Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can't think of anyone better to talk to about the intersection of these fields than Kenji López-Alt: professional chef and restauranteur, MIT graduate, and author of The Food Lab. We discuss how modern scientific ideas can improve your cooking, and more importantly, how to bring a scientific approach to cooking anything at all. Then we also get into the cultural and personal resonance of food, and offer a few practical tips. Support Mindscape on Patreon. James Kenji López-Alt received a bachelor's degree in architecture from MIT. After working at several restaurants, he began writing the Food Lab column for Serious Eats, where he is now Chief Culinary Consultant. His first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking through Science, won the 2016 James Beard Award for General Cooking and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook of the Year Award. He is co-owner of Wursthall Restaurant and Bierhaus in San Mateo, California. Web site Food Lab column Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter YouTube Storing stew/chili overnight probably doesn't make it taste better

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I understand that people have been doing a lot of cooking recently, more cooking than usual. Sourdough bread seems to be the thing that people have cottoned onto as an interesting thing to tackle. I have no idea why that thing in particular. I mean, good for you, if you're making bread out there. It's not my thing, but the idea of creating something in the kitchen is kind of my thing. I'm not especially good at it, but it appeals to me as both sort of creative and scientific. at the same time. And in that vein, we have a great guest today in Kenji Lopez-Alt, who is both a wonderful chef and food writer, and also someone very scientifically inclined. He's a very mindscape kind of chef. Kenji got a degree from MIT. He's been writing for a long time for the Serious Eats Food Blog, where he has a column called The Food Lab, and he's actually turned the food lab into a wonderful, wonderful book that not only tells you recipes to make things, but explains why they work. Like literally, for decades now, I've been wanting a book like this that didn't just give me

recipes, but went through the science, said like, okay, you want to soak beans? Well, how long should we soak them? What happens if you soak them for an hour, for 24 hours, with salt, without salt, let's do the experiment and learn it. It's a really wonderfully written and very informative book. So it was wonderful to get the chance to talk to Kenji about some of the big questions about cooking and eating and taste and flavor. So we talk about the science of cooking, you know, the famous Mayard reaction that gives you the wonderful grilled flavor, how different ingredients and flavors go together, and also things like how different people and cultures tend to enjoy different foods. I ask whether there's a grand unified theory of cooking. I'm not sure if that's

going to be a realistic thing to shoot for, but that's the kind of question that we talk about here. So this is both a practical episode. You might learn something about cooking, but it's also intellectually stimulating because you learn the why. Why is it that food works certain ways and not other ways? Why is it that certain cooking techniques work? As I say in the episode, it's both cooking with science and also cooking as science. So let's go. Kenti Lopez-Al, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. So I'm a I'm a big fan of the book that you wrote called Food Lab, Better Home Cooking Through Science. An honest recommendation here, you know, I feel in my heart that a cookbook, just like any other book, should be one that you can read like a book, that you can take to bed and leave through, not just a collection of recipes, and you certainly reach that standard, yes.

Oh, thanks. But I want to, but I want to offer open with a softball question here. Your subtitle is better home cooking through science. I'm sure there are some people, probably not Mindscape listeners, but some people out there who will feel a little uncomfortable at that phraseology. Like, shouldn't science be kept separate? Isn't cooking an expression of the heart and the passion and the taste? And isn't science something cold and unfeeling? Well, I don't think the two are, I mean, I think the two are orthogonal.

You can have something that is high science and high heart without the two competing. I don't think it's a dichotomy, really. And so in some sense that, you know, that title is obviously a little bit ironic. You know, it's, it's meant to sound, you know, it calls back like, you know, better living through science. It's a reference to older ad slogans. So first of all, I don't think that science and heart, as you put it, are two, you know, they're not a dichotomy. It's not a scale where if you lose, if you get more of one, you lose the other, you can have high science and high heart, high emotion, you know.

And in fact, I think they actually help each other. You know, the whole point of science is to give us sort of an understanding of how things work through a certain process. You know, science is a process. It's a process of examining the world around us and getting a better understanding of how it works. And I think the better you understand how food and cooking works, you know, or how, it's sort of like how, if you're trying to paint a picture, you know, if you're an artist, you're trying to paint a picture,

the better your understanding of color and how color mixes or the technical aspects of the medium you're working in, the better you understand that, the more easily you are able to express what is in your head. You know, so, for instance, like, I'm trying to teach my daughter how to play an instrument right now, or even better. So, like, I grew up playing violin, right? And ever since I was a little kid.

And so with violin, I'm at this point where it's like, I hear something in my head, it translates directly to my fingers. Like, I can play that. I can play what I hear. Whereas with guitar, I've only been playing it for since I was a teenager. So I don't have that kind of instinctual understanding of it. Yeah. So when I, when I'm playing guitar, it's like I hear something in my head and then I have to really think about,

right, now how do I translate that into motions in my fingers to get that sound to come out? And so there's a level of, there's a level of differentiation between my brain and what my body does. And, and, you know, if I was a completely beginner musician, and I was a completely beginner musician, and I had never played an instrument at all in my life, then that level, that distance would be even bigger. So it would be even more difficult for me to put into physical expression what I hear in my head. So that's, I think, the difference between science and art

or science and heart is that, like, the art and the heart are what we feel and what we think inside. And then the science and the technique are what allows us to then express that in the real world. So, you know, my goal with the food lab is not to be sort of super prescriptivist about recipes and, like, you have to do it this way, this is the way to make a hamburger, this is the way to roast your potatoes, whatever. It's really to sort of show you, this is the science behind it, and this is how you get from point A to point B, but you know, you're not restricted to,

you're not restricted to point A and point B. You can go wherever you want once you sort of understand the science around it, and you can, you're then able to think about what you want to do and what sort of expression you want to make yourself, and you have the tools to then bring that into fruition. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree. more. And I think that the important point here, which a book like yours helps people understand, is that science is a process, as you said. And I think that there's probably a lot of people out there who maybe think of it as a set of facts, right? A set of unmoving truths that are handed down by scientists. But it's really not like that at all. It's a lived experience, much like

cooking is. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite. I mean, it's quite the opposite. You know, science, at the core of science is that, you know, that what we think are facts are only facts, until contrary evidence shows that they aren't. You know, like the whole point of science is to question facts and to not accept that what someone told you isn't true unless it can be proven to be true. So, you know, so doubting facts is at the very core of what science is. Right.

And I think that there's a good room, there's room for a sequel to the book that would be better home cooking through philosophy. Because I really like the way that, you know, you open the book by saying, well, what is cooking anyway? That's a very mindscape thing to ask, right? So why don't you tell the audience here your answer to that? I mean, that's where we should start, right?

What do you mean by this cooking thing? Well, so there's a sort of technical definition of cooking. You know, cooking is applying heat and sort of triggering a series of chemical reactions in your food and physical reactions in your food in raw ingredients and transforming them into something else. That's what the basics of cooking are. But then, of course, there's a whole other side of cooking. You know, cooking is also history. also culture. It's also, you know, personal connections between you and your family. It's

an expression of yourself. It can be art. It doesn't have to be art, but it can be art. So, you know, there's many different aspects of cooking, but, you know, from a very technical definition, cooking is applying heat and chemical reactions to raw ingredients to transform them into something that is more desirable to eat. That's what cooking is. How much of a cheat is it that you say heat and the chemical reactions? Those sound like two quite different things. Well, you know, well, heat, can trigger chemical reaction. It's basically to just cover my basis because there are there are sort of types of cooking, you know, say like making a saviche, right? It's like you're you're, triggering chemical reactions, you're causing proteins to coagulate, but without applying heat, you know,

and, you know, you can also argue that combining ingredients so that we sense them in different ways, like, you know, like taking raw fish and putting a, putting a sauce on it is, is, you know, dipping fish in soy sauce and eating those two things together is different than just eating soy sauce and then eating fish. You know, the way we process those sensations is different. So I would consider all of that under the umbrella of cooking. So making a salad. Combining things, heating them maybe, you know, and maybe not eating them. But basically like taking raw ingredients, processing them in some way to transform them into a form that is desirable to eat.

