Kenji López-Alt, the Man Who Conquered Pie Crust With Science

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There are people who debate the appropriate time to season aburger patty, and then there is Kenji López-Alt. He knows with absolute certainty that a patty should be salted only after being formed, and he has gone to certain lengths to prove it. There was the time he used a softball pitching machine to hurl cooked burger patties at a wall at 45 mph, noting that the pre-salted ones were too dense and tough to shatter. And then there was the time he conducted a similar experiment, dropping a Dutch oven onto salted and unsalted patties, just to see how widely each one would splatter. That particular experiment can be found on page 547 of López-Alt’s cookbook,The Food Lab; it follows its author’s superfluous acknowledgement that his love of burgers could reasonably be called an obsession. “A couple of years ago,” he writes, his wife “forced us to move to a new apartment because the glorious smell of burgers and grilled onions had managed to permeate even the very walls. We may have to move again soon.”

This brand of cheerful, occasionally theatrical obsession animates every one ofThe Food Lab’s 958 pages. Subtitled "Better Home Cooking Through Science," it’s a monster truck-sized helping of classic American cooking, filtered through the twin lenses of hard science and exquisitely nerdy, MacGyver-grade experimentation. In it, among recipes formacaroni and cheese, meatloaf, andsticky buns, you’ll find a nine-page guide to grinding your own meat, an impassioned five-page disquisition about the right way to cook pasta, and a four-page dissertation on mashed potatoes that includes a reference to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The book, which took five years to write, won a James Beard and an IACP award and became a best-seller. In the process, it announced its then-35-year-old author as the face of home cooking for the millennial generation, a sort of love child of Harold McGee, Alton Brown, and Mr. Wizard. Referring to him by his surname feels unnecessary: to hisSerious Eats fansand 100,000-plus Twitter followers, he’s just Kenji.

Ten days before last Thanksgiving, López-Alt bikes into the driveway of the house he shares in San Mateo, CA, with his wife, Adriana. He tows 2.25 kilograms of Golden Delicious apples that are destined for a pie he has to make. More specifically, he has to make a video of himself making aGooey Apple Piefor the Serious Eats website, the latest in the series of videos he’s been making in the run-up to the food world’s version of the Super Bowl. Normally, in his role as the managing culinary director of Serious Eats and the author of its Food Lab column, López-Alt makes two or three videos each week. But in the last several days, he says, “I’ve done roast turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy stuffing, this apple pie, a sous-vide turkey, and a couple of others I can’t think of off the top of my head.”

As he hauls an induction burner from the pantry and arranges a sous vide circulator in a four-quart container filled with water, López-Alt explains that the pie’s filling will be par-cooked in a 160°F water bath for an hour, which allows the pectin in the apples to become more stable and in turn makes the finished filling gooey instead of mushy. Although Chris Kimball, his former boss at Cook’s Illustrated, preferred a more mushy, soggy filling, López-Alt places himself in the firmer-is-better camp. “Maybe it’s because my first apple pie experiences were the deep-fried pies at McDonald’s,” he says.

如果建立一个真空循环器、档次e of apple pie filling—something many people don’t even bother to cook, let alone prepare a water bath for—borders on the certifiable, it also falls into the realm of the ingenious. It’s this strain of enlightened madness that speaks to the core of López-Alt’s appeal—and to his ability to translate the obsessive-compulsive rigor of a place like Cook’s Illustrated into a kind of theater for a broader audience. Watching him rig an immersion circulator, you get a window into the insanity that goes into understanding and perfecting a recipe. But this is also theater built on reason. No, you don’t have to sous vide your apples—in the Serious Eats recipe, López-Alt explains that the microwave or stove top will also work. The reason he uses this method, he writes, is simple: Compared to the stovetop of microwave, “sous vide is easier (no fiddling around with heat levels) and way more foolproof, and it produces superior results.”

