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.
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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.
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- Storing stew/chili overnight probably doesn’t make it taste better
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: 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 caught on to as an interesting thing to tackle. I have no idea why that thing in particular. 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.
0:01:02 SC: Literally for decades now, I’ve been wanting a book like this, that didn’t just give me recipes but went through the science. And said like, “Okay, you wanna 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 getting 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. The famous Maillard 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 asked whether there’s a grand unified theory of cooking. I’m not sure if that’s gonna 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.
[music]
0:02:31 SC: Kenji Lopez-Alt, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
0:02:33 Kenji Lopez-Alt: Oh, thanks for having me.
0:02:35 SC: So I’m a big fan of the book that you wrote, called Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. An honest recommendation here, I feel in my heart that a cook book, just like any other book, should be one that you can read like a book, that you can take to bed and leaf through, and not just a collection of recipes. And you certainly…
0:02:53 KL: Yes.
0:02:54 SC: Reached that standard. Yes.
0:02:56 KL: Oh, thanks.
0:02:56 SC: But I wanna… So I wanna open with a softball question here. Your subtitle is Better Home Cooking Through Science.
0:03:04 KL: Right.
0:03:04 SC: 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?
0:03:22 KL: Well, I don’t think the two are… 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. In some sense, that title is obviously a little bit ironic, it’s meant to sound… It calls back, 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… They’re not a dichotomy, it’s not a scale where if you get more of one you lose the other. You can have high science and high heart, high emotion. And in fact, I think they actually help each other. The whole point of science is to give us an understanding of how things work through a certain process. 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 or how…
0:04:29 KL: It’s sort of like how, if you’re trying to paint a picture, if you’re an artist and 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. So for instance I’m trying to teach my daughter how to play an instrument right now. Or even better, so I grew up playing violin and, ever since I was a little kid. And so with violin I’m at this point where it’s like if I hear something in my head it translates directly to my fingers. 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.
0:05:12 SC: Yeah.
0:05:12 KL: So when I’m playing guitar, it’s like I hear something in my head and then I have to really think about “Alright, 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 differentiation between my brain and what my body does. And if 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’ll be even more difficult for me to put into a physical expression what I hear in my head. So that’s, I think is the difference between science and art, or science and heart is that the art in the heart is what we feel, and what we think inside and then the science and the technique is what allows us to then express that in the real world. So, 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 show you, this is the science behind it and this is how you get from point A to point B.
0:06:12 KL: But 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 wanna make yourself, and you have the tools to then bring that into fruition.
0:06:28 SC: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. 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 instead 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.
0:06:50 KL: In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. Science, at the core of science is that what we think are facts are only facts until contrary evidence shows that they aren’t. 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 doubting facts is at the very core of what science is.
0:07:15 SC: 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,” [laughter] because I really like the way that you open the book by saying, “Well, what is cooking anyway?” That’s a very Mindscape thing to ask. So why don’t you tell the audience here your answer to that? That’s where we should start, right? What do you mean by this cooking thing?
0:07:38 KL: Well, so there’s a sort of technical definition of cooking. 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. Cooking is also history, it’s also culture, it’s also 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. There’s many different aspects to cooking. But 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.
0:08:20 SC: How much of a cheat is it that you say heat and the chemical reactions? Those sound like two quite different things.
0:08:26 KL: Well, heat can trigger chemical reaction. It’s basically to just cover my bases because there are types of cooking, say, like making a ceviche, right? It’s like you’re…
0:08:37 SC: Right, that’s what I thought of.
0:08:38 KL: You’re triggering chemical reactions, you’re causing proteins to coagulate, but without applying heat. And you can also argue that combining ingredients, so that we sense them in different ways, like taking raw fish and putting a sauce on it is… Dipping fish in soy sauce and eating those two things together is different than just eating soy sauce and then eating fish. The way we process those sensations is different. So, I would consider all of that under the umbrella of cooking.
0:09:11 SC: So making a salad…
0:09:11 KL: Combining things, heating them maybe, and maybe not heating them, but basically like taking raw ingredients, processing them in some way…
0:09:18 SC: Yeah.
0:09:19 KL: To transform them into a form that is desirable to eat. That’s what cooking is.
0:09:24 SC: That’s a good definition. But I was immediately… This is the physicist in me, sorry about that, but I was just…
0:09:29 KL: Sure, sure.
0:09:29 SC: Caught up in this idea of heat and how important it was. 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 ceviche and salads and stuff like that, but as soon as you say you’re gonna cause chemical reactions in a substance by applying heats to it, that sounds pretty science-y to me, and it gets us right into science questions of how best to apply the heat, and what different ways will do to different kinds of food.
0:10:00 KL: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there are many different ways to apply heat. Yeah, well, there’s obviously the three main ways, there’s convection, conduction, radiation, like the middle school definitions of heat transfer.
0:10:13 SC: The classics, yeah.
0:10:14 KL: Yeah, that we learn. And all three of those come into play in cooking in different ways. But then once you wanna get more into it, you can start thinking about how a different type of pan… Different materials are going to transfer heat in different ways, how the humidity level is going to affect the way heat is transferred, and affect the texture and the rate of those chemical reactions. Yeah, it’s a pretty complex application of heat. And the thing about cooking though is that you don’t necessarily need to understand the science behind it to be able to apply technique, right? There’s many, many great, great, great great chefs in the world and many great home cooks who don’t know what conduction versus convection is, and you don’t necessarily need to know those things to be able to cook well. But I do believe that 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.