That's what cooking is. That's a good definition. But I was immediately, this is a physicist in me, sorry about that, but, you know, I was just caught up in this idea of heat and how important it was. I mean, it's obviously true. And we all know that there are, as you say, the sort of exceptions or the edge cases of sushi and saviche and salads and stuff like that. But as soon as you say, you're going to cause chemical reactions in a substance by applying heat to it, that sounds pretty science-y to me. And it gets us right into science questions of, you know, how best to apply the heat. what different ways will do to different kinds of food. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, there are many different ways to apply heat. Yeah, I mean, well, there's obviously like the three main ways. There's, you know, convection, conduction, conduction, radiation, like the, you know, the sort of middle school definitions of heat transfer. Yeah, that we learn. And all three of those come into playing, cooking in different ways. You know, but then once you want to get more into it, you can start thinking about, how a different type of pan, you know, different materials are going to,

are going to transfer heat in different ways, how the humidity level is going to, is going to affect the way heat is transferred and the text, sort of affect the texture and the rate of those chemical reactions. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a pretty complex application of heat. And, you know, and the thing about cooking, though, is that you don't need to, you don't necessarily need to understand the science behind it to be able to apply technique, right? You know, like there's many, many great, great, great chefs in the world and many great

home cooks who don't know what conduction versus convection is, right? And you don't necessarily need to know those things to be able to cook well. But I do believe that, you know, sort of understanding those things is a sort of liberating. It's one of the liberating effects of science. Like the more you understand something, the more able you are to adapt to a specific situation and the more able you are to make your ingredients bend to your will. Yeah. Is there some commonality to what happens to a steak and a piece of asparagus when you heat them up? Is there something going on in the chemistry that is just universal to that process?

Or is every potential ingredient a little bit different? Well, they're all a little bit different. But, you know, there are certain things that are common. You know, so like both of them, you know, both steak and asparagus and bread and, you know, anything that you heat up with really high heat that contains, you know, protein and carbohydrate will undergo the may. reaction, which is the sort of classic browning reaction, the reaction that gives you that brown crust on a piece of bread or that gives you the seared crust on a steak. And, you know, so there are certain reactions that will take place in a lot of different foods. But, you know, that said, the Mayard reaction is not just a single reaction.

It's a complex cascade of reactions that, you know, are not fully mapped out and fully understood. And the, and they vary a little bit depending on what, you know, what kind of foods, what kinds of foods you're heating, of course. That said, you know, from a cooking perspective, just from a, from a purely practical, you know, I don't need to understand the nitty-gritty aspects of a perspective. I do know for a fact that pretty much no matter what food I have, if I heat it up, if I sear it in very hot oil, it's going to brown. And those browning flavors are going to give it some kind of more complexity,

a little bit more sweetness, a little bit more of savory nature to it. So that I do know, even without understanding the very specific, you know, I mean, I don't know the specifics of the Mayard reaction. And nobody knows all of the specifics of them. But we do know that if you apply heat, high heat to food, it will brown. And that will add complexity to the flavor. The complexity is not just subjective, right? There literally are more chemical compounds in there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's like if you sort of imagine it is like a big Lego, like it's like a big Lego. like it's like a Lego elephant. And when you apply heat to it, it's like you're smashing that elephant and then you're taking all the broken down pieces and recombining them into a whole zoo, right? A whole zoo of miniature animals. And so it's like, yeah, it's not just subjective.

It's like there are, you know, hundreds of more chemical compounds in there than there were to start with. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Like if you think of, I mean, I guess we use the phrase raw ingredients metaphorically, but the literal raw ingredients that we use in cooking are sort of the template from which we draw all these different things

by changing them with different processes, right? By heating them up, by combining them in different ways, by letting acid do its work and salt and so on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I always in my head, for some reason, I mean, I guess it's because I grew up doing Legos, but I always just imagined Legos in my head. You know, that's how, that's chemistry to me,

is like Legos being separated and stuck back together in different ways, you know. I wrote a whole book on particle physics in the Higgs boson my editor had to cut out half of my Lego analogies because it's just too easy and obvious. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, so maybe get down a specific a little bit here. I mean, you mentioned conduction and radiation and convection. So how do these different ways of applying heat in at least broad strokes, you can get as specific as you want, but how do they affect the food differently? Okay, well, you know, I think we might have to get into some specifics, but, you know, so generally in the kitchen,

like, you know, conduction is the most efficient form of heating. So, you know, let's talk about, let's just talk about, like, baking a pizza, right? Because that uses all three forms of energy. Perfect. Of energy transfers. So conduction is what happens at the base of the pizza, the bottom of the pizza, right? The underbelly. So it's the heat from the floor of the oven that is being, well, partially conducted directly.

You know, obviously it doesn't make perfect contact, so there's some amount of radiation going on in there as well. There's not air flow, so there's no. real convection going on there, but it's mainly conduction. And so the material that you choose for the, that you choose to bake the pizza on can have a serious effect on how that bottom crust bakes, which is why, for instance, like we used to use pizza stones. I think nowadays, at least I use a pizza steel. And that's a perfect example of why. It's because steel is much denser, so it holds more energy. It has a higher volumetric heat capacity, so it

holds more energy per unit, you know, per thickness per unit per unit of mass than stone does. It also is also much more conductive, so it's able to transfer that energy much faster. So a stone heated up to 400 degrees in your oven is going to transfer heat

at a certain rate. A piece of steel heated up to the same temperature is going to transfer heat at a much higher rate, which is why steel gives you a crispier pizza crust. When you talk about then radiation, so radiation is like the direct transfer of electromagnetic radiation. It doesn't require contact. It doesn't require air.

It's just the waves traveling through the vacuum of space, right? And so with a pizza, in a traditional pizza oven, you're getting a lot of, the reason why you have to preheat the oven for so long is because you need the stones, the brickwork or the stonework in the top of the pizza oven to absorb enough heat that is emitting enough radiation that the time. of the pizza cooks quickly. The way we get around that in a home oven is we turn on the broiler, and a broiler heats almost purely through radiation. You know, there's some amount of convection, but most of the convective heat is traveling upwards away from the broiler element. So most of the heat, that energy transfer that you're getting when you cook in a broiler

is direct radiation from either a hot electric element or from, you know, from a gas flame. And then finally, you know, convection in a pizza oven. And so in a traditional pizza oven, you get convection by building a fire in the back of the oven. And the mouth of the oven or the chimney is at the front of the oven. And so there are heat currents. The air kind of has this kind of cyclone shape that flows from the back. So air gets pulled in through the mouth of the oven. It flows over the heat source in the back.