The pie’scrust will be a modified versionof the one López-Alt developed forCook’s Illustratedin 2007, the one that arguably launched his career thanks to its ingenious swap of half of the water for vodka. It was an eye-catching trick—vodka, unlike water, doesn’t allow the gluten development that can lead to a tough pie crust—but, López-Alt says, it distracted from the recipe’s true innovation, which is his method for incorporating butter into flour. By using a food processor to incorporate all of the butter into half of the flour, and then adding the other half of the flour at the end, he explains, you get a more uniform, consistent dough. “I think that was actually way cooler than the vodka part,” he says as he measures cinnamon, sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest and juice into a cluster of small, colorful bowls.

Before he made that pie crust forCook’s Illustrated, López-Alt had never made a pie crust in his life—or at least, he says, not a good one. Growing up, there was zero indication that he’d have a career in food, much less a passing familiarity with a stove. Born in Boston and raised in Upper Manhattan, he showed almost no interest in cooking; instead, he was on track to be a scientist, and majored in architecture at MIT. But a collegiate epiphany changed everything: while he loved biology, López-Alt realized, he hated the grindingly slow pace of the biology lab. So he decided to look for a summer job as a waiter, and ended up getting hired as a cook at a Mongolian restaurant. That led to a second epiphany: he loved cooking.

After college, López-Alt cooked at a series of Boston restaurants. Jason Bond, a chef who worked with López-Alt at No. 9 Park, remembers that although López-Alt was then so inexperienced that “no one would admit to being the one who hired him,” he quickly distinguished himself. One night, Bond recalls, a couple came in to celebrate a birthday. The pastry chef was off, and López-Alt stepped up: Instead of writing “Happy Birthday” on the dessert plate, he “made this beautiful architectural picture of the Eiffel Tower and wrote 'Happy Birthday' in French,” Bond says. “He was above and beyond.”

Eventually, López-Alt decided he wanted to find answers to the many cooking questions he had. So after eight years in professional kitchens, he became a recipe developer forCook’s Illustrated. That led him to Serious Eats, where the website’s founder, Ed Levine, hired him to write about food science after being struck by his “wonderfully geeky approach to food.” López-Alt’s first column was abouthow to boil an egg. In Levine’s telling, it changed everything: “Up until that point, we didn’t have a point of view about our recipes and techniques,” he says. López-Alt’s voice—accessible, funny, and unafraid to concede failure—immediately struck a chord; some of the more popular columns racked up a million hits. In the process, Levine says, López-Alt emerged as someone “who was going to move recipe development forward, who was going to be this original voice that would bring people along with him.”

López-Alt’s success arguably hinges in part on his timing: now 37, he began working for Serious Eats in 2010, a time when the Internet had started to encourage us to explore our inner geek by hacking every aspect of our lives—and also, in the process, fostered the more democratic sharing of skills and information. No longer was there was a singular, god-like voice telling you how, exactly, to roast a chicken; instead, there was a chorus of voices (albeit of varying degrees of trustworthiness) speaking to home cooks who were both emboldened and overwhelmed by all of their options.

As he sets up camera equipment, López-Alt sums up his audience as “like, 25- to 35-year-old men with beards and Asian women.” His writing, he thinks, appeals to a lot of people in his generation who grew up with working parents or without a legacy of family recipes. “I think a lot of men fall into that category, and increasingly, a lot of women these days didn’t learn how to cook at home, either,” he says. “So this science- and technique-based approach to cooking, like something that doesn’t require you to have a family tradition of cooking, that’s appealing to people like that.”

Before he begins shooting, López-Alt pounds out a short script and contends with a severed wi-fi connection that prevents Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, from setting the temperature for the sous vide machine. He scrapes some paint off his arms (the remnants of a home-improvement project), gulps grapefruit-flavored Squirt. He records his introduction to the video, starting and stopping again and again and again until he’s satisfied. Finally, López-Alt vacuum-seals the apples into a plastic bag and submerges them in the water bath. Done, for now. Later this afternoon, after the pie is finished, he’ll edit his video about sous vide turkey, made porchetta-style. “If you don’t care if your turkey looks like a turkey, it’s the best way to do it,” he says.

