The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Book Preface

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. And I’ll bet you can’t read even ten pages of it without becoming a better cook.

—Jeffrey Steingarten