And then it flows around the top of the oven and up the chimney. And so there's this kind of constant cyclone of air that's moving around the oven. And the more, the faster the air, the faster the air, is moving, the faster that hot air is moving, the more efficiently it'll transfer that heat because what happens with still air is that the, you know, the air that's right around the food being cooked, it transfers its energy to the food and then it kind of just sits there and it cools down. So when you have hot air, you know, so in a fan, sorry, in a home oven, if you're not talking about a pizza oven, in a home oven, you compensate for that by having a fan in the back. That's how a convection

oven works. It's basically just an oven with a heatproof fan in it. it. And by fanning the air around and constantly cycling it, you create convection currents, and that increases the efficiency of heat transfer. So, you know, so all three of those, all three of those types of cooking coming to play when you're cooking a pizza, you know, there's some things that were basically only one of the elements comes into play. For instance, if you're pan-searing a steak or you're making a smashed hamburger, you know, that's basically just conduction that you're relying on to transfer heat. So first of all, conduction to transfer heat from the pan to the food. And then, internally in the food. You know, there might be some small amount of convection as liquids sort of move

around in the food, but most of the time, most of the liquids in the food are relatively stationary. So there's not much convection going on. It's really just conduction from one part of the food to another part of the food. So that would be like a purely conduction-based food. A purely convection, let's see, what would be purely convection-based? I can't think of many much that's purely convection-based. But purely, purely radiation, pure radiation, would be something like an Alpestore taco where you have the vertical, you have a vertical rotissary and you have your meat rotating around there and then you have either a flame or a heat source that's off to the side.

So the hot air that's coming off of that is traveling all up. It's not really affecting the food much, but there's radiation that's going to be heating up the food. And that's really the only form of heating that that food is going to get. Yeah, you know, it's, well, all three are used. remember what the question was at the beginning. But all three are used to some degree or another in different applications. Well, I guess I don't

know much about the history of pizza ovens, but I'm guessing that the people who invented and perfected them weren't necessarily thinking in those terms, but they managed to find technology that would take advantage of all these different ways of doing it, right? Do you... Yeah, I think

that's a pretty safe assumption. I mean, I don't know for sure either, but that seems like a pretty safe assumption that we've been baking bread for longer than we've understood exactly how heat has transferred. Whether you're communicating with your team online or working on a project, Grammarly is the digital writing tool

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But now that we're a little bit better, our science is a little bit better, are we inventing new ways to do things? I was thinking of Suvide in the back of my head as something that maybe was actually inspired by our better knowledge of technology. Well, you know, I think Suvide is, something that's not necessarily inspired by a better knowledge, but it's inspired by better,

by higher capability. You know, like we, we now have control, you know, it's a technological breakthrough. I don't think it's a breakthrough in scientific understanding of heat transfer. Sure. Suvita is one of the things where it's like we now have the technology to be able to control the temperature of a water bath to a very precise degree. And, you know, and since then, we, we now have also the technology to do that with, with air. So like at my restaurant, we use combi ovens, which are, you know, steam ovens that can hold their temperature to within a tenth of a degree. So it's sort of like suede without the bag. I mean, I guess maybe given the heterogeneous audience we have here, why don't you explain what suvite is and what it's good for cooking?

Yeah. Oh, so so suvite is a, it's a method of cooking that was, well, first invented in like the 70s, but has really come to fruition in the early 2000s. So in the early 2000s was when restaurants started using it frequently. So what suveed is essentially you take a piece of meat, usually meat. It could be also vegetables, but it's not quite as useful for vegetables, just because of the temperature ranges that you cook vegetables at. But usually you'll take a piece of meat, you'll put it in a vacuum-sealed bag, and then you lower that bag into a water bath that's held at a very precise temperature

using a suvite circulator or precision cook or whatever you want to call it these days. And so what it allows you to do is, so for instance, a steak is medium rare at 125 to 130 degrees or so. Let's say 127 degrees is perfect medium rare for a steak. So with traditional cooking, you generally be cooking at a much higher temperature than you're going to be serving your food at, right? So an oven might be 400 degrees. The surface of a pan might be 600 degrees.

And so with traditional cooking, there's a sort of balancing act where it's like, all right, I want the center of the meat to be 127 degrees exactly. and so when do I how long do I have to cook it you know there's a very fine window of time between perfectly cooked and overcooked because the whole time I'm cooking it you know I'm cooking at a higher temperature that I'm aiming for so it's going to constantly be going up and up and up in temperature so it's very easy to overcook a steak or overcook a piece of chicken using traditional methods with suvied you can set the water bath at exactly 127 degrees so you put the steak in a bag you drop it in there and you know no matter how long I leave it in there it's going to

it's going to be at 127 degrees. Now, eventually there are other things that are going to happen. You know, there's enzymatic reactions that are, that'll cause a stake to turn mushy, et cetera. But you have a very sort of large window of time and a very large margin of error as far as timing goes to get a perfectly medium rare stake. So then what you would do is you would at a restaurant, in a restaurant setting, you would put a bunch of stakes in at the beginning of service.

And then as someone orders when you take the steak out of the soupied water bath, you sear it really well. also develops a nice crust. You get that Mayard Browning. And then you have a steak that's perfectly evenly cooked, edge to edge. You know, and more than anything, within the usefulness in a restaurant, and I think for a home cook, is that it foolproofs it. So that, you know, there's no possibility that you're going to accidentally overcook it.

So if you're a home cook who is worried, you just bought a steak for, you know, a dry-aged ribby that's two pounds, and you spend 50 bucks on it, and you really don't want to mess it up for dinner, cooking a soupies is going to guarantee that get it at the exact right temperature, even if it's the first steak you've ever cooked in your life. So that's sort of the advantage of sousvied cooking. You know, there are other things that you can do with suede cooking that you couldn't do that you simply were not possible previously. So for instance, like, well, we don't do it at my restaurant anymore, but for a while we

did, we used slow-cooked bacon in a couple of dishes. Okay. So that was bacon that we would cook at 135 degrees Fahrenheit for, sorry, 145 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours. And what that happens is, what happens then is that the meat is tenderized, but the moisture loss is very, very minimal. And so you're able to sort of get, you're able to basically cook like tougher cuts of meat, like pork belly or say beef chuck or beef brisket, things like that. You're able to cook tougher cuts of meat and tenderize them, but still serve them at the juiciness level that sort of a medium rare or a medium piece of meat would be. Why have you stopped doing this at your restaurant?

Mainly for logistical reasons and partly for, you know, early on, like we were doing, you know, our restaurant, I think like a lot of restaurants, early on we were much more experimental and we were trying to figure out what our audience wanted, what worked with operationally, what worked. And, you know, and so, and so, you know, opening a restaurant is sort of a process of refining operations to both suit the needs of your clients and to fit the operational infrastructure that you have. And so we were doing it for a while just to see whether it fit our menu, whether it fit our operations. And eventually we realized now this is not something that's sustainable. So we just stopped. I mean, for the practical advice for the home chef, do you think that suvite is at the point these days when any decently tricked out kitchen should have one? Or is it still in an optional kind of? Well, yeah, it's definitely, definitely optional.

They're pretty easy to use, really. They're inexpensive devices. These days, they're under $100. So, you know, if you are a medium, rare meat enthusiast, I would say then suvite is a very good investment. But on the other hand, it's like, you know, cooking suvied, you do miss certain things, right? It's like there's a certain sterility to cooking meat in a bag. Like you don't get the aromas that permeate your house the way you would if you're, slow cooking a piece of meat in the oven or doing a pot roast. For better or worse, yeah.

Yeah, you know, so it's like there's always trade-offs. And so you really have to ask yourself, what kind of cook am I? What do I want? Like, do I want, do I care so much about that perfect edge-to-edge doneness on a thick steak that I want to go suvied? Do I care so much about, like, getting a really succulent, medium-rare chuck roast that otherwise I would have to do as a pot-roast. You know, it really depends on what kind of cook you are. And I can't make a blanket statement saying, yes, it's worth it. Yes, or no, it's not. You know, I have a few suvied devices.

