It wasn’t so long ago that we learned to cook from an authority figure — our mother, our boss, Julia. They showed us how to do something, and we did it — without asking questions or demanding answers. But these days, the thirst for explanation is bottomless, either to help in actual cooking or to use as ammunition in online arguments.
Stepping into the fray this month is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose new book, “The Food Lab” (W.W. Norton), is a lavishly illustrated, 950-page, 6½-pound exploration of how science works in cooking that’s sure to be one of the big books of the fall cookbook season.
Lopez-Alt will already be familiar to many. After graduating from MIT (with a degree in architecture), he worked at Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Illustrated magazine, the monthly missal for the explanation-obsessed. For the last six years, he’s been the author of the Food Lab column on the Serious Eats website, billed as “unravelling the mysteries of home cooking through science.” The book is a compilation of those columns, plus lots of new material.
“The Food Lab” is loaded with fascinating information, all of it pegged directly to explaining how the basic processes of cooking work. This is an important distinction, as kitchen science is most valuable when it’s rooted in practice. (Full disclosure: In 2001 I published a book on kitchen science called “How to Read a French Fry,” which Lopez-Alt credits in his acknowledgments.)
“The Food Lab” falls somewhere between the pure science of Harold McGee’s elegant essays in “On Food and Cooking” and the geeky excursions in Nathan Myhrvold’s “Modernist Cuisine.” Lopez-Alt gives you enough science for the explanations to make sense, but everything is still firmly rooted in practical home cooking. While it could be read straight through, thanks to Lopez-Alt’s breezy conversational style, it’s probably most helpful when you want to learn about a specific topic.
Maybe the most valuable thing science can contribute to cooking is its method of inquiry — theories are worthless if they can’t be verified. This is where “The Food Lab” shines, when in addition to offering the theoretical explanation of what’s happening, Lopez-Alt grounds his findings in experiments he’s carried out. When should you salt a steak? Lopez-Alt tested half a dozen different timings and found that salting either an hour before or just before cooking was best.
When do you salt a hamburger? Or a sausage? The answers are different because the desired results are too. Lopez-Alt found that you want a looser, more crumbly texture for a hamburger, so you’re better off salting just the outside of the formed patty right before cooking — salting earlier will create protein linkages that will turn the burger dense. You prefer that kind of texture in a sausage, however, so you salt earlier. To make his point, Lopez-Alt dropped a Dutch oven on each hamburger sample and observed how it splattered. Science does not need to be dull.
Granted, the search for the perfect cooking technique sometimes leads to unnecessary “MacGyver-ing” — torturing a process so a simple task winds up being needlessly complicated. To hard-boil an egg, Lopez-Alt drops it into boiling water for 30 seconds, adds ice cubes to stop the boiling, returns the water to exactly 190 degrees and then cooks for 11 minutes.
But that’s not unexpected in this kind of book, and it may even be desirable — Cook’s Illustrated has built a million subscribers doing just that kind of thing.
The book is also studded with hundreds of recipes, mostly the sorts of dishes that adapt so well to the home kitchen. There is a lot of ground beef (hamburgers, meatloaf), but there are few trips into molecular cooking (sous-vide is limited to what can be done in an ice chest, no exotic thickeners here).
The Peruvian-style roasted chicken was terrific (rubbed with spices, spatchcocked and cooked at high temperature to get a really crisp skin). Even better was Lopez-Alt’s simple technique for roasted potatoes. He uses bakers rather than boilers, simmers them until they’re almost tender, then tosses them in a pan with fat and to rough up the edges (to set up the best crust). After roasting at 450 degrees for an hour, these were the crispest, lightest roasted potatoes I’d ever made.
It may be, as he says, just a matter of building up a coating of dehydrated gelatinized starch, but these potatoes were seriously delicious. Which is, after all, the whole point.
PERUVIAN-STYLE ROAST CHICKEN WITH SPICY JALAPENO SAUCE
1 hour, 15 minutes. Serves 3 or 4
PERUVIAN-STYLE SPICY JALAPENO SAUCE
2-3 jalapenos, seeded and roughly chopped
1 cup chopped cilantro leaves
2 cloves garlic, minced or grated on a microplane (about 2 teaspoons)
½ cup mayonnaise
¼ cup sour cream
2 tablespoons aji Amarillo paste (optional)
2 teaspoons fresh lime juice (1 lime)
1 teaspoon white vinegar
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Combine the jalapenos, cilantro, garlic, mayonnaise, sour cream, chile paste, lime juice and vinegar in the jar of a blender, and blend on high speed until smooth. With the blender running, slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Season to taste with ½ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper, or to taste. This makes about 1 cup sauce, which can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.
PERUVIAN-STYLE ROAST CHICKEN
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon paprika
3 cloves garlic, minced or grated on a microplane (about 1 tablespoon)
1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon oil
1 (3½- to 4-pound) chicken, butterflied
Peruvian-style spicy jalapeno sauce
1. Adjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position and heat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. In a small bowl, combine the cumin, paprika, garlic, vinegar, salt, pepper and oil, and massage together with your fingertips.
3. Dry the chicken thoroughly. Separate the chicken skin from the breasts. Spread the spice mixture evenly over the chicken and all under the skin.
4. Set a wire rack on a rimmed baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Position the chicken so that the breasts are in the center of the baking sheet and the legs are close to the edges. Roast until the thickest part of the breast close to the bone registers 160 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, 35 to 45 minutes.
5. Transfer the chicken to a cutting board, tent loosely with foil and let it rest for 10 minutes, then carve and serve with the spicy jalapeno sauce, if desired.
NOTE: Adapted from recipes found in “The Food Lab” by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Aji amarillo paste can be found in select gourmet and Latin markets, as well as online.
SUPER-CRISP ROASTED POTATOES
1 hour, 25 minutes. Serves 4 to 6
3 pounds baking potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1- to 2-inch cubes
Kosher salt
¼ cup duck fat, bacon fat or olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Chopped fresh herbs, such as thyme, rosemary, parsley and/or chives
1. Adjust the oven racks to the upper and lower-middle positions, and heat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Place the potatoes in a large saucepan and cover with cold water by 1 inch. Season generously with salt. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are just barely cooked through, about 10 minutes (a knife or cake tester inserted into a potato should meet little resistance). Drain and transfer to a large bowl.
3. Add the fat and a few generous grinds of pepper to the hot potatoes and toss well; the potatoes should end up with a thin coating of potato-fat paste.
4. Spray two rimmed baking sheets with nonstick cooking spray (or coat with a thin layer of oil). Transfer the potatoes to the baking sheets and roast until the bottoms are crisp, rotating the pans halfway through cooking, about 25 minutes. Test the potatoes by trying to pry one or two pieces off the baking sheet with a stiff metal spatula. If they don’t come off easily, roast for additional 3-minute increments until they do.
5. Flip the potatoes with the spatula, making sure to get all the crisped bits off the bottom, then continue to roast until golden brown and crisp all over, about 25 more minutes.
6. Transfer to a serving bowl, season to taste, and toss with chopped herbs.
EACH SERVING
Calories 246
Protein 5 g
Carbohydrates 39 g
Fiber 4 g
Fat 9 g
Saturated fat 3 g
Cholesterol 9 mg
Sugar 2 g
Sodium 18 mg