The Science of Cooking Well with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
As you all know, over here at FWNTT, we are not the most kitchen savvy individuals. But after today… we just might be! J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shares with us some insights from his incredible career as a chef, food writer, and food science enthusiast. We learn the best ways to improve our cooking, why knife skills matter, why you shouldn’t feel bad for taking longer than the recipe time suggests, and when to use high vs. low heat.
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Juna [00:00:01] OMG you guys, today is such an exciting day because guess what?
Eddie [00:00:05] What?
Juna [00:00:06] Although this podcast is literally called food, we need to talk. We have never ever had a professional chef on food. We need to talk.
Eddie [00:00:17] You know? You know, we talk a lot about the health of our foods. But mostly, no matter how healthy the food is, if it's not tasty, you're not going to be able to eat it very long, are you?
Juna [00:00:28] You're not in. The irony is that Eddie and I are both like, cooking challenge. Like we're not the best cooks. So I don't know why we made it so long. Because it's really, really important to have somebody here to tell us how to cook. Because we know what we're doing.
Eddie [00:00:40] Let me, let me. OMG, you know, you are telling all of our secrets now that yes, we talk about food, but, you know.
Juna [00:00:48] We don't know what to make.
Eddie [00:00:49] So I'm particularly excited to talk to today's guest because you may have heard of him, Kenji Lopez. All is from Serious Eats, and he has the recipe, which is his podcast with Kenji and Deb.
Juna [00:01:02] And it's a really fun podcast cause I just listened to a whole episode on how to make pancakes, and it's really cool, guys. He's basically a celebrity chef, okay? And I think Eddie and I both learned a lot on this episode. So if you are interested in the science of cooking and in how we can become better cooks, if you're not cooking inclined the way in are, then this is the episode for you. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie [00:01:27] And I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna [00:01:31] And you're listening to food. We Need to talk, the only health podcast that will make you so hungry. By the end of the episode, you will have to go cook. Before we start, we just wanted to shout out one of our favorite reviews of the week. You guys were so close to 2000 reviews. Please, if you haven't reviewed the show, go give it a five star rating and review and edit. Do you want to read the review? Because a really good one.
Eddie [00:01:58] I would love to. After bingeing the first two seasons of food, we Need to talk in about a week, I decided everything I was getting on. Can we say the name? Yeah, Noom. I can get here.
Juna [00:02:11] Yeah. Tell him.
Eddie [00:02:12] Tell him. The up to date sciencey encouraging shows are ten times better than the Noom course. Plus, Noom tries to be funny, but is nowhere near the pleasant banter of you and Eddie. I think you and you get the very best experts as guests and they are all personable. How do you do that? It goes on. I have learned so much from food. We need to talk and I tell my friends about it all the time. Just a break away please everyone listening, tell your friends I started exercising with resistance bands, walking more and eating food, not food like substances is incredible and I am feeling empowered to be happy and healthy to enjoy even more. I just ordered the book. It looks fantastic! Thank you. In conclusion, paragraph four linking conclusion. You are saving me a ton of money as I cancel Noom. Thank you Yuna and Eddie.
Juna [00:03:10] God bless. Thank you. It's like we planted this review. I don't know who this person is, but it's like we planted it. I swear to God, this is like the idea.
Eddie [00:03:17] This was not written by I.
Juna [00:03:19] This is not in my eye. And this was not written by editor. I, thank you so much. That was so, so kind. And yeah, if you haven't given us review yet, guys, please go do so. We appreciate you so much. And now to the episode. Welcome to another episode. Today we are joined by Kenji Lopez. Alta and I will let you introduce yourself with your title because you have so many titles that like I was going to call you a professional chef, but I actually think you call yourself a professional home cook. Is that right?
Kenji [00:03:48] Well, I don't have a restaurant anymore, so I'm not a chef in, you know, in the professional sense. No, I'm a recipe developer and a writer, so I'm a cookbook author. I have a, a column for the New York Times where I write about food science, you know, and I have a YouTube channel, right, where I cook stuff at home. And I've also got a podcast. Yes. I've also got a podcast with Ted Perlman. It's called The Recipe. And we talk about the recipe development process. We talk about how recipes get written, and how we make sure that they're foolproof for home cooks.
Juna [00:04:17] Okay, cool. So kind of a different way of looking at food than our show usually looks at food, because we are very much a health show. So we're always looking at food from a health perspective. But I actually think it's really, really cool to get a more professional kind of person whose job it is to make food taste good, because as a person is terrible at making food taste good. I just think it would like, really help everybody along on their health journeys if their food tasted good and was healthy. So I'm really glad to have you on.