But, you know, in all honesty, I like, I don't, I use them probably a dozen times a year, most, once a month or so. For the most part, my day-to-day cooking, I don't pull it out. But, you know, on the other hand, it's also like I, you know, like I've been, you know, I'm a restaurant-trained cook who's been cooking for 20-something years. professionally. So it's like, I can, if I want to, I can, I can nail that perfectly juicy chicken breast. You can get the temperature. Yeah, you can get the meat. Yeah. Yeah. In some sense, yeah, in some sense, the suvite is more helpful to the people who do not have that muscle memory, right? Do not know exactly how to get it done because it has that forgiveness about it. Exactly. Yeah. It's more than anything,

you know, and in restaurants, you know, the reason, you know, so the main reason we got the combi ovens in our in our kitchen now um which we use for our sausages and a few other things and we keep them uh we hold our we hold sausages at 135 degrees uh and then finish them by searing them on the flat top um the main reason we got that is because it takes out um it takes out any question of of of um human error you know yeah um it's so it's like we can we can focus on the other things it's like um you know of course our cooks are well trained but it's like um um we know we know for a fact that the sausage is going to be perfectly cooked every time. And we don't, I don't really have to worry about that. So it's like one of those things that's sort of taken off, you know, there's a lot of things to worry about

in a restaurant. And if you can take any of that stuff off your plate or take it off the plate of a line cook who has to do a million other things, like if you can, if you can guarantee that the sausage is going to be perfectly cooked, that's one less thing to worry about. And so for us, it's like a worthwhile investment. And so similarly, I think it might be worthwhile to a lot of home cooks who love cooking, but don't want to have to worry about, you know, don't want to have to sit there like babysitting a steak or a pork chop when they have to be making the salad or cooking the vegetables. Right.

You know, you can leave it there. It's good to go. You know, whether your family is ready, it, it, with traditional cooking methods, it's like, it's done when it's done and you better be ready to eat it. Yeah. With suvite, it's like, it can wait for you. When you're ready to eat, you steer it and you eat, and that's it. The other question.

So it takes a lot of the worries off your plate. The other question I have to ask you about heat is you make the provocative statement in the book that cooking with heat tends to be an irreversible process, right? You can't undo those chemical reactions that you did. And it can't help but make me think about entropy and thermodynamics and things like that. But I'm not quite sure if there actually is a connection there or if I'm just drawing one because of my prejudices. You would know better than me. that seems to make sense. There's an arrow of time when you cook.

What's that? There is an arrow of time when you cook. You can, you know, put things in one direction. There is an arrow of time. Oh, man. And, you know, yes, so my daughter's three years old and she's super into homophones and puns right now. And literally just yesterday, I told her that classic, time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. It's a classic.

Yep. which it took her a while to understand, but I think she got it. It's why three-year-olds are a great audience. There is an error of time with cooking. And, you know, there's some, in, there are some things that are reversible and some things that are not.

But for the most part, cooking reactions are irreversible. What's interesting are, there are some reactions that are irreversible between the time that you finish cooking and by the time they cooked, particularly with with certain types of carbohydrates.

So the starches in bread. So the reason that bread, like hot bread is soft, it's malleable. It's very plastic. And then as it starts to cool down, it stales, right? And staling is not just about drying. It's actually starch retrograding from a gelled form into a crystalline structure. So it recrystallizes as it cools down. With wheat flour, that recrystallization is reversible.

It's partly reversible. So you can take old bread and reheat it, and it'll get soft again, right? It'll taste fresh again. That's true. With other starches, like corn starch, so tortillas, one of the reasons why it's so difficult to get, why tacos in Mexico are so much better than they are here is because cornstarch undergoes an irreversible retrogradation as it cools down. So a fresh tortilla is at its best when it's first cooked.

And once it's cooled down, it's never going to be as good again, even if you reheat it. So when you go to Takaria in Mexico, most of the time, either they're making the tortillas to order, or they will have gotten their tortillas that morning from baked fresh that morning and stored in a cooler where they stay hot until they serve them. Whereas in the U.S., most of the time, they've been sitting at room temperature in a plastic bag on the supermarket shelf or at the store, and then they get reheated. and they never have that same elasticity and pliability that they have when they're freshly cooked. So, yeah, so that's an example of a reaction that is reversible in one case with bread, but not reversible with a tortilla. There's certainly dishes like stews or chilies where they seem to taste better the next day, right?

You make them and you think that they're at their peak, but then you put them in the refrigerator, take them out, and microwave them, and they're even better. Is that, it's not just an illusion, right? There really is something going on. So, so, you know, so it's a little difficult to do tests on that. But, but the, so the test that I have, that I have done, where, like, I made, you know, so the reason it's difficult to make tests is to do tests on that is because you have, so to do

it, actually, the only way I can think of to do it is that you have to make multiple batches of stew or chili or whatever, a couple days apart or a day apart. and so one of them fresh and then serve them one of them a day old. But the reason it's difficult is because it's never going to be the exact. It's not like you can make one batch and divide it in half. You can repeat the test many times. I haven't repeated it enough times that I can say reliably. But in the test that I've done, there's actually not that much difference in a freshly made stew versus a chilled and reheated stew.

The main difference, I think, comes down to sort of texture, like thickening and the texture that changes when you reheat. Flavor-wise, it's a little bit harder to pin down. You know, that's another reason why it's difficult to test because it's very difficult to isolate the texture changes that occur from the flavor changes that occur. Yeah, okay. You know, and so, no, but, you know, but that said, it's like, do you really care about those? Do you really care why? I guess all you really care about is does it taste better or not, whether it has to do with texture or flavor.

And in those cases, it's like, yeah, you can, you know what? Now, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head now, and I actually am positive that I have an article about this on serious heats where I summarized the testing that I had. And now I actually can't remember what the results are. But that's fine because I wrote it down somewhere and everyone can go and look it up. Exactly. I can look it up and we can link to it. From what I remember, I was surprised that the differences were less than I expected them to be. You know, even if the differences are psychological, like you said, is if it contributes to your enjoyment, that still counts, right?

If you are cured by a placebo, you're still cured. Yes, absolutely. And that's one of the things that I think is really interesting, particularly about taste. It's like, so, you know, I used to work for Cook's Illustrated magazine, and they relied very heavily on blind taste tests for judging different products. And at the time, I sort of fully bought into that. But since then, I've come to think, like, you know what? Like, blind tests are extraordinarily limited because in real life, nobody is tasting things blind. Right. And our perception of taste is not, it's not just about what we're perceiving on our tongue.

It's not just about, it's not just about sort of the literal physical interactions we're having with the world and the sensors that we have built in. You know, taste is something that you synthesize in your brain. it's like you take all the stimulus the smell the taste the sight the sound of foods the feel of foods the texture of foods and then you take all that information and you somehow inside your brain you crunch those numbers and it's not just the it's not just the stimulation you're taking you're also taking into account your memories you're taking into account your current mood you're taking about into account like the connection that you have with the specific food that you have and all these different sort of conscious and unconscious biases that your brain has built in. And that's what, that's what, um,

your sensation of taste comes from. So it's like, you can say that, um, you know, when, when completely blindfolded, all eggs taste the same. And, and this is a test I've done many times. And I, and I'm, I can state for all, with almost pure certainty that there's nobody in the world who can tell the difference between an egg that came from a chicken in their backyard and an egg that came from a factory farm. Um, in a completely blind setting, you can't tell the difference. But you never eat those eggs completely blind. You see the package. You know where the egg came from.

