Authors | J. Kenji Lopez-Alt |
---|---|
Country | America |
Language | English |
Subject | Cookbook |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date | September 21, 2015 |
Media type | Print, ebook |
Pages | 960 (print edition) |
Award | 2016 IACP Cookbook of the Year; [1] 2016 James Beard Foundation General Cooking cookbook award [2] |
ISBN | 978-0393081084 |
The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science is a 2015 cookbook written by American chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. The book contains close to 300 savory American cuisine recipes. [3] [4] The Food Lab expands on Lopez-Alt's "The Food Lab" column on the Serious Eats blog. [3] Lopez-Alt uses the scientific method in the cookbook to improve popular American recipes [3] and to explain the science of cooking. [5] The Food Lab charted on The New York Times Best Seller list, [6] and won the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for the best General Cooking cookbook [2] and the 2016 IACP awards for the Cookbook of the Year and the best American cookbook. [1]
Lopez-Alt developed the cookbook over a five-year period. [4] He described the book not as a recipe book but as "a book for people who want to learn the hows and the whys of cooking". [4] The recipes in The Food Lab are arranged by the technique used to prepare them. [7] The cookbook also contains charts and experiments aimed at explaining scientific concepts like the difference between temperature and energy and the Leidenfrost effect. [7]
Emily Weinstein of The New York Times wrote that "the recipes are sophisticated in their grasp of how ingredients and techniques work" but noted that "it is Mr. López-Alt’s original, living body of work online that to many may seem like his even greater achievement". [3] Eric Vellend of The Globe and Mail wrote that "Lopez-Alt's relentless pursuit of perfection yields hundreds of unconventional kitchen tricks". [5] Silvia Killingsworth wrote in The New Yorker that The Food Lab resembles a "hybrid reference text" more than a cookbook, and that "Kenji’s appeal is that he channels the shameless geekery of hobbyists everywhere into inexpensive, everyday foods". [7] Penny Pleasance of the New York Journal of Books called The Food Lab "a seminal work that is encyclopedic in scope and can be used as a reference by even the most experienced home cooks". [8]
General references