Kenji [00:04:47] Oh, well, I'm glad to be here.
Juna [00:04:48] So do you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about your background? So I think it's really cool how you, your background is in science and also in food.
Kenji [00:04:55] I went to school for, for architecture, actually, although I was a biology major for a couple of years. But yeah, I, you know, science has always been something that has been very interesting to me. And, you know, everyone else in my family is a scientist, my my dad and my grandfather and my sisters, they're all scientists. I ended up going into architecture and then, you know, and then I kind of accidentally fell into into cooking. It was sort of a summer job that I took because, I wanted to take the summer off from working in. I had worked in biology labs for a couple summers in a row, and I realized that after working those summers that this wasn't what I wanted to do, for the rest of my career. So I, decided to change majors. And so the summer after I did that, I was just looking to make some money to spend it, you know, so I could live for the summer. So I was looking for a job as a server, and I went into a restaurant that said that they needed cooks, that they had a cook who hadn't showed up for work that day. And so if I could start that day, I could just I could have a job as a cook for the summer. So so I took that job and, you know, and I, and I ended up really enjoying cooking. And so I went into that sort of full time after I graduated, you know, part time through the rest of school and then went into it full time after I graduated. But, you know, I never lost sort of the the love of science. And, you know, for me, the goal was always to get to a point where I could sort of marry those two things, the science and the cooking and, you know, I had that opportunity. After several years working in restaurants, I got a job as a as a test cook and, Cook's Illustrated magazine, which does an awful lot of sort of scientific testing during the recipe development process. And so I got to do quite a bit of that there and then, you know, and then after that, I started my column called The Food Lab on on Serious Eats, which is, you know, online publication. Right. And that's where I really sort of got to, got to kind of, well, I don't know, do whatever I wanted. All the questions that I'd been kind of building up about, you know, why we cook things certain ways, you know, things that I've been asking or had been curious about when I was working at restaurants, whether, you know, restaurants, you look at the time to, to, explore those questions too much. So I yeah, I just had a very long list of questions I wanted answered. And it turns out people like reading about that kind of stuff. So, you know, and so I had the opportunity to kind of make a career out of, out of doing that and answering the questions that I want to answer. As far as cooking goes.
Eddie [00:07:10] And just to clarify, the serious is like like the word serious, not serious radio.
Kenji [00:07:14] I know you like the word serious. Yeah.
Eddie [00:07:16] Right. Yeah, yeah. When I, when I first heard it, I thought, like, I think I'm serious radio. It's. No no no no.
Kenji [00:07:22] So serious. Yeah. Serious.
Eddie [00:07:24] Excellent. So you and I are both admittedly people who are in the kitchen with food occasionally and, you know, may, may or may not be cooking it.
Juna [00:07:34] I'm cooking challenged.
Eddie [00:07:36] I have, my wife is an amazingly passionate cook, creative and prolific, and just looks in the refrigerator and kind of sees things pop out at her. And I'm aspiring to be her good sous chef. Okay, I was advised along the way, start with cooking, because baking is like a formula, and you have to be much more exact when you're looking at food in the kitchen or you're looking sounds like a little bit more for the formula of what's going on.
Kenji [00:08:10] I wouldn't say I'm necessarily looking for the formula. So, so regarding the question about cooking versus baking, both of them can be very creative pursuits. You know, the difference is that in cooking, it's it is much easier in general, not always, but in general, it's much easier to adjust as you're cooking. So something doesn't taste right in the pan. You you can add more salt, you can add more, you know, add more pepper, whatever it is. Whereas with baking, a lot of times you got to mix it and then you get one shot at baking it and then you pull it out and it is what it is when it's done right and you can't go back and say, oh, now shoot, I should have added more cardamom. You know, you just have to do it again next time. So in that sense, baking is more precise because you do have to measure things out more precisely to begin with because you can make adjustments later on, you know? That said, I wouldn't say my cooking and any of the stuff I do is particularly precise in terms of it being, prescriptive. You know, I find that in fact, learning about sort of the science and technique behind cooking, the reason why you're doing things actually makes you a little bit more free, in the kitchen where, you know, so I think about recipes kind of as if you don't understand the technique, if you don't understand the basic principles, about why you're doing something, you're kind of a slave to the recipe. You got it. You got to do what the recipe says to get from point A to point B, right. And and that's sort of what the recipe is really. It's like turn by turn directions that you're getting from point A to point B. So you know, if it's like if I moved to a new neighborhood and I want to get to the post office, I can get to the post office just by staring into my phone and seeing, okay, okay, walk to here, turn right, turn left here, you know, walk 100ft. Stop. It's right here, you know, and I'll get to the post office. And that's kind of like what following a recipe is, whereas understanding the technique is more like having a map of the neighborhood, you know, so you can you can follow along in the recipe and see, okay, here's where I'm trying to go. And, you know, and these are the steps that are going to take me there. But you have a, a more sort of zoomed out view of it as well. And you can understand why these particular steps get you there. And once you get a little more experience, you can then sort of understand, okay, now that I've gotten here, well, I can get there through slightly different steps. Like, let's say I have less time to make it today or today. I don't have an onion, but I have a bunch of scallions. I can I still make it right. And you can sort of once you have sort of a more, the more zoomed out map, you can kind of plan your own route to get to the end, and you can also decide to go somewhere completely different once you get even more experienced. Right. And and so in that sense, I think, learning techniques, and learning the science behind cooking actually makes you more, it makes it easier to improvise and makes you more sort of expressive.
