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J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

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Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#61

Post by malwarebytess »

tootie wrote: post #13
jypepin wrote: post #3

Just wanna say that I'm a huge fan of Kenji. His Youtube channel is simple, interesting and the opposite of snob. A true food passionate that is doing whatever he can to go against gate keeping. He's been inspiring me to cook more (and successful at it!) for a couple years. https://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt

He's talking about this story on a reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/nwtg18/j_kenji_l%C...

The reason I read his work is because it respects my time, no faff. Seems like he takes some care to do this.

>If I don’t like something, I simply don’t write about it. you do a much better service by leading people to great places they may not have heard of than telling them to avoid a place they probably weren’t going to go to anyway

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#62

Post by tptacek »

ahepp wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #5

His Youtube is very, very good. Two Kenji videos that changed my life a little during the pandemic, in that I now make these things all the time: Spanish tortilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYk9W9v-bI Oyakadon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzpCqKdUA I feel like --- I might be wrong here --- Kenji's origin story is the Cook's Illustrated vodka pie crust, which replaces water in the dough with vodka to mini…

I'd like to see an as-blind-as-possible test of water vs vodka in the pie crust. Kenji has other pie crust recipes where he talks about encouraging gluten formation. Of course it's possible that there are some recipes where you want to encourage gluten formation and some where you want to discourage it. But I'm starting to get skeptical about this stuff, considering I've never once seen actual data tables about glute…

I don't ever use the vodka recipe any more; Kenji linked once to Stella Parks' pie crust recipe, which is a very simple water-based crust, and it's worked every single time for me. The vodka was just a neat trick, is all.

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#63

Post by drivingmenuts »

annexrichmond wrote: post #40
prpl wrote: post #15

Kenji is very good but also highly opinionated, often bordering on food snob. That’s fine, he’s often right but not always. I think that feeds into this problem: People following him will seek out “the best/perfect XYZ” which he looks for based on his own obsession at the time (smashed burgers, XLB, detroit pizza, etc…). If you watch old episodes of Jacque and Julia you will see how they could easily and happily disa…

Yeah I usually prefer Chef John. I feel like his recipes are creative and practical, and he's also just a hilarious super down to earth person. He comes up with methods that pretty much get you 95% of the way there at a fraction of the time and cost. His Chicken Tikka Masala recipe is the best I've had (homemade or at a restaurant) and among the simplest. He also has a famous method for Demi-glace IMO, a lot of the m…

Personally, I’m torn between Chef John and Adam Ragusa. Both produce attainable recipes, but Ragusa goes a bit further with pieces about the history and cultivation of food. An excellent example is found here: https://youtu.be/hQD9-FBs2qQ

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#64

Post by [deleted] »

criley2 wrote: post #26
tshaddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting characterization, because I would have said precisely the opposite: I’ve seen that he consistently goes out of his way to denounce notions like “it’s not real X unless you make it with Y.” He’s pretty outspoken that it’s better to adapt recipes based on your own preferences, skills, and ingredient availability than to try to chase “authenticity.” It’s not uncommon to hear him say things like “it…

I think the characterization comes from a legion of homecooks online going through a cooking journey and treating Kenji's whimsical opinion as a law, especially when written down for one recipe. Kenji's videos show how creative and open minded he is with cooking, but I've also had plenty of online encounters with folks preaching the food lab gospel.

[deleted]

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#65

Post by testfrequency »

I stopped following Kenji almost right at the time he decided to move to Seattle.

There is something slightly obnoxious about him that I can't quite describe that really irks me about his attitude (slightly elitist, mostly deserved, but not great if you're someone who cares about these things).

What is very interesting to me is how Seattleites are hanging on his every post and recommendation. Seattle has one of the least exciting and lackluster food scenes out of any "food city" I've ever lived in. It's honestly great for him as Seattle (I feel) lacks a food identity, so he is well positioned to influence a lot of young and well paid followers on social media

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#66

Post by zeroimpl »

notagoodidea wrote: post #51
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His wife is Columbian, IIRC.

Not sure to understand the point made between European Spanish cuisine and the Colombian one ?

Presumably there’s some similar food culture between Spain and Spanish-speaking countries?

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#67

Post by tptacek »

prpl wrote: post #28
scotu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely think you missed the last 3+ years of anything he did (I don't know how he used to communicate before) because if there is one thing I cannot say of him is that he's a food snob. He is opinionated, but explains why he does things (often offering a scientific reasoning/experiment), especially if he's not following the traditional way, he seems to give context on what would be more traditional, and is quick…

You are right, I stopped caring around that time (~3 years ago). That said, the science explanations are occasionally wrong. If you like science of cooking you might enjoy Cooking Issues/Dave Arnold quite a bit more. I generally prefer Dave's cut of the jib.

Dave Arnold is amazing and is probably a better HN food follow than Kenji (they're both great, but Arnold is distinctively HN-y, and also a truly idiosyncratic character.)

But Dave Arnold's slogan is "you're an enemy of quality", a title you can obtain by doing almost anything differently than he might, including not precisely measuring the displacement of ice and water before mixing a G&T. He calls things "garbage products" all the time. He is far, far more opinionated than Kenji is.

If Dave's opinionated demeanor isn't a problem for you, then opinionation (is that a word?) isn't really your problem with Kenji.

I highly, highly, highly recommend Arnold's book, Liquid Intelligence.

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#68

Post by JiBB »

user982 wrote: post #31
lacker wrote: post #22

Serious Eats is a great source. Their writing on how to cook a steak in a cast iron pan is excellent, a really useful and interesting read for anyone who likes cooking steaks in cast iron pans. https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-p...

I haven't visited ever since their redesign a few weeks ago removed their RSS feeds.

Ah, that would be why I hadn't seen any recipes from them in some time. Not even their announcement of the redesign, since the feed stopped updating right before that went up…

I'll send them some feedback—hopefully it was just a side-effect of the redesign, and they can re-add one without too much trouble.

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#69

Post by tristor »

During the pandemic I really up leveled my cooking, even enrolling in online culinary school. YouTube was a huge inspiration, as well as some books and blogs. Throughout all of that one of my main inspirations was Kenji. His articles on Serious Eats and his book The Food Lab are basically a bible of how to cook correctly in a way that makes sense to the engineering minded, and his YouTube channel is low-fi, super approachable, and unpretentious. He's one of the most important voices today in empowering home cooks.

Re: J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer

#70

Post by ahepp »

tptacek wrote: post #62
ahepp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see an as-blind-as-possible test of water vs vodka in the pie crust. Kenji has other pie crust recipes where he talks about encouraging gluten formation. Of course it's possible that there are some recipes where you want to encourage gluten formation and some where you want to discourage it. But I'm starting to get skeptical about this stuff, considering I've never once seen actual data tables about glute…

I don't ever use the vodka recipe any more; Kenji linked once to Stella Parks' pie crust recipe, which is a very simple water-based crust, and it's worked every single time for me. The vodka was just a neat trick, is all.

That's kind of my point though. I haven't seen sufficient evidence to confidently believe the vodka played a role in the crust. To be fair, I haven't seen sufficient evidence that no difference exists either.

It just bugs me a bit that this is called "food science", when experimental design and significance testing are the core of what science is.

At the same time, I don't want to be the science police and go around discouraging people from trying to methodically make their recipes better. I love every one of Kenji's (and Stella's) recipes that I try, so much so that I don't really bother getting recipes from other sources than Serious Eats.

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