You think about the life of the chicken. You think about what it is that you support in terms of animal welfare. You see the color of the yolk. And all those things are going to affect the way that you perceive flavor. And so it's very, you know, it's one thing to say, like, this is what our blind taste has showed. But that's not the be all and end all when it comes to taste and perception. Like, you know, like, the cold, you know, like, I have a certain affinity for, PBR, which is like objectively a shitty beer, a bad beer.

But to me, it was the beer that we had at the end of our shift when I was a line cook. There was a five-gallum bucket that we filled with ice and 24 PBRs, and the PBRs would sit there for the last hour of service under the ice, and you'd see them. And so that was like your, that was like the Pavlovian, you know, the reward that we got at the end of a good service was like these ice-cold, years. And so now every time I have a very ice cold PBR, I think to myself, oh, Kenji, you did a good job. And I get this, I get this happy feeling, you know? And so to me, ice cold PBR tastes great, when objectively, it probably doesn't, you know? But that's okay is the point, right? I mean, it's not like a mistake. It's not a mistake. Exactly. You, you, it's totally fine to feel that way. It's like, you should, it's great, you know, it's like, it's, you know, when it comes to

say to the eggs. It's like, it's great that that eggs that came from chickens that were treated better, taste better to me because not only does it make me enjoy the eggs more, it also leads to happier chickens. It's like, where's the downside in that? Yeah, exactly. I love the experiment that you talked about in the book where you colored the eggs so that people couldn't tell the difference. And the differences in quality that were perceived went away, but that's okay because the color of the eggs matters. Yeah, exactly. So, which the, the corollary. to that is that if you want to give people the best brunch ever, you just add like a drop of orange food coloring to your scrambled eggs before you cook them.

Yep. But don't tell them. And that deep orange color will make them think, oh, these must be wonderful eggs. The brain is just as important as the tongue in all these experiments. Yeah, more important. More important. Fair enough. But yeah, I wanted to move on a little bit from heat, which is just infinitely fascinating.

I could keep talking about. But there's a lot else that goes into cooking, right? I mean, the flavors. There's this stuff that we were taught when I was in elementary school, that we have four different kinds of flavors, but now that's been joined by umami, or four different ways of tasting, I suppose. Four different modes of tasting.

It's a better way of saying it. So is that, how sciencey is that whole spiel about, you know, some small, finite number of ways of tasting things? Well, yeah, so the one, so the four flavors, I think we were classically taught, are salty, sweet, sour, what are they? Salty, sweet, sour, and bitter.

Yeah, yeah. And now we've added savor to that. So, you know, there is a certain amount of science as to what, you know, the types of chemicals that trigger those sensations to us. Those old maps of the tongue where it's like, oh, we taste sweetness here, we taste saltiness there. Like, those are mostly bunk. You know, there is a, there's a distribution of all these sensors all over our tongues.

they're slightly more concentrated in some places than others, but the idea that we only taste saltiness at the tip of our tongue or bitterness at the back left side of our tongue, whatever the map said, I think that's largely been disproven. But yeah, but you know, what's interesting is that a lot of those flavors and the way we balance flavors and the way we value those different flavors is largely cultural. You know, so, you know, as a child, you can say, all right, children generally hate bitter flavors.

And the reason that we hate bitter flavors is because a lot of poisons in nature have bitter flavors. But then if you go, once you get older, you know, so it's like, like, you know, and by the same sense, like someone who's never tasted, someone who's not used to tasting olive oil or say chocolate, they might, if you give them a sample of three different chocolates and three different olive oils, they're probably going to pick the sweetest chocolate and the sort of frutious, least bitter, least astringent olive oil as being the best. But if you've done go and ask the panel of experts, it's like, no, it's like we want a balance of sweetness and bitterness. We want our olive oil to have a certain astringency, a certain pepperyness and a certain bitterness,

because, you know, once you start stimulating those those sensors in our tongues that sense bitterness, it actually makes us salivate more, which then brings out other flavors and food. So it's like, you know, there's a difference between what are purely pleasurable. And again, I think a lot of this comes down

to sort of experimental design, where it's like you're tasting an olive oil on its own without the context of food or anything else, right? And it's like, and without having experience of olive oil eaten with food. And so then, yeah, maybe the bitterness might be overwhelming. But then if you take that same olive oil and eat it with drizzled over a salad of spring vegetables that are nice and sweet, that bitterness is actually going to make us salivate more, which then makes us more able to perceive the sweetness of those vegetables.

So there's sort of sort of like synergistic effects that different types of flavors get. from each other. And, you know, and so, like, if you also think about, say, like, like, like Southeast Asian cuisine, right? It's like the very simple way that it's often been, so, like Thai food, for example, the very simple way that it's often been presented to us is that Thai food has this balance of sweet, salty, sour, and hot, right? Yep.

And so we think of that. And, yes, you can think of certain Thai dishes that are popular in the U.S. that contain all of those flavors. so like Tom Yongung, like sweet and sour soup, or like larb, like with lime juice and chilies and sugar and fish sauce. But when you, you know, the reason that we're sort of drawn to those dishes is because they capture all those flavors in one single dish. Whereas frequently when you go, if you actually travel around Thailand and eat a lot,

you'll find that there are many dishes that don't contain all those elements altogether. There are many dishes that are just purely bitter or many dishes that are that are purely hot that don't have much of the sweetness to balance them out. But generally they're eaten in meals where they have all the different elements to sort of balance each other out. And so, again, again, I think I got enough of a tangent and I don't remember what we initially were talking about, which happens frequently to me. I'm sorry. This is why I'm a writer and not a talker because with writing you can always go. look back and see what you're putting together the five different basic modes of tasting right and and like you say like a dish might have all of them but that's not

necessary if you if you're if you're having a meal then you can put them together in different dishes yeah exactly yeah so it's like it's like my um yeah exactly so it's like my pizza you know so so i i find so i think that as so as far as seasoning goes like salt i think is in most cultures. In fact, I think in every culture, getting the salt level right is the most important element of properly seasoning of food. Without the right level of salt, things just taste bland. I think after that, getting the acid level right is the most important thing. And oftentimes, a lot of dishes benefit from a hit of acid right at the end. It'll enhance flavors that will help you perceive things more. But that's not to say that every single dish needs acid,

particularly if it's generally served with something that's kind of acidic. So for example, it's like a pasta dish, you know, it could be something that has acidity on its own, you know, it could be something with like a bright acidic tomato sauce or a squeeze of lemon at the end. But I could also eat like a sort of like a rich, rich ragu bolognese, which might have as a little bit of acid from the wine. But I would be drinking it with a wine that provides acidity so that it kind of cuts through the richness of it as I'm eating it. So it's like, you know, and that's the same idea of eating like in Thailand where

you might eat a very hot dish accompanied by a sweet dish or a starchy dish. So that they balance each other out over the course of one meal. Even when you're a kid, it's like eating a hot dog with lemonade makes more sense than eating a hot dog with milk. It's because you're combining that fatiness and that richness and that savouriness with acidity. Or a hamburger and a Coke makes more sense than, well, I guess people do like a hamburger and a milkshake together. But there goes my theory. People overindulge sometimes. That's okay.

