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

seattletimes.com

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

#151

Post by kenjilopezalt »

agurk wrote: post #137
user982 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They also changed the URLs of all the recipes, which previously had dates in them (luckily the old ones still redirect for now). This was useful as recently they've been republishing a lot of old content, and it was easy to see if that was the case by hovering over the URL. They've even changed the date on the recipe page to "last edited" - a couple of old ones I was looking up yesterday from 2016 now have 2020 at th…

I personally find this super frustrating because I used to be able to tell when I wrote something by visiting serious eats. Now I have to search through my old archive hard drives which is way harder. Unfortunately I have no role at serious eats currently so can’t really push back on that.

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

#152

Post by kenjilopezalt »

egypturnash wrote: post #17
rapfaria wrote: post #11

Love his youtube videos, but I wonder how can someone engage in answering so many hateful comments and such. To think that by the size of his channel he would put someone in charge of this. Perhaps the "guys, gals and non-binary pals, I'll see you next time" came from someone telling he was not inclusive enough when saying goodbye?

My experience of Seattle is that "guys, gals, and non-binary pals" feels like something totally expected out of the kind of person who would move to Seattle. This article also mentions that he lives, specifically, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Cap Hill is Seattle's rainbow flag district, and anyone living there is probably gonna be encountering enbys on a regular basis.

I don’t really encounter many people period because I’ve only lived here during pandemic. My daughter’s preschool teacher is non-binary though, and we have a neighbor whose teenager is also non-binary so maybe you’re right. I donut to be inclusive, not for any other reason.

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

#153

Post by tptacek »

bobf wrote: post #141
samatman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a point of order (and because I don't like giving Gordon Ramsay credit for things either), Jaques Pépin popularized that technique for scrambled eggs when Ramsay was ten years old. He remains a delight to watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqKq0bQHnZU

I've watched this Jacques Pépin video countless times and the ease with which he casually prepares the two styles of omelets in ~5 minutes and narrates the process amazes me every time. I still can't perfectly replicate the second "classic French omelet" style even after years of effort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1XoCQm5JSQ&t=8s

That video is amazing and taught me how to make omelets. Of course, Pépin is also responsible for the single greatest cooking video on the Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfY0lrdXar8

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

#154

Post by ska »

dbt00 wrote: post #132
ska wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> treating Kenji's whimsical opinion as a law, Whatever his stuff is, 'whimsical opinion' is pretty rare.

Eh if you've been following him for long enough you've seen him get onto kicks and off again. He did a vegan month for a while, but that's gone. Once upon a time he was convinced that using baking soda (something you'll see him use a lot more than most) was the way to perfect, fast caramelized onions. It took a while but Daniel Gritzker and others eventually convinced him he was wrong. None of this is bad -- the food…

I wasn’t suggesting assuming anyone is right, that would be silly,

But I think “whimsy” is just really off target. Most or his stuff (notwithstanding some retractions, we all learn as we go) is either pretty well researched and backed up or he’ll be very clear it’s just the way he is doing something, not canon. He has strong opinions about some things - especially cookery myths - but they tend to be backed up with a bunch of data, otherwise not so much,

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

#155

Post by dadrian »

tptacek wrote: post #67
prpl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I like Dave Arnold’s “Liquid Intelligence”, but I cannot stand his podcast. Comically, I don’t really like Kenji / Serious Eat’s written content, but his YouTube channel is great.

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

#156

Post by pcthrowaway »

dylan-m wrote: post #127
octodog wrote: post #88

I used to love Kenji but recently have become less interested in his recipes because they are very meat focused. I'd love to see more vegetarian/vegan stuff from him because his approach to food and communication style is great.

That's a really good point. He's my go-to guy for meat stuff, and one of the things I love about The Food Lab is the amount of thorough research and explanation. I would love more of that but for vegan and vegetarian things. On that note, his bean burgers are phenomenal: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-black-bean-burger-recip... :)

I was quite excited to be able to try a JKLA recipe, but these do contain egg unfortunately

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

#157

Post by criley2 »

ska wrote: post #154
dbt00 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh if you've been following him for long enough you've seen him get onto kicks and off again. He did a vegan month for a while, but that's gone. Once upon a time he was convinced that using baking soda (something you'll see him use a lot more than most) was the way to perfect, fast caramelized onions. It took a while but Daniel Gritzker and others eventually convinced him he was wrong. None of this is bad -- the food…

I wasn’t suggesting assuming anyone is right, that would be silly, But I think “whimsy” is just really off target. Most or his stuff (notwithstanding some retractions, we all learn as we go) is either pretty well researched and backed up or he’ll be very clear it’s just the way he is doing something, not canon. He has strong opinions about some things - especially cookery myths - but they tend to be backed up with a…

I said whimsical because a lot of times Kenji's opinion will be like "I usually just whip this up looseygoosey but if we're trying to be as silly about it as possible, I suppose we could do this fourteen step process..." and then the mantra online becomes "Kenji's Iron Clad 14 Step Process for This Meal -- The Only Way Its Done".

That's why watching his videos is really important. If there's any recipes he ignores completely the most, it's his own.

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