A Letter For J. Kenjo Lopez-Alt
The Food Lab and Serious Eats Founder
If you don’t know who J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and you like to both cook and eat delicious food, like me, than today’s letter will be a real treat. Kenji is one of the great independent creators of the blog/youtube era of the internet. He’s an absolute ALL-TIMER.
He starting writing on the internet in 2006 and he came into my life in 2009 when I graduated from the Air Force Academy and moved to Downtown St. Louis and got an apartment with a whole kitchen. This was a big deal for me.
Why? Because I grew up cooking and in the kitchen with my mom, a fabulous midwestern mom-chef, and for 4 years I lived in a dorm and wasn’t able to cook. So when I finally got to be an adult and have access to my own kitchen I kinda went crazy.
Kenji was sort of like my own personal sherpa, my guide, my mentor. His mix of culinary skills and knowledge with science hooked me in. Using the scientific method and explaining what happens to food on a molecular/chemistry level when prepared was game changing for me. It meshed with my brain perfectly, I could understand it and trust it more than a regular cookbook.
The Food Lab is different from a normal cooking blog - Kenji will cook the same dish a bunch of different ways and explain why the results are different and examine which methods he prefers best. It’s a revolutionary way to communicate about food and the cooking process. This is what his wiki says about it:
The Food Lab is "a seminal work that is encyclopedic in scope and can be used as a reference by even the most experienced home cooks"
The path to trying recipes and methods was so fun and easy, that it made me want to cook every night. I’d wake up excited knowing that I had something to prep and cook, I treated it like I was a professional chef even though I was just making food for my friends and neighbors. My roommate (Spencer) and I would have these food nights where we both would make something different, battling in the same kitchen iron chef style, and then serve them to our friends. It was awesome, exhilarating, and fulfilling.
Those nights I also learned to love serving people. I get so much enjoyment out of cooking and watching people eat what I’ve made and enjoy it. It’s one of the ultimate forms of love and fulfillment for me.
In some ways Kenji is like my pseudo-grandma, his recipes and methods have become my recipes and methods. And my recipes will become my kids recipes (my son Otto already likes to cook and help in the kitchen and the salmon is his favorite dish). Heck, maybe even this letter will pass along his recipes to you, here are my all-time favorites from Kenji:
How to cut without sticking to knife:
Just a couple days ago Kenji posted an article to his Patreon page titled “Dear Alcohol, we need to talk”. It’s beautiful. You should read it because I’m not going to try and explain it (and my words mean nothing compared to his own).
What I will say is how proud and grateful to him I am for him publishing it. It’s so authentic and real. It takes so much courage to write something like that and put it out to the world. I’m so thankful to Kenji not just for the 18 years of The Food Lab and all that I’ve received from him through that, but for being a role model in authenticity. For being a middle-aged man with kids thats willing to bare his soul outward on his own misgivings (we are all imperfect humans trying our best).
With love and deep appreciation,
-Andrew