0:11:23 SC: 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?
0:11:39 KL: Well, they’re all a little bit different, but there are certain things that are common. Both of them… Both steak and asparagus and bread and anything that you heat up with really high heat that contains protein and carbohydrate will undergo the Maillard reaction, which is the 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. So there are certain reactions that will take place in a lot of different foods. But that said, the Maillard reaction is not just a single reaction. It’s a complex cascade of reactions that are not fully mapped out and fully understood, and they vary a little bit depending on what kinds of foods you’re heating, of course.
0:12:26 KL: That said, from a cooking perspective, just from a purely practical, I don’t need to understand the nitty-gritty aspects of the 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 more complexity, a little bit more sweetness, a little bit more of a savory nature to it. So that, I do know, even without understanding the very specific… I don’t know the specifics of the Maillard 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.
0:13:09 KL: And the complexity’s not just subjective. There literally are more chemical compounds in there. [0:13:13] ____.
[overlapping conversation]
0:13:14 KL: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s like if you sort of imagine it, it’s like your stake is a big Lego… 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 of miniature animals. And so, it’s yeah, it’s not just subjective. It’s there are hundreds of more chemical compounds in there than there were to start with.
0:13:43 SC: That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. If you think of, I guess we use the phrase “raw ingredients” metaphorically, but the literal raw ingredients that we use in cooking are sort of a template from which we draw all these different things by changing them with different processes, by heating them up, by combining them in different ways, by letting acid do its work and salt, and so on.
0:14:02 SC: Yeah, absolutely.
0:14:04 KL: And so…
0:14:04 SC: Yeah, I always, in my head, for some reason, I guess this is because I grew up doing Legos, but I always just imagine Legos in my head. That’s chemistry to me, is like Legos being separated and stuck back together in different ways. [chuckle]
0:14:18 SC: I wrote a whole book on particle physics and the Higgs Boson, and my editor had to cut out half of my Lego analogies because it’s just too…
0:14:25 KL: Oh, really? [chuckle]
0:14:25 SC: It’s just too easy and obvious, yeah.
0:14:27 KL: Yeah, yeah.
0:14:28 SC: But so maybe get down a specific a little bit here. 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?
0:14:43 KL: Okay, well, I think we might have to get into some specifics, but so…
0:14:49 SC: Yeah.
0:14:50 KL: Generally, in the kitchen, conduction is the most efficient form of heating. So let’s just talk about baking a pizza, right?
0:14:57 SC: Good.
0:14:58 KL: Because that uses all three forms of energy.
0:15:00 SC: Perfect.
0:15:02 KL: Of energy transfer. So conduction is what happens at the base of the pizza, the bottom of the pizza, the under belly. So it’s the heat from the floor of the oven that is being… Well, personally, conducted directly. 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 to bake the pizza on can have a serious effect on how that bottom crust bakes, which is why, for instance, 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 volume metric heat capacity, so it holds more energy per unit, per thickness per unit of mass than stone does. It is also much more conductive, so it’s able to transfer that energy much faster.
0:16:00 KL: 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 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. And so, with a pizza in a traditional pizza oven, you’re getting a lot of… The reason why you have to pre-heat the oven for so long is because you need the stones, the brickwork or the stone work in the top of the pizza oven to absorb enough heat that it is emitting enough radiation that the top of the pizza cooks quickly.
0:16:46 SC: Right.
0:16:47 KL: The way we get around that in a home oven is we turn on the broiler, and a broiler heats almost purely through radiation. 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 energy transfer that you’re getting when you cook in a broiler is direct radiation from either a hot electric element or from a gas flame. And then finally, convection in a pizza oven. 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 has this 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 constant cyclone of air that’s moving around the oven. And the faster the air is moving, the faster that hot air is moving, the more efficiently it’ll transfer that heat because well, what happens with steel air is that the air that’s right around the food being cooked, it transfers its energy to the food, and then it just sits there and it cools down.
0:18:00 SC: Right.
0:18:00 KL: So when you have hot air, 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 heat-proof fan in it. And by fanning the air around and constantly cycling it, you create convection currents, and that increases the efficiency of heat transfer. So all three of those types of cooking come into play when you’re cooking a pizza. There’s some things that where 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, 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, 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 a purely conduction-based food.
0:19:03 KL: 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 radiation, pure radiation would be something like an al pastor taco, where you have the… The vertical… You have a vertical rotisserie 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.
0:19:26 SC: Right.
0:19:27 KL: 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. It’s all three are used. I don’t remember what the question was at the beginning, but all three are used to some degree or another in different applications when you’re cooking.
0:19:50 SC: 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 we…
0:20:06 KL: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty safe assumption. I mean, I don’t know for sure either, [chuckle] but that seems like a pretty safe assumption that we’ve been baking bread for longer than we’ve understood exactly how heat is transferred.
[chuckle]
0:20:19 SC: But now that we’re a little bit better, or our science is a little bit better, are we inventing new ways to do things? I was thinking of sous vide in the back of my head as something that maybe was actually inspired by our better knowledge of technology.
0:20:30 KL: Well, I think sous vide is something that’s not necessarily inspired by a better knowledge, but it’s inspired by higher capability. We now have control. It’s a technological breakthrough. I don’t think it’s a breakthrough in scientific understanding of heat transfer.