Eddie [00:10:40] Cook.
Juna [00:10:41] Yeah, I totally agree. I was listening to your podcast before this to prepare, and when you guys were talking about, for example, pancake recipes and you were explaining, like what? Baking powder and what baking soda does, it made it makes so much more sense to me because I was like, now that I understand what they're for, it makes it so much less arbitrary to me why certain recipes have baking powder, and certain ones have baking soda, and certain ones have both. And it just feels to me like I just like, don't understand, like, why are all these recipes so different? But they all make buttermilk pancakes. Like, it just makes no sense. And then when you're explaining it, I was like, oh, this makes so much more sense. Like it made it a lot less daunting. Ironically, even though like you're explaining the science of it, I was like, okay, now it feels like there's a reasoning behind these things. And so, I don't know, I did feel a lot less intimidating, I guess.
Eddie [00:11:25] Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, you know, I.
Kenji [00:11:28] Yeah, I always feel like I want to know the why. You know, it's like when when someone tells me to do something, I want to, I want to know why I'm doing it. And so that's always, you know, my goal with explaining recipes is that, I don't know, I try, I try and offer what I would have wanted when I was learning how to cook, which is here's the recipe and here's why you're doing these things. Because once you understand the why, then that allows you to sort of make your own. It frees you to make your own decisions. You know, you can follow the recipe exactly if you want, but if you know that adding more baking soda is going to make your pancakes a little bit browner and you really like dark brown pancakes, then you know, you go ahead and you add a quarter teaspoon more baking soda and you know that it's going to work.
Juna [00:12:03] And I was going to say, I feel like the more experienced chefs or cooks I know are much less tied to their recipe. Whereas for me, because I'm like terrified of missing something out because I know I don't know what I'm doing. I like follow recipes to the letter I like, measure everything out and like, freak out as soon as I mess something up. Whereas I've noticed with other people that are more experienced, they're a lot less, anxious in the kitchen. So they are more free to make tweaks to the recipe, which is like a cool thing to aspire to as well.
Kenji [00:12:31] Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with following recipes. Exactly. You know, they're the only thing you got to be careful about is making sure that you get your recipes from a good source, from making sure that you're getting recipes that are going to work. Because there's a lot of, I don't know, the internet has made it very easy for people to publish recipes, which is good in many ways. But it's also made it made the barrier for entry pretty low as far as quality of recipes and as far as like testing of those recipes go. So it's much easier to find recipes, but it's also very easy to find bad recipes I think these days.
Eddie [00:13:02] The experience that I'm having recently is with my wife being somewhat busier at work. She said you got to take over some more of the cooking. So talk about training wheels. We're getting Purple Carrot, which is one of the meal delivery kits. And it certainly comes with recipes. And I mean to say that I was dutiful in following exactly what they said. I mean, Kenji, like, I mean, we're talking to the letter. Yeah. And then my wife arrives home and. She looks and she thanks me. And then it takes a she said, did you try this along the way? I'm like, they didn't tell me to try it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They they just say, hey. So they didn't say that. They didn't say to test it before you put it in. You know, the second and third lemon and the the mustard. And, how was I to know that it needed more salt and then so she, you know, gently said you have to taste this along the way. I guess my question I need more.
Kenji [00:14:02] Salt is better than than having too much.
Juna [00:14:04] Oh.
Eddie [00:14:04] So true. Thank you. You got me. You got me covered there, which I appreciate. You can't undo the salt very easily, but, so they take me through the next step. Like, I now feel like I can. I'm still.
Kenji [00:14:19] Same. Okay.
Eddie [00:14:21] So again.
Kenji [00:14:22] You feel like you can roast a purple carrot?