But also, I mean, you brought up the idea that we have training in this, right? Like, it's not all nature. There's some nurture involved. It reminded me of, I heard a talk by a sommelier when Jennifer and I were visiting Asia. And he explained that China had just been waking up to the pleasures of wine for the first time, but they completely went for the sweetest wines they could find, right? Because that's what made sense to them. And he predicted that, you know, 30 or 40 years from now,

they'll be enjoying the same kind of wines they like in California or France or Spain. Right. And is that, do you know, when was this that you, that you went on that trip? Just like five or ten years ago. Well, not too long ago. Oh, okay, okay. Got it, got it. Yeah.

You know, I was in China, I guess like five years ago now. and while I was there, I found, and I'm pretty sure this is true because I remember looking it up, I haven't looked at up recently, but I think China is actually the number one, not just consumer of wine, but the number one producer of wine in the world. Did you taste any Chinese wine? No.

Okay, I have not either. We tasted, I mean, we tasted a lot of rice wine, like a lot of traditional Chinese wines. We didn't taste any Chinese grape wine, though. Yeah, I mean, there's no reason. No, but that absolutely makes sense. You know, maybe China as a nation discovering wine is sort of like, is sort of like my daughter discovering chocolate where, you know, she immediately goes for the really sweet stuff. But, you know, but the more you get exposed to chocolate, the more you, the more you start to appreciate the complexities of the not-so-sweet stuff where you can, you know, where you can really taste all the other flavors and you can taste all the different, the aromas.

You know, it's almost like, you know, the more context food has and the more of a story it has and the more you can tell about its history and production, the more interesting it gets, right? And I think it's the same with any kind of sort of, any kind of consumed medium, you know, like music. You know, I think like a single Beatles song is great, but it's much, much better when it's in the context of their albums and when it's in the context of the world they were living in. And so I think, you know, the more context and the more story that a piece of food has that you're consuming, you know, whether that's your personal story or whether that's the sort of a more global story, I think the more interesting it can get. So, you know, I used to have this mindset where the story of a food had to be kind of specific thing. And I think a lot of people have this idea also about, you know, and it sort of ties into the idea of, it ties into the idea of authenticity. where it's like, you know, a steak that is, that is, that is, that was raised by a farmer who, um, raised the cat, like, named the cow himself, fed it by hand, whatever, that that steak

so has more of a story value than say, um, a steak that was grown in a lab in a test tube or in a petri dish, right? Yeah. Um, and, and, and since then I've kind of come to realize, you know what? Like, my idea of a story is not necessarily. any more valuable than someone else's idea of a story so so for someone someone else they might find the idea of a steak that is grown you know made from stem cells and grown in a lab to be a far more fascinating story and therefore

far more interesting to eat than a than a than any one of you know a million cows that has a name and so you know so so these days I try very hard to sort of reserve judgment and to remember that like my idea of value is not the same as everybody's idea of value when it comes to food. And, you know, so long as you are thinking about the food and thinking about, you know, gaining some value beyond just the sort of eating pleasure of it, you know, beyond the sustenance element of it, that, you know, who am I to judge what actually is interesting and isn't?

Yeah, and you can appreciate the importance and the relevance of having a story without judging that there's some objectively better stories than others, like you just said. Exactly. That's something to keep in mind. Yeah. I mean, when you're designing a new dish or when you're trying to, you know, in your restaurant, you have to actually figure out what's going to be on the menu. How many of these aspects do you come across sort of ahead of time in terms of the way to apply heat,

the different flavors to bring in, the textures, the timing, all this stuff. Is it sort of there's a scientific process in your head or is it more you're playing around in the kitchen and letting yourself be surprised? Well, so when we're designing a dish for the restaurant, you know, the technical elements of it are something that, well, largely comes from my experience and then we'll go through testing to make sure, to refine the process to make sure that it works, mainly from an operational perspective, because it's like, it's one thing to be able to cook one really great chicken schnitzel at home, and it's a very different thing to be able to do 120 of them a night. Yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. And it's a different set of equipment. in. It's different product that you're using. So most of the technical aspects of cooking

are done from an operational perspective. And there we do some really serious testing. So it takes like, you know, it takes like a good month or so from the time I have finalized a dish to the point where we're sort of ready to put it out to the public and we're ready to put it on the menu. And we might do some sort of like experimental stuff. Like we'll put it on the menu for a night or two just to see how it works and see where we need tweaking. But there is like a very, you know, I'm the kind of chef who really likes to, and writer actually, like who really goes through a rigorous editing process where it's like I throw as many ideas out there as I can. And then I test them and I test them and I test them and I refine them until I'm happy with the way that

they're working in. I'm sure that I can get them consistent. So that's sort of the technical side of the of the coin. I think, More important with a restaurant, though, is not the technical side, but making sure that it fits within the theme of your restaurant and that people aren't confused by something on a menu. You know, and, you know, I think my writing and sort of my online persona gives me a lot of latitude as far as, you know, and the way we designed the restaurant. It gives us a lot of latitude. It's modeled after a German beer hall, but we incorporate elements of cooking from all around the world, and particularly a lot of sort of Asian ingredients and techniques. Well, that is what people are going to expect, right?

They're going to expect something that is not exactly a traditional German beer hall. Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, it's like when we first started, we tried to stick a little bit closer to what a traditional German beer hall would be with some sort of California elements. You know, it's like a German beer hall, but not all the food is brown and white. You know, it's like we tried to make things green and red and purple too. Just because we're in California and we get great produce. And because that's just what a California audience wants.

But, but, you know, eventually it's like we sort of realize, you know what, like, people are not coming here just for this beer hall experience. Like, they're coming here because, like, they read my book or they know, like, they're coming here because it's like my restaurant, right? Partially, at least. And so they're, they've come in expecting a little. kind of crazier stuff, which is great for me. It's like, all right, I guess if that's what people want, I'll just do, I'll cook the kind of stuff that I want to do. And it's like, so now sort of the menu criteria is like,

as long as it's something that goes well with beer, like as long as it's something that's going to get people to order beer, and it's saying that I would personally want to eat with beer and find interesting. And I'm able to, you know, convince my partners. So, you know, there's a good balance because, like, I'm super into the internet and like I know my audience and I know what like my readers want. Whereas my partner Adam, he is sort of, he's, you know, he's sort of a Luddite. Like he has no idea about how social media works.

He doesn't know any of that stuff. And so he knows really what sort of the local crowd who don't follow my stuff want. And so between the two of it, it's like we have this Venn diagram of like what my audience wants and what a general audience who has no idea who I am wants. And we just kind of kind of find that little football shaped intersection. And that's what sort of forms our menu. But, yeah, I would, you know, I would say we spend a lot more time, a lot more of the early time on a particular menu item,

thinking about sort of the cultural element of it and how it's going to fit in with the cultural of our restaurant, with the culture of our area. And also whether it's sort of like it pays its cultural dues to the sources that I'm, you know, that I'm that I'm glomming, you know, that I'm taking. techniques and ingredients from. You know, so like we did, for example, for a while we were doing a special dish with, with kimchi. So it was like a combination like German, Korean hybrid thing.