0:20:48 SC: Sure.
0:20:48 KL: Sous vide is one of those 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 since then, we now have also the technology to do that with air. So at my restaurant, we use combi ovens, which are steam ovens that can hold their temperature to within a tenth of a degree.
0:21:11 SC: Wow.
0:21:11 KL: So it’s sort of like sous vide without the bag.
0:21:13 SC: And I guess maybe, given the heterogeneous audience we have here, why don’t you explain what sous vide is and what it’s good for cooking?
0:21:20 KL: Yeah, so sous vide is a method of cooking that was, well, first invented in 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 sous vide 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 sous vide circulator or a precision cooker, whatever you wanna call it these days. And so what it allows you to do is… So for instance, a steak is medium rare at 125-130 degrees or so. Let’s say 127 degrees is perfect medium rare for a steak. So with traditional cooking, you’d 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, “Alright, I want the center of the meat to be 127 degrees exactly, and so how long do I have to cook it?”
0:22:33 KL: There’s a very fine window of time between perfectly cooked and overcooked, because the whole time I’m cooking it, I’m cooking at a higher temperature than I’m aiming for, so it’s gonna 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 sous vide, you can set the water bath at exactly 127 degrees, so if 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 be at 127 degrees. Now, eventually there are other things that are gonna happen, there’s enzymatic reactions that’ll cause the steak to turn mushy, etcetera, 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 steak. So then what you would do is you would, in a restaurant setting, you would put a bunch of steaks in at the beginning of service, and then if someone orders one, you take the steak out of the sous vide water bath, you sear it really well so it develops a nice crust, you get that Maillard browning, and then you have a steak that’s perfectly evenly cooked edge to edge.
0:23:35 KL: And more than anything, the usefulness in a restaurant and I think for a home cook, is that it full proofs it, so that there’s no possibility that you’re gonna accidentally overcook it. So if you’re a home cook who is worried… You just bought a steak for… A dry aged rib eye that’s two pounds and you spent $50 on it and you really don’t wanna mess it up for dinner, cooking it sous vide is gonna guarantee that you 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 sous vide cooking. There are other things that you can do with sous vide cooking that you couldn’t do… That simply were not possible previously. So for instance, like… Well, we don’t do it at my restaurant anymore, but for a while, we used slow-cooked bacon in a couple of dishes.
0:24:22 SC: Okay.
0:24:22 KL: So that was bacon that we would cook at 135 degrees Fahrenheit for… Sorry, 145 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours. And 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 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.
0:24:55 SC: Why have you stopped doing this at your restaurant?
[laughter]
0:25:00 SC: It sounds awesome.
0:25:00 KL: Mainly for logistical reasons, and partly for… Early on, we were doing… 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 so 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 sort of just to see whether it fit our menu, whether it fit our operations. And eventually we realized, “No, this is not something that’s sustainable,” so we just stopped.
0:25:40 SC: I mean, for the practical advice for the home chef, do you think that sous vide is at the point these days when any decently tricked-out kitchen should have one, or is it still in an optional kind of place?
0:25:53 KL: Well, yeah, it’s definitely, definitely optional.
0:25:55 SC: They’re pretty easy to use, really.
0:25:58 KL: They’re inexpensive devices. These days, they’re under $100. So if you are a medium rare meat enthusiast, I would say then sous vide is a very good investment. But on the other hand, it’s like cooking sous vide, you do miss certain things, right? There’s a certain sterility to cooking meat in a bag, 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, when doing it that way.
0:26:29 SC: For better or worse, yeah.
0:26:31 KL: Yeah, there’s always trade-offs. So you really have to ask yourself what kind of cook am I? What do I want? Do I want… Do I care so much about that perfect edge to edge doneness on a thick steak that I want to go sous vide? Do I care so much about getting a really succulent medium rare chuck roast that otherwise I would have to do as a pot roast? 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.” I have a sous vide… I have a few sous vide devices, but in all honesty, I use ’em probably a dozen times a year at most, once a month or so. For the most part my day-to-day cooking, I don’t pull it out. But on the other hand, it’s also I’ve been… I’m a restaurant-trained cook who’s been cooking for 20-something years professionally, so it’s like if I want to, I can nail that perfectly juicy chicken breast.
0:27:29 SC: You could get the temperature right. You can get it medium rare. You know how to do it.
0:27:31 KL: Yeah, yeah, without the sous vide. Yeah, yeah.
0:27:33 SC: Yeah, in some sense the sous vide 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.
0:27:43 KL: Exactly, yeah. It’s more than anything… And in restaurants, the main reason we got the combi ovens in our kitchen now which we use for our sausages and a few other things, we keep them… We hold sausages at 135 degrees and then finish them by searing them on the flattop. The main reason we got that is because it takes out any question of human error.
0:28:09 SC: Yeah.
0:28:10 KL: So it’s like we can focus on the other things like… Of course, our cooks are well-trained, but we know for a fact that the sausage is going to be perfectly cooked every time, and I don’t really have to worry about that. So it’s like one of those things that’s sort of taken off. 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, 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 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, don’t wanna have to sit there like babysitting a steak or a pork chop when they have to be making the salad or cooking the vegetables.
0:28:56 SC: Yeah. Right. In the real world, sure.