Eddie [00:14:24] Well, I feel like I could put together my own rest or I don't need their box. In other words, I can, and it's actually sort of comical. Like, I'll go around the kitchen using one of their recipes and collect all the spices, and I put it into a box that happens, you know, and I'm ready to go home tonight and then get the vegetables out. But like, take me through the next step in terms of planning.
Juna [00:14:47] How do you graduate from.
Eddie [00:14:49] Yeah yeah.
Kenji [00:14:51] Well I would say find a sauce that you like, you know like whether, whether it's a cuisine or a single chef like a single author and sort of work through their stuff for a while, you know, there's no sort of magic bullet where suddenly you're going to be able to just, you know, cook and improvise. I feel like it's it's you're going to be slowly adding tools to your toolkit as you go, you know, and learning which ones work for you and which ones don't. And so I would suggest finding a cuisine that you particularly enjoy, or going to a bookshop and finding a cookbook that looks particularly appealing to you and just working your way through it and getting yourself familiar with some dishes that you're going to want to make, repeatedly, you know, because you learn how to do things through repetition. And so by finding dishes that are relatively simple things that you can practice on and things that are going to be sort of, you know, pleasing both to you or whoever you're going to be serving regularly, that you can eat it, you know, regularly once a week or once a month or however long it is a lot of the variability as far as the time that it takes to cook a meal comes down to knife skills and repetitive tasks, like things that people do all the time that some people, you know, one of the reasons why, if you look at a recipe, say something published in the New York Times, and you look at the suggested time, you know the time that it tells you it's going to take the way that time is calculated, it counts all the ingredients in the ingredients list as if they've been prepped to that point already. So, if it if it says like one carrot chopped, it'll assume that the carrot has already been chopped before you start counting the time. And the reason it does this is because and the reason why most recipe sites that have that are, you know, pretty reputable do this is because the time it takes a person to cut a carrot is, just vary so drastically. And so, you know, once you start cooking, you can say, okay, if you're over medium high heat, this onion is going to take about six minutes to soften. Right. And that's going to be the case no matter who's cooking it. At least it right there or thereabouts. But a cup of onion chopped. It could take someone 30s. It could take someone five minutes. And so a lot of times when you're, when you're working on prep for a recipe and you're trying to judge how long something is going to take, you need to add the suggested time. Plus, however long it takes you to prep everything up to the level of the ingredients list. And that's the part that I think is most time consuming and daunting for a lot of people. And also, what throws a lot of people off from cooking is that they look at this recipe and they see, oh, it's going to take half an hour. And then no, no, no, it actually takes them an hour, an hour and a half. And a lot of that comes down to, yeah, just practicing knife skills and getting faster at that sort of production part of it. And so, you know, just finding a set of recipes that you enjoy that you can continuously cook over and over and getting yourself familiar with them and getting yourself use of those knife skills. And then, you know, from there expanding, I think is, is a good way to go. You know, meal kits I think are I think are fine. I think the recipes and stuff that you get in them are less contextualized than they would be in a well-written cookbook. And I think that context often helps either to, you know, either to get you excited about other types of dishes that can be made with similar flavor profiles. Or, you know, in some cookbooks, they'll be organized by techniques once you learn how to use a technique, like, say, how to braise a dish, you'll be able to now make these other, you know, braised dishes.
Eddie [00:17:58] I just want to acknowledge and, you know, bear witness. And anyone listening to that, I feel like I'm talking to my my cooking therapist because I feel so much better about myself knowing that it's.
Juna [00:18:09] Going to take you so long.
Eddie [00:18:10] Exactly. It's it's supposed to take 25 minutes. And two hours.
Juna [00:18:14] Later, I saw a TikTok that was like Gordon Ramsay making butter chicken. It was like butter chicken in 14 minutes. And I was like, what? How? What happened? I just don't even know.
Eddie [00:18:24] The the other thing that the other thing that I've learned just to reflect on is the idea of like, sure, I'll open up the kit. I will do exactly what they say to the letter. I will chop the onions just the way they say. And it wasn't until you not know if I told you the story a couple of weeks ago. And for people to understand culinary medicine. Culinary medicine is spreading across the United States. Medical schools are now teaching kids how to cook. And a colleague of mine set up a program at Harvard Medical School. And I went into the kitchen with the students, and they had a chef. And he, taught me how to look at the pile of vegetables. This was towards the end of their course. So instead of saying, chop this carrot and diced this onion, he had like 12 vegetables and you had to pick what you were going to use. And then he gave a context and, you know, he said, here's why you want to dice the onion, because each piece should be the same size. I'm like, I'm saying to myself, idiot, like, that makes sense. And then and then he was quizzing the kids, which one are you going to put into the sauté pan first? And I'm like, don't ask me. You're not. You know the answer.