In case it’s not clear by now, López-Alt is a big fan of sous vide cooking—his kitchen is home to no less than eight immersion circulators, andThe Food Labincludes a passionate paean to the technique. What it all boils down to, so to speak, is precision and incomparably consistent cooking: by using sous vide, López-Alt writes, “even a monkey with a toupee can produce perfectly cooked proteins without fail...we’re talking perfect food here.”

There are, of course, plenty of home cooks who are left cold by the idea of perfect cooking through science—and the idea that, say, mac and cheese needs to be approached with the clinical precision of a laparoscopic robotic arm. But to López-Alt’s credit, he doesn’t make his readers feel that they themselves need to engage in exhaustive experimentation or hold a PhD in particle physics—instead, he does the work so they don’t have to. ReadingThe Food Labis a little like watching a movie with the director’s commentary switched on; if you want behind-the-scenes explanations, they’re there, but if you want to skip directly to the recipes, that’s fine, too. They’re as tactile as any other recipes, and as earthy, too. When you make The Food Lab’sCheesy Hasselback Potato Gratin,你不考虑科学;相反,你的re literally up to your wrists in cheese and heavy cream, thinking about how surprisingly sensual potatoes can be, no matter how precisely you have sliced them with a mandoline. The point, López-Alt says, is not that his way is the only way—he doesn’t expect that his Platonic ideal of apple pie will be everybody’s Platonic ideal of apple pie. Instead, he says, “you try to give people the tools to figure out how to make it the way they like it.”

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Currently, López-Alt is working on his second book. It will be shorter, or what qualifies as shorter in Kenji World: only 500 to 600 pages. Whereas he describes the first book as “meat and potatoes,” this one will contain more seafood, pizza, and “everyday foods” that are familiar but “aren’t necessarily in the American canon,” López-Alt says. There will be a chapter on stir-frying and using a wok, another on pressure cooking. It’s due in Fall 2018; after that, at least three other books are in the pipeline: a vegetarian and vegan cookbook, a book about food science for kids, and a cookbook about Colombian food, inspired by visits to Adriana’s native country. Norton,The Food Lab’s publisher, is clearly confident that there is a still-unsated appetite for López-Alt’s approach to food: it has always held the first option on his next two books. And it’s easy to see why: if a science-based cookbook weighing six pounds can become a New York Times bestseller, then anything is possible.

For now, López-Alt’s workload doesn’t leave much room to think about cookbooks; his hours are long, he says, though he’s trying not to work on the weekends. He doesn’t read as much as he should, he admits, though he admires writers like Yotam Ottolenghi, Fuchsia Dunlop, and David Lebovitz. He doesn’t read a lot of food media, or media, period, though he spends a good amount of time on Twitter, where he’s lately been vocal about his political opinions. And he does a lot of work on the house; recently, after replacing his deck, López-Alt recycled the old boards into a set of handsome planters in his backyard. He also built the bed where he and Adriana sleep. “I just like making things with my hands,” he says, his voice a shrug.

In the kitchen, the apples simmer away, though it’s easy to forget that: packed into their vacuum-sealed plastic bag, they’re completely odorless, and it’s odd to anticipate apple pie without the smell of apple pie. In the next room, López-Alt sits at his dining table next to a stack of sauté pans. Even when he’s not moving, he’s moving, fiddling with a stray iPhone adapter plug as he is asked to consider his uncanny ability for getting people to care about the science of their food. “People need something they’re familiar with, something to latch onto and pique their interest and maintain it. And if you jump straight into science, nobody’s going to care,” López-Alt says. He jiggles the iPhone adapter. “But if it’s the science of mashed potatoes, then people do care.”

Rebecca Flint Marx is editor-at-large atSan Francisco Magazineand the winner of the 2015 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Food and Culture.