0:28:57 KL: You can leave it there. It’s good to go whether your family is ready… With traditional cooking methods, it’s done when it’s done and you better be ready to eat it. With sous vide, it can wait for you. When you’re ready to eat, you sear it and you eat, and that’s it.
0:29:13 SC: The other question…
0:29:15 KL: So it takes a lot of the worries off your plate.
0:29:15 SC: 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…
0:29:27 KL: Yes.
0:29:29 SC: It can’t help but make me think about entropy and thermodynamics and things like that. But I’m not quite sure if there really is a connection there or if I’m just drawing one because of my prejudices.
0:29:40 KL: Yeah, you would know better than me. That seems to be… That seems to make sense.
0:29:49 SC: There’s an arrow of time when you cook.
0:29:52 KL: What’s that?
0:29:52 SC: There is an arrow of time when you cook. You can push things in one direction but you can’t undo it.
0:29:56 KL: Yes, there is an arrow of time. Oh man, and 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.”
0:30:12 SC: It’s a classic. Yup.
0:30:13 KL: Yes. It took her a while to understand, but I think she got it.
0:30:15 SC: That’s why three-year-olds are good audience.
0:30:17 KL: Yes, yes. There is an arrow of time with cooking. And 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 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 sort of re-crystallizes as it cools down. With wheat flour, that recrystallization is reversible, well, partly reversible. So you can take old bread and reheat it, and it’ll get soft again, right? It’ll taste fresh again.
0:31:22 SC: That’s true.
0:31:23 KL: 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 corn starch 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 a tacoria 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 US, 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 re-heated, 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.
0:32:25 SC: There’s certainly dishes like stews or chilis where they seem to taste better the next day, right? You make them and you to think that they’re at their peak, but then you put them in the refrigerator, take ’em out and microwave them, and they’re even better. It’s not just an illusion, right? There really is something going on?
0:32:43 KL: So it’s a little difficult to do tests on that, but the… So the tests that I have done, where I made… 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 of days apart or a day apart.
0:33:07 SC: Yes.
0:33:07 KL: And so when it’s served, one of them fresh and then serve one of them a day old. But the reason it’s difficult is because it’s never gonna be the exact… It’s not like you can make one batch and divide it in half.
0:33:16 SC: Right.
0:33:17 KL: 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 texture, like thickening, and the texture of that changes when you re-heat. Flavor-wise, it’s a little bit harder to pin down. And 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.
0:33:57 SC: Yeah, okay.
0:33:58 KL: And so… 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? And whether it has to do with texture or flavor. And in those cases, it’s like, yeah, you can… You know what? [chuckle] Now, I’m trying to remember off the top of my head now, and I’m positive that I have an article about this on Serious Eats 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.
0:34:31 SC: Exactly. I can look it up and we can link to it.
0:34:32 KL: But from what I remember, I was surprised that the differences were less than I expected them to be.
0:34:37 SC: Even if the differences are psychological, like you said, if it contributes to your enjoyment, that still counts. Right? If you are cured by a placebo, you’re still cured.
0:34:43 KL: Of course. Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the things that I think is really interesting, particularly about taste. So I used to work for Cooks Illustrated Magazine, and they relied very heavily on blind taste test 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, blind tests are extraordinarily limited, because in real life, nobody is tasting things blind, right?” And our perception of taste is not just about what we’re perceiving on our tongue, it’s not just about the literal physical interactions we’re having with the world and the sensors that we have built in. Taste is something that you synthesize in your brain.
0:35:28 KL: 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 stimulation you’re taking. You’re also taking into account your memories, you’re taking into account your current mood, you’re taking into account the connection that you have with a specific food that you have, and all these different sort of conscious and unconscious biases that your brain has built in, and that’s where your sensation of taste comes from. So it’s like you can say that, when completely blindfolded, all eggs taste the same. And this is a test I’ve done many times, and I can say 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 that came from a factory farm. 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.
0:36:39 KL: And so it’s very… It’s one thing to say like, “This is what our blind taste test showed,” but that’s not the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to taste and perception. I have a certain affinity for PBR, which is, 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-gallon 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 like… And so that was like the Pavlovian… The reward that we got at the end of a good service was like these ice-cold beers. 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 happy feeling. And so, to me, ice-cold PBR tastes great when, objectively, it probably doesn’t.
0:37:39 SC: But that’s okay, is the point, right? It’s not like a mistake.
0:37:42 KL: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly. It’s not a mistake, exactly. It’s totally fine to feel that way. It’s like you should… It’s great. It’s like… When it comes to, say, to the eggs, it’s great that eggs that came from chickens that were treated better tastes better to me, because not only does it make me enjoy the eggs more, it also leads to happier chickens.
0:38:03 SC: Happier chickens.
0:38:05 KL: So it’s like, where’s the downside in that?
0:38:06 SC: 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…
0:38:11 KL: Yeah. Yes. [chuckle]
0:38:14 SC: The differences in quality that were perceived went away, but that’s okay ’cause the color of the eggs matters.
0:38:20 KL: Yeah, exactly. So 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.
0:38:30 SC: Yep, but don’t tell them.
0:38:31 KL: And that deep orange color will make them think, “Oh, these must be wonderful eggs.”
[laughter]
0:38:35 SC: The brain is just as important as the tongue in all of these experiments.
0:38:39 KL: Yeah, more important.
0:38:40 SC: 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 we were taught when I was still 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 ways of tasting is a better way of saying it.
0:39:04 KL: Right, right, right.