Juna [00:19:29] It's like the harder ones are longer to cook.
Eddie [00:19:32] It took me a number of years to learn this.
Juna [00:19:33] No, it's so the.
Eddie [00:19:35] Context is huge and I'm excited to go.
Juna [00:19:38] On. Okay. What I was going to also say was this is remind me a lot of music. So my undergrad, like a lot of my time was spent with classical piano. And I feel like the first step of music is you're learning to play other composer's pieces, right? And you have to learn to play them exactly right and blah, blah, blah. And then like, as you get better, like, a lot of people move on to composition where you're making your own pieces and you kind of take things from other composers that you learned, but you also put your own twist on them. And then like, the more you do it, the more things become your own. And I feel like a similar thing is supposed to happen with cooking. And I've gotten stuck at I can only follow other people's instructions, and if I ever try to like, create my own, it's just not good.
Kenji [00:20:14] You know? So the part I mean, the analogy, the music analogy that I think about is that, so a lot of this sort of little the technical skills and cooking are kind of like practicing your skills, you know, practicing your skills in arpeggios and that and doing your etudes. So I play violin, and I actually, I was, I was a classical composition minor. Okay. College.
Juna [00:20:32] But, so you get it.
Kenji [00:20:33] Yeah. It's like you practice your scales and, you know, and then pieces, actual written pieces are built on scales, right? At least at least depending on the genre. But in most things that they're playing these days, they're, they're built on scales. And so it's the same in cooking where it's like going back to what it's talking about with with the knife skills. That's like practicing your scales and getting used to the sort of the sound of things, and being able to tell, like when something like, say, you're sweating an onion, right? And depending on the heat or the size of the pan and the moisture content of the onion, the length of time it takes for to sort of properly sweat can vary a little bit, you know, which is why oftentimes, you know, good recipes are written with visual cues and auditory cues, and not just sort of timing and temperature, but learning that, you know, so like there's a sound where, the most of the water from the onion has started to evaporate off, which means that the pan can now start to start rising above the boiling point of water, and you can start rising above 212°F. Which which starts giving it more of like a crackling sound, like a frying sound, as opposed to a sort of sweating, like, sputtering sound. And so, you know that that's like a cue that you like, you kind of just learn how to use where it's like, I could be over at my cutting board chopping a carrot, and I'm cooking onions in the pan. And I can hear where they are in their cooking process just because they're used to that sound, you know? Totally. And that's like one of those things where if you're playing an instrument, it's like you might practice, you know, doing a string crossing or, I don't know, a piano, like crossing your fingers early on. And you might practice that as, like a, as a sort of exercise, but eventually it's like you do it so much in practice just by playing pieces and by and by doing your scales and stuff that, that part of it, you don't really think about it when you're doing it anymore, right? Your fingers just kind of do it, you know? And so in that sense, it's like cooking. There's no magic bullet, here that it is. I think a lot of it does come down to just getting into the kitchen and doing it. And the more ways you can sort of make yourself enjoy that process of getting in there and doing it, you know, whether that's finding dishes you like to make or finding sort of an angle of attack that you like, whether you're interested in sort of the science or, or a specific culture or something like that. You know, the more the more you can get yourself into the kitchen just actually cooking, you know, the more experience you're going to get and the more you're going to start picking up on those things that are, you know, simple to read about but don't necessarily don't necessarily play out in practice without actually practicing them a lot.
Eddie [00:22:46] And we'll be right back with chef Kenji Lopez alt. Food We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health. The home of Full plate Living. Full Plate living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples being strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full Plate Living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers, and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at Full Plate Living Dawg. And we're back with chef Kenji Lopez Ault.
Juna [00:23:39] In terms of knowing what flavors go well together. I think this is where I really struggle, because I think that other people have a better vocabulary for like what things can go well because they've had a lot of different foods and they've cooked a lot of different foods. And at a certain point people will just know, like this type of food goes really well with these types of spices. And that's why I feel like I just like don't understand. And I know I kind of have the general genres of like, I know what kind of spices go in Indian cuisine and when spices go in Italian cuisine. And then I kind of look at the vegetables I'm using. I'm like, these seem like Italian vegetables cause it's like eggplant and stuff. So I'm like, okay, like, yeah, I'm going to use like the Italian spices. And that's kind of where I like get really lost. So I'm like, I don't understand why everybody else seems to know what things can go together. And I just like, don't understand until I try them like this. It's just not that good.
Eddie [00:24:27] Well, I mean, I think the secret.
