Kenji Dreams of Sausage

Kenji López-Alt’s (@kenjilopezalt) best-loved recipes crackle with an elegant, egghead contrarianism. At the Food Lab, the hit blog he writes at Serious Eats, he delights in telling readers that the way they’ve always cooked something is suboptimal, proposing crafty alternatives arrived at through obsessive trial and error. Among his most popular posts is a 2010 investigation into why the most delicious French fries are fried twice, during which López-Alt uses high-precision Starrett dial calipers to verify that the crust formed on a twice-fried fry, “at 39/1000ths-of-an-inch, is over twice as thick as the 17/1000ths-of-an-inch crust formed on a fry that is only fried once.” In 2015, López-Alt put out The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science,a hefty kitchen manual that sold nearly 500,000 copies and won the James Beard Award for General Cooking. Today, his fans include prominent chefs (Tony Maws, Alton Brown) and a passionate cadre of amateur cooks, among whom his word is authoritative. (“A lot of recipes don’t actually work,” says a cookbook editor at a rival publisher. “Kenji’s work.”) The Times dubbed him “the nerd king of Internet cooking”; the food writer Helen Rosner calls him “a religion.”

From “Kenji Dreams of Sausage” by Jonah Weiner for Grub Street; Photo by Dwight Eschliman (@eschlimanstudio)    

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