0:39:08 SC: So is that… How science-y is that whole spiel about some small finite number of ways of tasting things?
0:39:14 KL: 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…
0:39:24 SC: Bitter.
0:39:25 KL: And bitter, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now we’ve added savory to that. So there is a certain amount of science as to what the types of chemicals that trigger those sensations to us. There’s old maps of the tongue where it’s like, “Oh, we taste sweetness here, we taste saltiness there.” Those are mostly bunk. 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 maps said, I think that’s largely been disproven. But yeah, 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. So as a child, you can say, “Alright, 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, so it’s like…
0:40:39 KL: And by the same sense, 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 gonna pick the sweetest chocolate and the fruitiest, least bitter, least astringent olive oil as being the best. But if you then go and ask a 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 pepperiness and a certain bitterness.” Because those, once you start stimulating those sensors in our tongues that sense bitterness, it actually makes us salivate more, which then brings out other flavors in food. So it’s like, there’s a difference between what are purely pleasurable, and again, I think a lot of this comes down to experimental design, where it’s like you’re tasting an olive oil on its own without the context of food or anything else, right?
0:41:40 KL: And it’s like… And without having the 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 gonna make us salivate more, which then makes us more able to perceive the sweetness of those vegetables. So there’s certain synergistic effects that different types of flavors get from each other. And so if you also think about, say, Southeast Asian cuisine, it’s 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?
0:42:30 SC: Yep.
0:42:31 KL: And so we think of that, and yes, you can think of certain Thai dishes that are popular in the US that contain all of those flavors. So Tom Yum Goong, sweet and sour, hot and sour soup, or larb with lime juice and chillies and sugar and fish sauce. But when you… The reason that we’re drawn to those dishes is because they capture all the 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 of those elements all together. There are many dishes that are just purely bitter, or many dishes 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 balance each other out. And so again, [chuckle] I think I got off on a tangent and I don’t remember what we initially were talking about, which happens frequently to me. I’m sorry.
[overlapping conversation]
0:43:32 SC: The different [0:43:32] ____.
0:43:32 KL: This is why I’m a writer and not a talker, because with writing, you can always go look back and see what you wrote.
0:43:37 SC: Yeah, I know, exactly, you can edit yourself. [laughter] No, but we’re putting together the five different basic modes of tasting, right? And like you say, a dish might have all of them, but it’s not necessary. If you’re having a meal, then you can put them together in different dishes.
0:43:52 KL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like my… Yeah, exactly. So it’s like my pizza. So I think that as far as seasoning goes, 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 a 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, it 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.
0:44:34 KL: So for example, it’s like a pasta dish, it could be something that has acidity on its own, it could be something with a bright acidic tomato sauce or a squeeze of lemon at the end. But I could also eat a rich Ragù Bolognese which might has a little bit of acid from the wine, but I would be drinking it with a wine that provides acidity, so that it kinda cuts through the richness of it as I’m eating it. So it’s like… And that’s the same idea of eating 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. Right? It’s because you’re combining that fatty-ness 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 [laughter] there goes my theory.
0:45:34 SC: People overindulge sometimes. That’s okay.
0:45:36 KL: Yes. Yes. [chuckle]
0:45:37 SC: But also, you brought up the idea that we have training in this. Right? It’s not all nature, there is 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, because that’s what made sense to them. And he predicted that 30 or 40 years from now, they’ll be enjoying the same kind of wines they like in California, or France or Spain.
0:46:13 KL: Right. Is that a… When was this that you went on that trip?
0:46:20 SC: Just like five or 10 years ago, not too long ago.
0:46:22 KL: Oh okay, okay, got it, got it.
0:46:23 SC: Yeah.
0:46:24 KL: I was in China, I guess, five years ago now. And while I was there, I found, and I’m pretty sure this is true, ’cause I remember looking it up. I haven’t looked it 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.
0:46:41 SC: Oh. Did you taste any Chinese wine?
0:46:43 KL: No. [chuckle]
0:46:44 SC: Okay, I did not either.
0:46:47 KL: We tasted a lot of rice wine, a lot of traditional Chinese wines. We didn’t taste any Chinese grape wine though.
0:46:54 SC: Yeah, there’s no reason in principle.
0:46:56 KL: But that absolutely makes sense. Maybe China as a nation discovering wine is sort of like my daughter discovering chocolate, where she immediately goes for the really sweet stuff. But the more you get exposed to chocolate, the more you start to appreciate the complexities of the not so sweet stuff where you can really taste all the other flavors and you can taste all the different aromas. It’s almost like 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?
0:47:37 SC: Yeah.
0:47:37 KL: And I think it’s the same with any kind of, any kind of consumed medium, like music. I think 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 the more context and the more story that a piece of food has that you’re consuming, whether that’s your personal story or whether that’s a more global story, I think the more interesting it can get. I used to have this mindset where the story of a food had to be a kind of specific thing, and I think a lot of people have this idea also about… And it ties into the idea of authenticity, where it’s like a steak that was raised by a farmer who raised the cow, named the cow himself, fed it by hand, whatever. That that steak has more of a story value than, say, a steak that was grown in a lab in a test tube or in a petri dish, right?
0:48:44 SC: Yeah.