Kenji [00:24:30] Is that is that it's all a matter of taste, right? There aren't things that necessarily inherently go well together. And you'll find that when you change cuisines or move to different parts of the world, that the ideas of what goes well together can vary drastically, right? You know, like there's like a Moroccan dish that's pigeon or, you know, often chicken with, cinnamon and powdered sugar that's baked in pastry. It's like, like chicken with powdered sugar in it. And that's like a, that's a to a lot of people, that would sound really weird. And it's really delicious, but it would sound weird, right, right. Whereas, you know, in Italy, mixing, putting cheese on top of fish would seem strange. But like, my wife is from Colombia, you go down to Colombia and there's trout that's broiled with cheese all the time. It's very common. Right. And so so there's a lot of things that you sort of hear as rules you use or you hear that like this goes together with that, but then you're going to find a million examples of how to break that. And so really what I would suggest is again, sort of find the cuisine that you're interested in. Like if you're interested in Italian cuisine, like do a deep dive into Italian cuisine and see how flavors are paired, across Italy, see, you know, maybe do sort of a geographic exploration and see how flavor pairings change according to the climate, our change between northern and southern Italy. And from there, you know, you can see the variations there. And from there you can see, okay, well, if it changes this much in just Italy, like, how much is it going to change from Italy to the rest of the world, you know, so, but I would say just starting starting small and keep your focus on something that you're just really interested in. And then you can decide sort of to move on from there. And we're not I think it's fine. You know, like many chefs, they specialize in one cuisine, and they might get sort of a broad overview of other types of cuisines, but they really just focus on one. And I think, I think that's fine. Going deep, on to one single cuisine and learning everything you can about it, I think is, is great. I tend to take a sort of broader approach to this, which means that I don't get as deep an individual cuisines as a lot of other cooks do. But I think, you know, you can find your own personal balance as to what works for you and what you enjoy doing.
Eddie [00:26:26] What's your take on the almost like, I'll just say like a preoccupation of health in regard to our food versus I was at a cooking conference at the corner of America, and one of the chefs there, she was responding to a question about, could you make this dish like, without the pork? And I loved her answer. She goes, you could, but like, why would you want to? It's like, it's just like it's just a little piece and it's gonna, like, flavor this whole big dish. And I can't remember the name of the dish. Yeah, but it was sort of this tension between the, the, the health there and the preoccupation versus just freaking make something delicious and you'll enjoy it. And what can you share with us about that?
Kenji [00:27:12] Well, you're the health experts, but, you know, my my take on all this tends to be so, first of all, like any move that gets you eating less prepared foods and cooking more for yourself, I think is a healthy move because it means you're actually paying attention to the individual things that are going into your body. And I think, you know, any any move that gets you to pay more attention to that is going to sort of automatically make you probably think about it more and make better choices in the long run. So in that sense, I think cooking is always good. My general take on and health issues is that.
Eddie [00:27:43] I don't know, ultimately, like, we.
Kenji [00:27:45] Kind of know what's good and bad, like what's good and bad hasn't changed like drastically over the years. And you can get caught up in fad diets and whatever ingredient is, is being highlighted, you know, as good or bad currently. But in general, like I feel like I know, like what's crap and what's not, and I just limit the amount of crap I take in. And that seems to work. Okay.
Juna [00:28:07] Can you I don't know, this podcast.
Eddie [00:28:08] That.
Juna [00:28:09] He just summarized, he just summarize the whole podcast and like.
Eddie [00:28:12] Amen.
Juna [00:28:13] Amen. 30s I know that makes a lot of sense. Do you ever consciously think about health when you're cooking or are you of the mind like just because you're cooking, it's inherently going to be healthier and so there's no need to like, really subsidize.
Kenji [00:28:27] I don't necessarily think about the health of an individual dish that I'm cooking like, I don't I don't work on the level where it's like, oh, I better swap out like this cheese for. A skim milk cheese are a better. You know, here, I'll use applesauce instead of ricotta. Like I don't I don't think if I'm making an individual distro, I'm going to make it taste as good as possible. I think about health more on a, you know, on a more macro level than that. So, not not even in an individual meal. It's like I don't mind having just pizza for a meal, but I might have, you know, I might have just salad for a meal, like the next day. Right? Like, I think about it more, and especially since having kids, you know, it's like our kids eat the same things that we do at home. And for me, like the way I kind of monitor their health is like, if my daughter doesn't feel like eating peas one day, that's totally fine. If or if she just wants to pick through and either gesture pasta one day, that's totally fine as long as I go over the course. You know, if I look at her over the course of a few day span, she's generally eating a varied diet, you know, and the choices she's making it generally good that I don't really worry about it. And I, I kind of think about it the same way for myself. It's like, yeah, I'm if I if I'm making pizza for every single meal, then I'm gonna start questioning if I'm doing something wrong. But as long as, you know, over the course of a week or whatever, we get a variety of foods, then, I generally am okay with it.
