Top 45 J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Tempura chefs are sort of like the Jedi of the cooking world: They must deftly perform with the utmost skill and precision, using extremely dangerous tools, all while maintaining a calm, serene demeanor. It is an elegant technique, from a more civilized time.

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.

I love fresh-from-the-vine summer tomatoes almost more than any other food I can think of, and when I come home with a big haul from the farmers market, I’d like those tomatoes to be at peak flavor and texture for the whole week, until I can replenish them.

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.

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.

2015 was simultaneously the year in which I consumed the most popcorn of my life and the year in which I received the most praise from my dentist.

Historically, almost every cookbook and chef have taught that when you’re cooking a piece of meat, the first step should be searing.

An ice cream sundae isn’t complete without a crunchy element.

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.

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.

I found, when I was working in restaurants, that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.

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.

One of the handiest features of crepes is that you can cook the pancakes all the way through and refrigerate them, to be reheated and stuffed later.

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.

Like a good grilled cheese, a good quesadilla is one that takes its time cooking, for a thoroughly melted interior and nice, even browning.

I’ve tested every imaginable brand of popcorn and popcorn-popping product I could get my hands on.

You’d think that being that guy who always has pizza to give away would make you really popular with the neighbors, but I’ve had people turn down free pizza after I’d offered it to them too many times.

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.

Traditional cooking techniques inevitably form a gray band of overcooked meat around the outer edges of a steak. Sous vide, thanks to the gentle heat it uses, eliminates that gray band, producing a steak that’s cooked just right from edge to edge.

Steel is dense, which means that, for a given volume, it can hang on to more thermal energy than aluminum can. On the other hand, aluminum is highly conductive, which means that it can transfer heat from one place to another very rapidly.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no question that resting meat helps it to retain juices, though the exact degree to which it does so is up for debate. I’ve tested dozens of steaks over the years, and I’ve found significant variation.

See, tomato skins are really good at keeping tomato juices inside the tomato, but they have one defect: Moisture can escape from the tops, where the tomatoes were attached to the vine.

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?

If you want to get really crazy, Brussels sprouts love cured pork. Crisp up some bacon, pancetta, or chorizo in a skillet; save the crisp bits; use the fat to roast the sprouts; then toss them together with the meat when they come out of the oven.

Your goal when searing a steak is to make sure that the temperature and evaporation buckets are as small as possible, so that you can rapidly fill them up and move on to the important process of browning.

Tempura-style batters were originally brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century.

Cooking for a family, and specifically cooking to stimulate exploration of new flavors and textures, has led to mealtimes that are both healthier and more exciting.

The key characteristics of a tempura-style batter are extreme lightness of color and texture: Good tempura should be pale blond with an extraordinarily lacy, light, and crisp coating.

Once you start thinking of different dishes in terms of how they’re heated, you quickly realize that the key to successfully pulling off a big meal is to diversify. If you plan on five casseroles and a turkey, you’re gonna run out of oven space. Don’t do it!

Symbols have power and meaning and can mean different things to different people at different times and in different contexts.

Walk into any Japanese fish market, and you’ll see neat rows of sea urchin roe sold in little wooden trays.

There are a number of things that can cause your fridge to break down or lose power: electrical shorts or surges, clogged ventilation, et cetera. So it’s possible that even with your temperature dial adjusted to the correct position, your fridge might be far warmer than it should be.

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.

My first restaurant job was Knight of the Round Grill.

The higher the temperature you use to cook, the faster energy is transferred, and the less evenly your meat cooks. Conversely, the more gently a steak is cooked, the more evenly it cooks.

Pancakes are simple. They’re diner food. They’re what you make on a Sunday morning with the kids. Crepes are fancy. They’re French-bistro food. They’re what you make once a week after your Parisian vacation because you want to relive some pleasant memories.

My job on that first day, like for most green cooks, was official kitchen gofer. Whatever any other cook needed doing, I did it.

Frying is essentially a drying process. Batters and breadings are formulated to dry out in a particularly graceful way.

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.