0:48:44 KL: And since then, I’ve kind of come to realize, you know what, my idea of a story is not necessarily any more valuable than someone else’s idea of a story. So for someone else, they might find the idea of a steak that is grown, made from stem cells and grown in a lab to be a far more fascinating story, and therefore far more interesting to eat than any one of a million cows that has a name. And so these days, I try very hard to reserve judgment and to remember that my idea of value is not the same as everybody’s idea of value when it comes to food. And so long as you are thinking about the food and thinking about gaining some value beyond just the eating pleasure of it, beyond the sustenance element of it, that who am I to judge what actually is interesting and isn’t.
0:49:43 SC: 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.
0:49:51 KL: Exactly.
0:49:51 SC: That’s something to keep in mind, yeah. When you’re designing a new dish or when you’re trying to, in your restaurant, you have to actually figure out what’s gonna be on the menu, how many of these aspects do you come across 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?
0:50:18 KL: Well, so when we’re designing a dish for the restaurant, 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 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.
0:50:43 SC: Yeah.
0:50:44 KL: Right?
0:50:44 SC: Oh, yeah. [chuckle]
0:50:45 KL: And it’s a different set of equipment, it’s a 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 a good month or so from the time I have finalized a dish to the point where we’re 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 experimental stuff. 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 a very… I’m the kind of chef who really likes to, and writer actually, 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, and I’m sure that I can get them consistent. So that’s the technical side of the coin.
0:51:43 KL: 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. And I think my writing and my online persona gives me a lot of latitude as far as… And the way we designed the restaurant, it gives us a lot of latitude. It’s modeled after German beer hall, but I… We incorporate elements of cooking from all around the world, and it’s particularly a lot of Asian ingredients and techniques.
0:52:24 SC: Well, that is what people are going to expect, right? They’re gonna expect something that is not exactly a traditional German beer hall.
0:52:30 KL: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so 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. It’s like a German beer hall, but not all the food is brown and white. We tried to make things green and red and purple.
[chuckle]
0:52:46 SC: Weird.
0:52:47 KL: Just because we’re in California and we get great produce, and because that’s just what a California audience wants. But eventually, it’s like we realized, “You know what, people are not coming here just for this beer hall experience. They’re coming here because they read my book, or they know… ” They’re coming here because it’s my restaurant, partially at least. And so, they’ve come in expecting a little kind of crazier stuff, which is great for me. It’s like, alright, I guess if that’s what people want, I’ll just do… I’ll cook the kind of stuff that I wanna do. And so now the menu criteria is like, as long as it’s something that goes well with beer, as long as it’s something that’s gonna get people to order beer, and it’s something that I would personally want to eat with beer and find interesting, and I’m able to convince my partners.
0:53:36 KL: So there’s a good balance because I’m super into the internet, and I know my audience, I know what my readers want. Whereas, my partner, Adam, he’s sort of a Luddite. He has no idea about how social media works. He doesn’t know any of that stuff. And so, he knows really what the local crowd who don’t follow my stuff want. And so, between the two of us, it’s like we have this Venn diagram of what my audience wants and what a general audience who has no idea who I am wants, and we just kind of find that little football-shaped intersection, and that’s what forms our menu. But yeah, I would say we spend a lot more time, a lot more of the early time on a particular menu item thinking about the cultural element of it, and how it’s going to fit in with the culture of our restaurant, with the culture of our area. And also whether it pays its cultural dues to the sources that I’m glomming, that I’m taking techniques and ingredients from.
0:54:40 KL: So, we did, for example, for a while, we were doing a Spaetzle dish with Kimchi. So it’s like a combination, German-Korean hybrid thing. And I don’t wanna be the kind of chef that’s just like, “Oh, I love Kimchi, I’m just gonna shove it in here because whatever,” without really understanding how it’s typically used in Korean cuisine. And so with that dish, we designed it very much based off of Tteok-bokki, which is a home-style Korean rice cake dish that often has Gochujang and Kimchi. And the techniques that we use in making it, and the flavor combinations that we use there are drawn very, through a lot of rigorous research and experience in Korean cuisine because, well, because I wanted to make sure that the dish makes sense to both cultures, and that it doesn’t feel like we’re just… Well, cultural exploitation. I don’t wanna ever feel like I’m just stealing something from someone without actually understanding the historical or cultural significance of it. And 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 training our staff how to cook it or testing it out on customers.
0:55:56 SC: 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 gonna go together. Broccoli and, I don’t know, chicken livers are better than you might have thought. Do you ever use that kind of thought process?
0:56:20 KL: Yeah. I’m super dubious of that, only because I think, as we were talking about before, it’s completely impossible to divorce the cultural and historical and personal elements of flavor pairings in food from the actual interactions, and the actual chemical, physical interactions that they have. So it’s like, sure, we can say, “Alright, 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… Alright, so first of all, a lot of that has to do with the way they’re specifically prepared, but it’s also like… 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.
0:57:15 SC: Yeah, for better or for worse.
0:57:15 KL: For some people, it might make them taste much better together, and for other people, it might make them taste worse together. So it’s… I think 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 yeah, I’m very dubious about that, that whole side of molecular gastronomy. [chuckle]
0:57:48 SC: I’m personally a huge fan of molecular gastronomy, but I absolutely agree that it can go too far. 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.
0:58:08 KL: Yeah, yeah, you do. And it’s also… You also… The thing is, you have to also, at some point, realize that the results are highly personal, right? It’s…
0:58:19 SC: Yeah.
0:58:20 KL: There’s no such thing as like these things universally go well together, right? 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 steak. It’s like it all has 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.