Eddie [00:29:42] I have the same sensation listening to you explaining that as a few minutes ago when you said, like, pull the camera back a little bit, go a little bit more upstream, like, understand what's going on and the, the chemistry and the kind of the science of the cooking. Okay. I love this idea of like, we're not just focusing on arguing with your kid about, you know, eating six more peas otherwise. Oh, right. Dessert. But just sort of like, take a deep breath. You know, no one's going to starve here. And you could have your peas tomorrow if you want them and enjoy the pizza while you're, you know, while you're having that meal. Yeah.
Juna [00:30:13] How do you think about making healthy food taste good for people that, like, are consciously trying to, quote unquote, eat healthy if they really identify as like, they take a lot of effort to have a healthy lifestyle. A lot of time, obviously, that food just, like, doesn't taste good. And I'll just get like an obvious, you know, and. Well, well, okay, I'll just say a lot of the meals that people will be, you know, like the, what's the word stereotypical, the stereotypical bro meals of like rice, chicken, broccoli or like everything is protein shakes. Everything is like low fat. This there's just like a lot of protein that people have to prioritize all this stuff. What do you think is the biggest thing that makes those things not taste good? And how do you think people can improve the taste?
Kenji [00:30:56] Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't eat a ton of those meals, but I mean, I like rice, chicken and broccoli. We eat a lot of rice, chicken and broccoli at home. But I, you know.
Juna [00:31:04] How do you make it?
Kenji [00:31:05] Well, I think the.
Eddie [00:31:06] Key makes it. Well, okay.
Juna [00:31:10] You're not steaming everything. Yeah.
Kenji [00:31:12] You would certainly. You could steam broccoli and have it tastes really good or blanch it in, well, salted water, you know, and have it taste good. So I think probably the first two things that people need to, pay attention to to make their food taste good is, salt and acid. So, you know, like a salt and a squeeze of lemon can go a long way to making, your broccoli taste good or your chicken taste good. Like a good, flavorful fat. Like olive oil will go a long way to making broccoli and chicken taste good. You know, technique wise, I think building flavor into them is an important thing. So with broccoli, like, you can just boil it in, salted water. And, you know, if I do it that way, then generally I'll try and serve it with a kind of a more flavorful sauce, like I might make like, like an herb mayo or something like that, which I guess I don't know if you're if you're paying attention to your health, you're not going to eat it with an herb mayo. Or I might do, you know, I'm like chopped capers and lemons and and garlic, something like that. But but if you want just the plain broccoli, you know, doing it some sort of really high heat method like roasting at a really high temperature or grilling it, or broiling it or doing something where you're going to get some of those sort of browned, crispy, nutty bits, is like goes a long way to building flavor into just plain broccoli. And similarly with chicken, it's like, are you just steaming it? Or can you get away with like, grilling it or doing something that's going to build some flavor into it? Are you are you brining it, to make sure that it stays juicy, etc.? So.
Juna [00:32:33] Is brining different than marinating?
Kenji [00:32:35] Brining is distinct from marinating, although they can often overlap. So brining is specifically about salt. So, you know, they're, you know, traditional brine like a wet brine. A traditional brine would be where you take your chicken or your pork chop or whatever it is, and you and you dunk it in a bowl of salt water. And, although these days, what I, what I generally recommend is what was what you call dry brine, which doesn't really make sense, but it makes sense because it's a process that stems from, from the brining process. But essentially you salt your meat in advance and you put it on a plate and just let it sit in the fridge with the salt on it. For chicken, it'll help even half an hour in advance, but you can do it up to day in advance. In either case, whether you're doing just a dry bryant or a traditional brine, the salt will dissolve some of the proteins in the in the chicken or in the meat, whatever the meat is, so that, when they subsequently cook, there's proteins don't tighten up as much. And so they don't squeeze out as much moisture. And so that's how brining essentially works is that given that you're cooking it, you know, cook to the same temperature, say. 40 degrees for like a pork chop, you know, medium a brined pork chop will squeeze less and end up with, I can't remember how much 11% more moisture or something like that. I can't, I can't remember off the top of my head.
Juna [00:33:46] And why did you specifically say roasting at high heat? Sorry not to interrupt, but, Emery, you said like high heat. Why does high heat matter versus just roasting at 350?
