Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
A fridge is basically just a big, cold box with a few shelves in it, right? Well, that's true, but where you store food in the fridge can have quite an impact on its shelf life.
A zipper-lock bag will work for basic, short-term sous vide cooking projects, but for extended cooking and storage, you'll want to pair your sous vide circulator with a vacuum sealer.
Like a good grilled cheese, a good quesadilla is one that takes its time cooking, for a thoroughly melted interior and nice, even browning.
People should eat what they like, even if it's some jalapeno and cheese-covered monstrosity with blueberry cream cheese.
Evaporated milk is a highly concentrated source of milk protein micelles - bundles of proteins that can act as powerful emulsifying agents - which help to keep the sauce creamy and smooth.
Ham and cheese between two slices of bread do not make a great sandwich. But add some creamy mayonnaise, maybe some bright pickles, and some crunchy vegetables, and we got a decent lunch going on.
Organizing your fridge for maximum efficiency - in terms of food shelf life, food safety, and easy access to the things you reach for most - should be a top priority.
I have very strong opinions about bagels.
Here's what I think, though this theory is hardly unique to me: Kids aren't picky because they really care about particular foods; they're picky because it offers one of the few opportunities in their heavily guided and chaperoned lives to express opinions and exercise control.
I mean, my family liked eating, but I was one of those kids who, you know, I hated fish until I was probably in my early 20s. When I went to college, I had no idea how to cook.
Over the years, I've discovered that lessons in cooking come in two forms. There are the lessons that you never fully learn; skills that you get better and better at, but never quite perfect. Then there are the lessons that you only need to learn once because the results of not following them will literally scar you for life.
My love of buttered popcorn has never been a secret. It runs deeper than a bottomless jumbo tub, free refills and all. It's my favorite food.
I started freelancing for Serious Eats while I was still living in Boston. I was born there, grew up in New York City, but went back to Boston for school, and then I lived in Boston for about ten years.
When I had a side-by-side-style freezer, I kept everything - soup, ground meat, steaks, cooked rice - frozen in flat packs that I filed away vertically like vinyl records.
Kids do gross things. For several months, mine would combine everything on her plate into a single bowl, pour her drink on top of it, then mash it up and eat it with her hands. It didn't matter what it was.
No matter how your breading or batter is constructed, it serves the same function: Adding a layer of 'stuff' around the item being fried means the oil has a tough time coming in direct contact with it, and thus has a hard time transferring energy to it.
So, the first step to opening a restaurant is, don't. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. I mean, even once you're open, it's still a series of putting out fires. Step one: don't.
I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people.
The texture of Mexican crema is thinner than that of regular American sour cream, but it also has a more distinct tang to it.
Mapo tofu is my favorite food in the world. We always have tofu at home. Like, a lot of it.
Like regular table salt, MSG can also help boost our perception of other existing flavors. Tomato soup with a pinch of MSG tastes a little more tomato-y. Add a dash to beef stew to make it taste beefier.
Like broccoli, their closely related cousins, Brussels sprouts benefit from extremely high heat and browning, to the point of a near-char, in order to intensify their sweetness and bring out their unique nutty flavor without turning them overwhelmingly sulfurous.
Different hot sauces fulfill different needs, and I wouldn't want anyone to live in a world in which each fridge held only one bottle.
A tender beef roast with a well-browned exterior is about as easy to pair with wine as a dish can be. You have your pick of just about any medium- to full-bodied red wine, from any place.
It's good to recognize your flaws, but it's also good to recognize your skills.
Every since my wife, Adri, got pregnant with our now-eight-month-old daughter, Alicia, I regularly get asked what my plans are for feeding her. How can someone who writes about food and tests recipes for a living meet the picky and precise needs of an infant without losing his mind?
I came from a family of scientists. My father is a microbiologist and my grandfather is an organic chemist. I had a very science- and math-heavy childhood.
Good knife skills are lessons you learn over time.
The key to a successful Thanksgiving is planning. Know what needs to get done, when it needs to be done, and how much effort and time it's going to take you.