And, you know, so I, and I don't want to be the kind of chef that's just like, oh, like, I love kimchi. I'm just going to shove it in here because, because whatever, without really understanding how it's typically used in Korean cuisine. And so, you know, so for that dish, it's like we designed it very much off based off of dofokie, which is like a Korean rice cake, a home style Korean rice cake dish that's often as

Kochi Chang and kimchi. And the techniques that we use and making it and the flavor combinations that we use there are drawn through a lot of sort of rigorous research and experience in Korean cuisine. Because, well, because, you know, I wanted to make sure that the dish makes sense

to both cultures, and it doesn't feel like we're just you know, like, well, cultural exploitation, you know, I don't want to be, ever feel like like I'm just stealing something from someone without actually understanding the historical or cultural significance of it. And so, you know, so we spend a lot of time thinking about those kinds of questions and making sure that a dish makes sense before we even start, you know, training our staff

how to cook it or testing it on customers. On the flip side, I remember reading one of the ideas behind molecular gastronomy was that we could actually look into the chemical compounds in different kinds of food and find pairings that you might not have intuitively expected on the basis of, well, these chemicals are going to go together. You know, broccoli and, I don't know, chicken livers are better than you might have thought. Do you ever use that kind of thought process? You know, I'm super dubious of that. Only because, you know, I think, as we were talking about before, like, it's completely impossible to divorce the cultural and historical and personal.

elements of flavor pairings and food from the actual sort of interactions and the actual chemical physical interactions that they have. So it's like, sure, we can say, all right, like this, whatever IBM's computer decided that broccoli and chocolate go well together. And I taste them and they taste good together. But it's like, all right, so first of all, like a lot of that has to do with the way they're specifically prepared. But it's also like they, the, the mere fact that I know that a computer decided these two things taste good together is going to affect the way that they taste together for better or for worse. You know, for some people, it might make them taste much better together.

And for other people that make them taste worse together. So, you know, it's, I think when you, when you try to answer questions like that, it completely ignores the fact that taste is not something that we purely sense. it's something that we create in our heads. And I can't imagine, I can't think of any possible way to divorce those two things from each other. So, so yeah, like, I'm very dubious about that whole, that whole side of molecular astronomy. I'm personally a huge fan of molecular gastronomy, but I absolutely agree that it can go too far. You know, I've been in places overall or had individual dishes where, like, I know what you were going for.

and this one just didn't work. So you have to at some point trust the results, not just the reasoning that goes into it. Yeah, you do. And, you know, and it's also you also, the thing is like you have to also at some point realize that the results are highly personal, right? Yeah.

There's no such thing as like these things universally go well together, right? You know, it's like they go well together. It's like in the same sense that there's no universally better way to bake pizza or a better way to make a hamburger, a better way to cook a steak. It's like it all has to do with your personal taste and how you grew up and your culture and everything and the specific environment that you're in right now. There's this moment around 10 years ago when I think I went to like three different restaurants in the course of two months and they all had some version of olive oil flavored ice cream.

And it didn't work at any one of those restaurants. Oh, really? I love olive oil ice cream. The message must have gotten out. That was the cool thing. But it didn't work for me any one of those times. That's okay. different strokes right it's like I personally love all in fact I just last night I put I drizzle

the olive oil and put sea salt on on ice cream for dessert oh this changes everything yeah in fact like at our restaurant at worst I mean we're not open currently but the one dessert that we've had on the menu you know we've had a few different desserts that have rotated around but the one dessert that we've had since day one that is will be on the menu again when we reopen is a roasted pumpkin seed oil sunday, which is just vanilla ice cream drizzled with roasted pumpkin seed oil and smoked sea

salt. And it has a pumpkin seed brittle, but the main flavors are just vanilla ice cream, roasted pumpkin seed oil, and sea salt, which I find extremely delicious, but it's also a pretty divisive. It's a pretty divisive one. Well, I should say, oh, those things sound weird together. I'm not going to get that. Salt. Salt on ice cream makes perfect sense. But most of the time people who do think, like, oh, that sounds like

it could be interesting. We'll get it. And, you know, because they know, they're the type of person who is into interesting flavor combinations like that. They like it. It's like it's one of those things where it's like you kind of, you have to kind of know yourself and tasting it is not really going to make much of a difference. You know,

there are some cases where it's like something sounds like it's going to be good and then it ends up being terrible. But I feel like usually if something sounds like it's going to be delicious, it's probably going to be delicious to you. Assuming that the execution went well. You know, I did this podcast with Michelle Gelfand, who is a psychologist, and she talks about tightness versus looseness in both people and societies. And some people are just happier when they're obeying the rules, whatever the rules are.

They like the idea of obeying the rules. And other people are just happier violating the rules, whatever the rules are. And that's going to go into what you enjoy at the dining table, too. Yeah. You know, what's funny is that I'm the latter, right? Like I hate rules. And if somebody tells me to do something or that I have to do something, like it makes me much more unlikely to do that thing or to enjoy that thing.

Yeah. And I know that about myself. But what's funny is that like when my book came out and when I had my column, Food Lab, like my audience seems to be the opposite. Like, well, at least a lot of my audience seems to be the kind that enjoys my writing because I explain,

here's why I'm doing this, here's why I'm doing that. And they like that sort of rigidity. And they're like, okay. and I see this online a lot and oftentimes I think to myself oh my God like I've created this monster where it's like

oh but like you can't cook a steak that way because Kenji said cook it this way and it's like no like that's that's not what I meant at all but you know people will often like sort of call up my name and use it as as an authoritative proof that the way someone else is doing something is wrong which is not you know which is the opposite of the way I generally feel in real life

it's like if somebody tells me that something is the wrong way to do something then I'm much more likely to figure out why I like doing it that way than to try and change what I like. This is exactly one of the reasons why I enjoyed your cookbook because I'm not a great chef by any stretch, a great cook. But I can follow recipes. So if the recipe is clear, I can follow it.

But I rebel against it at the same time, even though that's the best way. Like I'm not knowledgeable enough to make substitutions myself. So I just follow the recipe, it turns out good. And what I always wanted was not just an explanation for why this works, but this thing you did in your section on creamy vegetable soups, where you said, I'm not going to give you the exact recipe. I'm going to tell you, like, the template for making a great soup out of any vegetables in any way. And like, this is the kind of thing that works. The theory of the recipe is what I've always been looking for. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you got that,

because I feel like a lot of people don't get that out of the book. But I mean, you know, I guess a lot of people do as well. You know, like the analogy I always uses that. you know, it's like if you think about cooking, like the food landscape is a map, right? And it's like, yeah, a recipe is sort of like a term. There's like going on to Google and saying, hey, take me to take me to the grocery store here. And you get sort of term by turn directions. And it's like, all right, on one case, like I could be looking down on my phone the whole time, just keep like completely ignoring the world, follow the term by turn directions on the map and arrive at my destination, right?

And that's sort of like what following a recipe precisely is. It'll get you from point A to point B. and it'll be almost guaranteed to get you there, right? But you can get, you get much more information if you actually look up and look at the world around you. So what I'm hoping is that like, you know, my book and my column and whatever that it gives you, that it's more like giving you a map where it's like,

here's a suggested route that you take. I'm going to give you turn-by-turn directions here, but I'm also going to give you the whole map so that if you want to go to a different place or you want to try taking a different route, or if you're not starting at the same place as I am, If you have a different set of ingredients or a different set of tools or your kitchen is not laid out the way mine is, that you can still get to the same endpoint that I get to. And that's sort of what understanding the science and understanding the technique behind cooking is like.