Kenji [00:33:54] So basically, the temperature at which you wrote something is going to change sort of the temperature gradient of the food inside. Right. And so when you're roasting at a relatively low temperature, you have a much more subtle gradient inside. So say you're roasting a piece of chicken, right. And you're and your chicken is done when the breast reaches, 160 degrees in the center, if you're roasting at 300°F, maybe, you know, the outer 5% of it will get, say, above 200°F, right? And then from there, you'll have a sort of gradient all the way to the center, where it's 160 degrees. If you're roasting at a much higher temperature, like 500 degrees, you'll have sort of a bigger band of, higher temperature meat on the outside, like the gradient will be much more severe. However, you'll also get a lot more browning on the outside. And so the higher the temperature you go, the more browning you're going to get on the outside before it's cooked through the center. And the lower temperature you go, the more evenly you're going to cook and the less browning you're going to get. So for something like broccoli, or cauliflower or brussel sprouts, where I feel like I want to try and retain some of its fresh bite. So I want the center to be relatively not, you know, not super cooked, but I really want the outside to be extremely well cooked because I want to develop this dark brown, nutty flavors. That's when I'll roast at really high heat as opposed to low heat. Similarly for something like if I'm, roasting a whole chicken, I would tend to do that at a very high temperature because I want the I want the skin to brown. Really well. On the other hand, if I was roasting, chicken with like, like skinless chicken, for example, I would roasted at a low temperature because I don't want, I know that, without the skin on there to sort of insulated and protected that chicken breast meat has a tendency to, you know, dry out at higher temperatures.
Juna [00:35:35] Hockey puck.
Kenji [00:35:36] Yeah. Exactly. So, so those are situations where I would choose a lower temperature where I don't care as much about browning, and I just kind of want more even cooking.
Eddie [00:35:43] So, as we start to wrap up and we could obviously ask you questions.
Juna [00:35:48] About so many more. Yeah.
Eddie [00:35:50] I wanted to, just express some gratitude and acknowledgment that I think what I'm evolving towards listening to you is that, like, I don't need to a rush through any recipes I'm trying to do because I eventually may not need a recipe. I'll aspire to that. I need not rush through and feel badly that it's taking me three times longer, because it does take me a long time to chop carrots. I'm getting. I'm getting better, but also to pay attention. More like I would go into the kitchen thinking like, oh, what podcast am I going to listen to while I'm cooking? And now I'm thinking, like, I need to pay attention to listening to my what is it, sweating onions. It sounds like it sounds like a it sounds like a punk. Sounds like a punk band. But to actually like, listen and to appreciate what's going on when the broccoli is getting brown. So I just wanted to say thank you for all of that. And I'm going to be looking up. Remind me your book.
Kenji [00:36:44] My first book is called The Food Lab. And then I have another book called The Wok.
Eddie [00:36:50] And the food lab is about the science, right. As well as.
Kenji [00:36:53] I was about. Yeah, sort of the science and technique of home cooking.
Eddie [00:36:57] Yeah. So thank you so much.
Juna [00:36:59] This was so cool. Kenji. We have so many questions that we have to let you go.
Eddie [00:37:02] I have to say, yeah, we've done dozens, almost 100 podcast episodes. This is the first one where I'm like really hungry.
Juna [00:37:11] I was thinking about it too. I was like, damn. Like, I've put more effort to my dinner today because I feel inspired.
Eddie [00:37:15] So thank you so much.
Kenji [00:37:17] Yeah, well, thank you for having me.
Juna [00:37:21] Thank you so much to Kenji Lopez for joining us. On today's episode, we will link to his column and his podcast and his book. Everything will be on our website. If you want to hear the rest of our episode with Kenji, where we talk all about spices and salt and how to get a grill flavor without having a.
Eddie [00:37:40] Grill, and also how to use an induction stove, I am clueless.
Juna [00:37:43] Eddie's induction stove trebles. Then head over to food. We need to talk.com/membership. You can find us at food. We need to talk on Instagram, and you can find me at the official unit on Instagram and a unit, yada. On YouTube and TikTok. You can find.
Eddie [00:37:58] Eddie in the kitchen paying attention to my sweating onions.
Juna [00:38:03] That sounds like it's like means something I know. Okay, food we need to talk is a distribution. No. I'm sorry. Food We Need to talk is distributed by Pyrex.
Eddie [00:38:15] Our mix engineer is Rebecca Seidel.
Juna [00:38:18] And we were created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie [00:38:22] For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to talk. Com. Thanks for listening.
Juna [00:38:32] If you want to hear the rest of this bonus episode, head to food. We need to talk ecom slash membership and thank you so much to everyone who chooses to support us.