I like to think of deviled eggs as a suit. The egg white and filling are like the jacket and pants - they're the main attraction, and the part that the egg is largely going to be judged by.
You can cook a limited number of sous vide recipes in a beer cooler, but if the person you're buying for wants to start cooking like the pros, they'll need a dedicated circulator that's designed to maintain the temperature of a water bath to within one degree.
No matter how many great things you say about Jacques Pepin, there's always more. Through his books and videos, he taught me the importance of technique in the kitchen, but, more significantly, he showed me what it means to be a great teacher and educator.
I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I'm pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate.
Tri-ply pans try to split this difference by sandwiching a layer of aluminum in between two layers of steel. They heat evenly and store plenty of energy. Tri-ply pans are also more sturdily constructed than disk-bottom pans, which have aluminum disks attached only to their bottoms.
Walk into any Japanese fish market, and you'll see neat rows of sea urchin roe sold in little wooden trays.
For creamy sea urchin pasta recipes, the typical process is to saute garlic, shallots, and chilies in olive oil, then add the pasta and pour in a sauce made from raw sea urchin roe blended with softened butter or heavy cream.
In its pure crystalline form, MSG can be added to soups, stews, sauces, and stocks to add a rounded, savory flavor.
Symbols have power and meaning and can mean different things to different people at different times and in different contexts.
Kids want to know things - it's just a matter of keeping them engaged with cooking in a way that provides these learning points, while also giving them some degree of control over the finished product.
Book proposals are written like business plans. You need to identify your market, see what the competition is in the space, calculate how many books you think you can sell, work on building a platform to sell them and promote them.
There was a lightbulb moment as soon as I walked in the kitchen and started working. I love the physical action. I love the whole idea of feeding people and bringing people together over food. I love the craft involved.
Kombu isn't the only food rich in glutamic acid, though it may be the richest.
Making sea urchin pasta is a lot like a toddler playing with Play-Doh: There are a million right ways to do it, and most of them are salty and delicious.
My first restaurant job was Knight of the Round Grill.
Well, my mom is Japanese. She moved to the U.S. when she was a teenager. And so, her food is - she did all of the cooking at home for the most part.
We host Thanksgiving in my mother's apartment in New York. I don't know if you've seen many New York apartment kitchens, but they are not known for spaciousness.
I found, when I was working in restaurants, that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.
So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room, where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything, because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you're forming it, it doesn't bind properly, and your sausages end up crumbly and dry.
Generally, if two ingredients sound like they're going to taste bad together, they're probably going to taste bad together.
Frying is essentially a drying process. Batters and breadings are formulated to dry out in a particularly graceful way.
An ice cream sundae isn't complete without a crunchy element.
But if you're from New York and you grew up here, you have it built into you - what a slice of pizza is supposed to be - in a way that people from outside of New York don't.
The perception of juiciness involves a complex jumble of things, including how quickly juices are squeezed out of meat fibers by our teeth, how much saliva we produce, and the ratio of liquid fat to water-based liquid.
I first became aware of Lao Gan Ma chile crisp at a potluck baby shower in 2016, where a friend brought a bowl of chilled hand-pulled noodles that he tossed with black vinegar, soy sauce, sesame seeds, scallions and a ladleful of the sauce.
Fattier, expensive cuts like prime rib or New York strip are celebratory centerpieces that do best when simply roasted with salt and pepper and served straight away.
Most ceramic plates, bowls, and cups have an unglazed rim around the very bottom, where the piece was in contact with the floor of the kiln. This unglazed ceramic is harder than metal and can be used just like a sharpening stone.
I've tested every imaginable brand of popcorn and popcorn-popping product I could get my hands on.
The higher the surface area-to-volume ratio of a given amount of meat, the more efficiently it will freeze and the less damage it will suffer.
When planning a Thanksgiving menu, it's always a balancing act between representing all the classics and satisfying all the members of your family.
If you want your kids to have fun learning about food, you need to let them explore it in their own way. Let them figure out for themselves what textures and flavors go well together. Who knows, maybe they'll invent the next French-fry-dipped-in-a-Frosty trend.
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