The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

sciences (and particularly poorly in English, for the record),
spending my summers playing music (chamber music camp,
not band camp, thank you very much!) or working in
biology laboratories. Did I ever show an inclination to
cook? Not really. I took an after-school cooking class in
third grade, where I learned to make simple syrup and stone
soup. My dad trained me in the art of making open-faced
tuna melts on Saturdays. He also taught me a valuable
lesson in how not to cut a block of frozen beef straight from
the freezer into steaks—a memorable afternoon that
included the line, “Kenji, go get me the hammer,” and
concluded with shards of knife all over the kitchen floor and
beef still as blocky as it ever was.
My specialties all through high school were half-assed
guacamole and perfectly heated frozen chicken potpies. The
one time I did exert myself in the kitchen, I produced a
batch of what I thought were some pretty awesome almond
tuiles coated in chocolate and filled with raspberry
preserves. Being the incurable romantic that I am, I’d slaved
over them for my high school girlfriend for Valentine’s Day,
see? Turns out she wasn’t as into romantic nerds as I
thought she was. I got dumped on Valentine’s Day, her dad
ate the tuiles, and my fledgling cooking career was put on
hiatus.
The time for me to move upward and onward with my
college education finally came, and I entered the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology—that temple of
science where nerdfolk congregate en masse to talk hertz
and bytes and the average student wears only two-thirds of a
pair of shoes during winter (I brought down the average).