0:58:41 SC: There’s this moment around 10 years ago when I think I went to 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.
0:58:51 KL: Yes.
0:58:51 SC: At any one of those [laughter] restaurants.
0:58:53 KL: Oh Really? I love olive oil ice cream. [laughter]
0:58:55 SC: 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?
0:59:00 KL: Yeah. That’s you right?
0:59:01 SC: Yeah.
0:59:01 KL: I personally love olive, in fact, I… Just last night, I put, I drizzled olive oil and put sea salt on ice cream for dessert.
0:59:09 SC: Oh, this changes everything.
0:59:11 KL: Yeah.
[laughter]
0:59:13 KL: In fact, at our restaurant at Wursthall, we’re not open currently, but the one dessert that we’ve had on the menu. We’ve had a few different desserts that have rotated around, but the one dessert that we have had since day one that will be on the menu again when we reopen is a roasted pumpkin seed oil ice… Sundae 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.
0:59:47 SC: Well, I should say…
0:59:49 KL: Some people’re like, “Oh, those things sound weird together. I’m not gonna get that.
0:59:50 SC: Salt…
0:59:50 KL: I’m not gonna order it.
0:59:51 SC: Salt on ice cream makes sense.
0:59:52 KL: But most of the time, people who do think like, “Oh, that sounds like it could be interesting, will get it and because they know they’re the type of person who is into interesting flavor combinations like that, they like it.
1:00:03 SC: Yeah.
1:00:04 KL: It’s one of those things where you have to kinda know yourself and tasting it is not really gonna make much of a difference. There are some cases where it’s like something sounds like it’s going to be good and then it ends up being terrible.
1:00:15 SC: Yeah.
1:00:15 KL: But I feel like usually if something sounds like it’s going to be delicious, it’s probably gonna be delicious to you.
[laughter]
1:00:21 KL: Assuming that the execution went well.
1:00:23 SC: I did this podcast with Michele 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, right? They like the idea of obeying the rules.
1:00:39 KL: Right.
1:00:40 SC: And other people are just happier violating rules whatever the rules are…
1:00:44 KL: Right.
1:00:44 SC: And that’s gonna go into what you enjoy at the dining table too.
1:00:48 KL: Yeah. And you know what’s… What’s funny is that I’m the latter, right? I hate rules and if somebody tells me to do something or that I have to do something, it makes me much more unlikely to do that thing or to enjoy that thing.
1:01:03 SC: Yeah.
1:01:04 KL: And I know that about myself, but what’s funny is that when my book came out and when I had my column, Food Lab, my audience seems to be the opposite. Well, at least a lot of my audience seems to be the kind that enjoys my writing because I explain here is why I’m doing this, here is 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 often times I think to myself, ” Oh my God! I’ve created this monster. Where it’s like, “Oh, you can’t cook a steak that way because Kenji said cook it this way.”
[laughter]
1:01:32 KL: And it’s like, “No, that’s not what I meant at all.” But people will often sort of call up my name and use it as an authoritative proof that the way someone else is doing something is wrong, which is not, 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…
1:01:52 SC: You wanna do it.
1:01:52 KL: Likely to figure out why I like doing it that way.
1:01:55 SC: Well, I think this is…
1:01:56 KL: Not to try and change what I like.
1:01:57 SC: 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.
1:02:12 KL: Right.
1:02:13 SC: 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 gonna give you the exact recipe. I’m gonna tell you the template for making a great soup out of any vegetables in any way.”
1:02:34 KL: Right.
1:02:34 SC: I’m like, “This is the kind of thing that works.” The theory of the recipe is what I’ve always been looking for.
1:02:40 KL: Yeah, yeah. I’m glad you got that ’cause I feel like a lot of people don’t get that out of the book, but I mean, I guess a lot of people do as well. The analogy I always use is that if you think about cooking, the food landscape is a map, right? And it’s like…
1:02:57 SC: Yeah.
1:02:57 KL: A recipe is sort of like a term. It’s like going onto Google and saying, “Hey take me to the grocery store here and you get sort of turn by turn directions and it’s like, Alright, on one case like I could be looking down on my phone the whole time, just completely ignoring the world.
[laughter]
1:03:12 KL: Follow the turn by turn directions on the map and arrive on my destination, right? And that’s what following a recipe precisely is.
1:03:19 SC: Yeah.
1:03:19 KL: It will get you from point A to point B and it will 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 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 gonna give you turn by turn directions here.”
1:03:42 SC: Yeah.
1:03:42 KL: ” But I’m also gonna give you the whole map, so that if you want to go to a different place or you wanna 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 end point that I get to.” And that’s sort of what understanding the Science and understanding the technique behind cooking is like.
1:04:04 SC: 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…
1:04:23 KL: Yes.
1:04:23 SC: There’s also the philosophy of cooking as Science that you try different things, you do experiments, you kind of 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.”
1:04:42 KL: Yeah and often time, for some people, they feel like they don’t have that luxury because they cook to feed their families and they…
1:04:48 SC: Yeah.
1:04:48 KL: Don’t wanna mess things up. But if you’re okay with eating something different than what you had planned, it’s really hard to mess something up so badly that it’s literally inedible and I find it’s always interesting to eat the experiments, to eat them and think about what kind of, what might have gone wrong or what might have gone accidentally right and… So I recently, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I’ve recently, for the last month or so, I’ve been doing this daily YouTube show where I basically just strap a camera to my head and I cook without really planning. It’s like I have a general idea of what I’m gonna cook…
1:05:23 SC: Oh, I did not see that but that’s fantastic. Yeah.
