I'm passionate about and do them. And then, you know, I'll be putting my best work out there and hopefully it'll get discovered. And that is really sort of what happens. Like I put what I think is the best work out there and what I think what I'm most passionate about. And luckily, that has happened to be what a lot of people want to read. Like the food lab is just like, I wrote a book thinking, I started a column thinking, okay, what would me as a young cook have wanted?

And I thought, okay, I'm going to write this book for someone who grew up like me and for someone who was cooking like me. And it just happened that there were a lot of people who were in that same boat. Finding the career has been a combination of making those passionate choices about things I'm really invested in, and then a lot of luck, both in my own personal happenstance and also in my upbringing and things I was born into and also the context of other people finding it. How does choosing something make you love the other thing differently?

I've heard you say that you love playing violin more than you love cooking. You get more enjoyment out of it. Is that like loving your ex more than your spouse kind of thing? No, because I'm not in that kind of committed relationship. Like food and music are not people. I don't think so. I think, you know, I love playing music. My favorite thing in the world is to find a group of, you know, like three to four people

and play music, whether it's, you know, classical music or rock music or whatever. That's like my happy space, is like playing music with other people. I don't know that I would feel that way if it was my job and if I did it all the time. And I see that kind of burnout in all fields. With food, it's not necessarily the cooking itself that I find pleasure in. It's like I don't often sit at home and when I'm all by myself cook something

and take pleasure just in that pure act of cooking. I take pleasure in the exploration of technique and in the distribution of that exploration, like the writing I love and the sharing and the teaching I love, and the feeding of other people, the hospitality element of it. I love all that.

Yeah, if I'd gone into music, I would probably find the joy in music to then be the exploration and the sharing of it as opposed to just the, for me right now, it's just the technical, like the sitting down and playing with friends and the connection you get from playing with other people. Have you ever made a bad choice, like a bad food choice? Have you ever eaten something and regretted it emotionally instantly?

I've certainly made things that didn't taste good. Yeah. I don't know that I've made something that I regret in emotion, but I've never made anything that I regret, because I always feel like... Or eaten anything that you regret emotionally. You know when you eat like a Domino's pizza at 4 a.m. and you regret it emotionally? You don't have that?

I have eaten Domino's pizzas at 4 a.m. by choice. I don't generally regret it though. Oh, wow. You're a stronger person than me. Okay. No, wow. You're a stronger person than me. Okay. No, sometimes I do. It's not the thing I ate, but the quantity. Sometimes I'm like, I didn't need to eat that third taco that was the same as the first two tacos, but it would taste really good.

And I'll just make up for it tomorrow. Okay. Last question we ask every guest on this show is, like, you're very wise, I think, from those choices you made, from everything you've told me. It's all luck. No, yeah, but you're very wise. What are you dumb about? What do you not know about? What's a question that we could go answer for you?

How to organize your life and how to get things done. How to get things done. How to get things done, yeah. It's like, I feel like I'm just, like, flying blind all the time. Like, there are people who it feels like no matter how much you put on their plate they seem to know what the next thing they have to do is you know and that type of organization is just like It's like it feels like someone's like you know like playing a whole orchestra by themselves to me right I just don't know how to do that because I get caught in these like little

Rabbit holes that I like to explore, but then I'm like oh shit like I was already looking at that one that rabbit hole over there Oh and this one over here and it's like just like yeah, how do I don't organize your life how to organize life? Okay, real bad question. Who do you think could answer that? Oh, I don't know Marie Kondo I was like I'm gonna ask Marie Kondo. She's gonna be like we'll have fewer ingredients and definitely throughout the 40 year old cinnamon Thank you so much Kenji for doing this. I really appreciate it. Oh, thanks for having this fun. So I totally knew brunch was a scam, or I guess scam is the wrong word, but a conspiracy. And if all the people who are looking into the We Didn't Land in the Moon conspiracy could finally turn their attention to the brunch conspiracy.

I would really appreciate that and so would so many people's Sunday afternoons. Now conspiracies aside, I just love talking to Kenji. I really appreciated hearing about the evolution of his career, the kind of obsession and 20-hour days that he spent in his 20s and 30s perfecting recipes, and how all of that kind of changed when he had a family of his own to feed, and how he's taken this kind of more hands-off approach. For many people like me, cooking is going to be a science, a recipe I follow from start to finish. For people like my mom, it's much more technique that she kind of follows by instinct.

And then for Kenji, a select few, it's this artistry. And I loved hearing him talk about how food can evoke feelings, and it was actually humbling to know that even he cannot recreate his mom's mapo tofu. Although I'm sure his is really yummy. In fact, you can find the recipe for it in the wok. And maybe this makes me an old man yelling at clouds, but I do kind of worry about how many pictures we take of food and how perfectly our kind of single-size orders arrive to our lonely homes nowadays.

I do think that all of this kind of disintermediates future food memories. Unless you're like Kenji and just secretly cooking up rotten egg experiments in your kitchen and making new food memories every day. So that's just something to think about in terms of our food culture and our broader culture. If you want to spend more time with Kenji, and I certainly do, you should check out his YouTube channel, JKenji Lopez Alt. You can also grab his cookbooks, The Walk or The Food Lab, or my personal favorite, Every Night is Pizza Night, which is a kid's book, but it's for adults too. And you can

check out his podcast called The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. That's it for this week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions. You can find us next week for an all new episode. This episode was produced with Sickbird Productions, Diana da Costa, Healy Cruz, and Kesagnew, with additional editorial support from Holly Thiel, Dana Balut, and Claire Lichtenstein. Our theme music is by David Kahn, and I'm your host, Naima Raza.

If you like this show, please hit follow or subscribe, and tell 10 of your friends about it. If you have dumb questions, tell me about it. Leave them in the comments or email me, naimaraza101 at gmail.com. See you next week on, tell me about it. Leave them in the comments or email me, naeemaraza101 at gmail.com. See you next week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions.