PREFACE
Longtime fans of J. Kenji López-Alt can celebrate.For years we’ve loved (and cooked from) his practical
columns about kitchen science on the excellent
seriouseats.com website. With this book—precise and
serious, witty and relaxed—Kenji joins the glittering
constellation of men and women who have, over the past
thirty years, brought the ancient human art of feeding
ourselves into the scientific age. What goes on within a cube
of ice or a stew-pot has followed the three laws of
thermodynamics, among many others, for the past forty
thousand years—or however long you believe it’s been
since our species’ first act of cooking—but we just never
really knew it. Kenji stands on the shoulders of giants, of
Achatz, Adria, Arnold, Blumenthal, Kurti, McGee,
Myrhvold, Roca, and This—all of whom have brought the
realm of pure thought into the scullery, where it materialized
into something delectable. Kenji does it in his own way. He
has a degree from MIT and eleven years in restaurant
kitchens—in my mind, the two minimum qualifications for a
man who would aim to make a better hamburger or, to my
surprise, boil a better pan of water. Kenji’s recipes produce
simple, delicious specimens of home cooking. They are not
difficult to carry out, but they can be extremely precise,
while the thought behind them may be complex, and his
testing obsessive. But Kenji’s book is not about recipes.