1:05:24 KL: Before I start, but it’s not like I weigh out my ingredients or, it’s sort of like the anti-cooking show, where there’s nothing… Things go wrong all the time. And that’s just generally… 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 I have all these recipes in that book, but I can honestly tell you that of the 300 and something recipes in that book, since that book was published, I’ve maybe made two of them the exact same way that they were published.
[chuckle]
1:05:55 KL: I don’t follow recipes. I understand techniques and I know like, “Alright, when I make chili, here are the different elements.” So the recipe for chili in that book has 40 ingredients and it takes 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 wanna do, 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 very specific idea of the perfect food every time because I find that food’s more interesting when you experiment and when you decide for yourself, ‘Okay, what do I want out of it this time? What do I want out of my chili this time?'”
1:06:41 SC: 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 there.
1:06:51 KL: Okay.
1:06:51 SC: But oh, my God! The compliments I got.
1:06:53 KL: Ruined. Bacon ruins it, bacon ruins it. I can’t put bacon in that. [chuckle]
1:06:55 SC: No, no, it was good. Just a little bit, a little, probably a little bit. But yeah, people thought I was a genius after that. I didn’t wanna… 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 ’cause you put more than one chili recipe in the book, so there’s the maxi chill and then there’s the weekend night chili that you wanna just get it done with. But you gave 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.
1:07:35 KL: Yeah, no, that’s definitely true. And that’s something that you find frequently. Well, ’cause cooking is one of those things where there is science to it, but it’s also one of the things that most people do. Well, certainly, every group of people does it every day, multiple times a day. Maybe not every individual in a group does it, but everybody eats every day, or at least almost…
1:07:56 SC: Hopefully.
1:07:58 KL: 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, “Alright, I know this works. Why should I care about doing it any other way?” In the same sense that there are a lot of people who see eating as a burden. 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. I personally don’t understand those people, but they exist and it’s…
1:08:34 SC: They do.
1:08:35 KL: And who am I to judge that? And especially when you’re talking about in a professional setting, in a restaurant kitchen, restaurants are very high-stress places. They’re very low-margin businesses. You don’t really have the luxury of wasting food or taking time to test things. And once you find something that works, you stick with it. And in some cases, especially with sort of old-school chef mentality where the chef cannot admit any kind of failure or fault, you look at some old-school chefs like Gordon Ramsay. 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 sort of just a product of the way kitchens, professional kitchens used to be run, this sort of very strict hierarchical system that kitchens were run by.
1:09:36 KL: And so, I think that’s how a lot of sort of these myths get perpetuated, someone tells you… 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’re not taking into account the fact that the reason… Maybe that works in a restaurant setting. Maybe that works when you’re cooking 40 eggs at a time, but it’s not the same as when you’re cooking two eggs at a time for your family. Maybe it’s only that way because that’s the best way to get a line cook motivated to do something, where… So you always 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?
1:10:28 SC: Yeah, and presumably, the same advice goes to things you heard from your great-grandmother as things you heard for Michelin star chefs. They can come from other contexts that might not apply to your situation.
1:10:39 KL: Yeah, exactly.
1:10:41 SC: So I guess to close up, let me just ask. 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 boil a pot of pasta to a slightly larger degree of creativity in the kitchen?” What is a step you can take to open up your horizons a little bit to all the different techniques out there?
1:11:17 KL: Well, what I would say… So the process by which I learn about a new dish is that I… So I almost rarely… Rarely do I follow 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 five or six recipes or I’ll look… First of all, I start with the history of a dish, actually. I’ll look up like, “Okay, what does this dish mean? Where did it come from? What does it mean? What kind of cultural and historical contexts does it have?” 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.
1:11:56 KL: So if I’m looking up a Spanish tortilla, 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 huge debate in Spain about whether a tortilla should have onions or not in it.” And so from there, you get a better context of why certain techniques exist and why some techniques might differ from the other. And then by getting a better understanding of a food, you can then sort of place it in the 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 a few key cooking processes that are different from recipe to recipe and start to think about why they might be different. And if you have the capacity and the time and the patience, you can try it multiple ways. But it’s the same as learning about anything. You just gotta practice and be smart about the way you think about it.
1:12:48 SC: That sounds good to me. Do you have…
1:12:50 KL: Yeah, that will be my advice: Practice and be smart.
1:12:53 SC: 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 would be your final meal if you had to choose?
1:13:03 KL: Yeah, well, it could be a few different… I would say right now, my… No, it will be dumplings and mapo tofu. Not traditional… The way my mom made them. So Japanese gyoza that my mom made out of… She would take leftover beef from hamburgers, I think, and mix it with whatever food scraps she had. And then, Japanese-style mapo 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… [chuckle] It was something I grew up eating.
1:13:37 SC: Exactly, that makes perfect sense. Does that go well with beer?
1:13:41 KL: It goes well with Calpis, which is a Japanese yogurt drink.
1:13:45 SC: Oh, okay. I’m not familiar with that one. Alright, good, something more to discover. Well, anyway, lots to discover here. Kenji Lopez-Alt, that was really fantastic. Thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.
1:13:55 KL: Oh, well, thanks for having me.
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