Well, and also it speaks back to where we started and sort of science as a process, because as much as there's a lot in your book about cooking with science using the scientific processes, scientific ideas, like knowing the shape of the molecules or the cells in an onion, helps you cut it in the best possible way, right? But there's also the philosophy of cooking as science, that you try different things, you do experiments, even if it's not a blind test, you try to say, well, I'm told to do it this way, let me do it all the different ways, and actually see what is the best,

rather than using the power of pure reason to tell ahead of time. Yeah, you know, and oftentimes, you know, for some people, they feel like they don't have that luxury because they cook to feed their families and they don't want to mess things up. you know but if if you're okay with eating something different than what you had planned it's it's really hard to mess something up so badly

that it's like literally inedible and I find it's always interesting to eat the experiments you know it's like to eat them and think about what kind of what might have gone wrong or what might have gone accidentally right and you know so I recently I don't know if you if you've seen it but I recently like for the last month

or so I've been doing this daily YouTube show where I basically just like strap a camera to my head and I cook without really planning. It's like I have a general idea what I'm going to cook before I start, but it's not like I weigh out my ingredients or it's sort of like the anti-cooking show where it's like there's nothing. Things go wrong all the time. And you know, that's just general. Like it's a much closer representation to how I really cook in real life than I think the impression the book gave across is. Because like, you know, like I have all these recipes in that book,

but I can honestly tell you that like of the 300-selling recipes in that book, since that book was published, I've maybe made like two of them the exact same way that they were published. I don't follow recipes. I understand techniques and like, and I know like, all right, when I make chili, here are the different elements. You know, so like the recipe for chili in that book has like 40 ingredients and it takes like whatever, seven and a half days to make, something ridiculous. And I'm frankly surprised anybody actually makes it that way. But the point of that recipe was to show you like here are all the different things that can affect the way your chili come out. now you go and choose what you want to do

like what you actually care about and that's much more how I cook in real life it's like I'm fine with not having some some you know very specific idea of the perfect food every time because I find that you know food's more interesting when you when you experiment and when you and when you decide yourself okay what do I want out of it this time

what do I want out of my chili this time I did in fact make exactly that chili recipe and it took me seven and a half days and I used a million different ingredients But I'll tell you, well, I added bacon. That was the one thing I added, I think, that you didn't put in. But, oh, my God, the compliments I got. Bacon ruins it. No, no, it was good.

Just a little bit, like a little tiny little bit. But, yeah, people thought I was a genius after that. I didn't want to, you know, like I said, I did not deviate from the recipe. But sometimes, but the one, and one, that's another great example, even for people who don't go to all that effort, because you do, you put more than one chili recipe in the book. So, like, it's a maxi chili, and then there's, like, the weekend night chili. that you want to just get it done with,

but you give some of the results of the experiments where you sort of overturn some old wives tales about beans and soaking them and things like that. And it's just really interesting that certain techniques are handed down for generations and no one tests them to figure out whether they're actually correct. Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And that's something that you find frequently.

You know, well, because cooking is one of those things where it's like there is science to it, but it's also like one of the things that like most people do. Well, certainly like every group of people does it every day multiple times a day, right? Like maybe not every individual in a group does it, but everybody eats every day. Or at least, hopefully. Almost everybody eats every day. And so it is one of those things where it's like there's a lot of science to it and a lot of technique,

but it's also a task that's just necessary. So for many people, it's like, all right, I know this works. Why should I care about doing it any other way? you know, it's just in the same sense that there are a lot of people who see eating as a burden, right? It's like there are plenty of people who, given the choice of taking a pill once a month that gives them all their nutritional needs and they don't have to worry about it, they would gladly take that because they find eating to be a waste of time and a burden. Like, you know, I personally don't understand those people, but they exist. And it's, you know, and who am I to judge that? And so, and especially like when you're talking about like in a professional setting, in a restaurant kitchen,

restaurants are very high-stress places. They're very low-margin businesses. Like, you don't really have the luxury of wasting food or taking time to test things. And once you find something that works, it's like you stick with it, right? And in some cases, it's like, you know, especially like with sort of old-school chef mentality where the chef is like, cannot admit any kind of failure or false. It's like they, you know, you look at some old-school chefs like, you know, like, like Gordon Ramsey. It's like no matter what he says, he has to have some reason for why it's

the correct way to do it, even if he's just pulling that reason out of his ass, he has to say it, and he has to sound really sure of himself when he's saying it. And that's just come, that's sort of just a product of the way kitchens, you know, professional kitchens used to be run, like this sort of very strict hierarchical system that kitchens were run by. And, you know, and so I think that's how a lot of sort of like of these myths get perpetuated. It's like, someone tells you, like if a 12-star Michelin chef tells you this is the way it is, then by the power vested in their authority, that must be the way it is. But you know, but you're not taking into account the fact that the reason, you know,

maybe that works in a restaurant setting. Maybe that works when you're cooking, you know, 40 eggs at a time, but it's not the same as when you're cooking two eggs at a time for your family. You know, maybe it's only that way because that's the best way to get a line cook motivated to do something. where, you know, so it's like you almost have to think about what were the parameters, what was the setting under which these techniques were developed and do all those parameters apply to me at home right now?

Or is there something I could be thinking about differently that might make it easier or better for me, given my certain situation? Yeah, and presumably the same advice goes to things you heard from your great-grandmother as things you heard from Michelin-Star chefs, right? They can come from other contexts that might not apply to your situation. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I guess to close up, let me just ask, you know, I think that like you said, not everyone can spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Not everyone can spend a lot of time cooking,

but everyone does eat and enjoys eating. This might be a tough question, but is there any advice you would give to the person who wants to sort of take the step from minimalist, like I put things in the microwave or I, you know, boil a pot of pasta to a slightly larger degree of creativity in the kitchen. Like, you know, what is the step you can take to open up your horizons a little bit to all the different techniques out there? Well, you know, what I would say is, so the process by which I learn about a new dish is that I, so I almost rarely, rarely do I follow like a single recipe.

So if I hear about a dish that's interesting to me or if I go to a restaurant and eat something that I'm like, oh, wow, this is something new. The process I go through is that I look up like five or six recipes or I'll, or look first well I start with the history of a dish actually like I'll look up like okay what does this dish mean where did it come from what does it mean what like what kind of cultural and historical context does it have and and really try and get an understanding of what makes the thing the thing that it is and then from there I'll research a bunch of different recipes it's like so if I'm like if I'm looking up like a Spanish tortilla right it's like one recipe might have onions another recipe might have no

onions and then you look up the actual history and you find out oh there's this like huge debate in Spain about whether a tortilla should have onions or not in it. You know, and so from there, it's like you get a better context of why certain techniques exist and why some techniques might differ from the other. And then, you know, by getting a better understanding of a food, you can then sort of place it in context of your own life and understand what it is that you want out of it. And you might be able to sort of identify like a few key cooking processes that are different from recipe to recipe and start to think about why they might be different.

And, you know, if you have the capacity in the time and the patience, you can try it, try it multiple ways. You know, but it's the same as like learning about anything. It's like you just got to kind of practice and be smart about the way you think about it, you know. That sounds good to me. Do you have that? Yeah, that would be my advice.

Practice and be smart. Well, that's very good advice for many, many different things. Do you have in mind what I thought of another question. Do you have in mind what would be your final meal if you have to choose? Yeah. Well, it could be a few different. I mean, I would say give right now my, you know, it would be, it would be dumplings and maputofu, like, not, not like traditional, the way my mom made them. So like, like Japanese gyoza that my mom made out of like, she would take leftover beef from hamburgers, I think, and mix them with whatever fridge scraps she had.

And then Japanese style mappo tofu, which is not spicy and is made with sake and sugar. And I think she used, actually, I think she used the dumpling filling in the mapo tofu, but it would be something, it would be something. It would be something I grew up eating. Exactly. That makes perfect sense. Does that go well with beer? It goes well with calpice, which is like a Japanese yogurt drink. Oh, okay.

I'm not familiar with that one. All right, good. Something more to discover. Well, anyway, lots to discover here. Kenji Lopez-Lult, that was really fantastic. Thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. School's first federal credit union, serving school employees and their families.

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