-So this book, The Wok,
so I started writing this book really,
before I started, before it started writing,
it was part of the first book in fact.
So the first book I wrote was called The Food Lab
and it was based on, it was based on a column
I was writing for Serious Eats,
which is a food website that is still,
it was around in the early days of food blogs
and it's still around today
and still does really remarkably good recipe work today.
But I had a column there called The Food Lab,
in which I wrote about sort of food science for home cooks
and kind of used our limited budget
to perform some food science at home,
like little experiments that people would maybe be interested
in finding out the answers for but are not interesting enough
to be funded by actual labs.
Instead, instead, yeah, I wrote them up
as like 3,000 word articles about how to boil an egg.
And yeah, so that was,
that became a book called The Food Lab,
which initially was going to be a two volume set.
It was like one of these things where I, it was the first book
I'd written and I, when I pitched the book,
when I wrote the book proposal,
it was supposed to be a 350 page thing with recipes.
And then I started writing it,
and it was supposed to come out a year
after I sent in the proposal.
So that got approved and I started writing it
and I was like done with the introduction
and part of the first chapter after the first 350 pages.
And so I told my editor at the time,
her name is Maria Garner Shelley,
who, she passed away a few years ago,
but I told her, yeah, I have like 600 pages,
but I'm not done. And she's like, okay,
like give me this kind of pages and like keep going.
And so I did. And so at some point,
we decided, okay, there's like enough material here
that we're going to make it a two volume box set.
And so that was the plan, and in fact, on my computer
I have it like laid out as a two volume box set,
so it exists somewhere in the ether.
I don't think it exists on the internet.
It probably does, but not anywhere
where anyone can get it, I hope. But anyhow, at some point
I think the higher ups in the publishing,
The Publishing House and Norton decided
that they didn't want to risk like selling a two volume box
set on a first time author. Wisely, I think.
And so we had to cut it down. And so what ended up happening
was that about 700 pages of material
was cut from the first book, and the first book ended up,
I think, much tighter and much better.
But at the beginning of the first book,
on maybe like the tenth page or so,
there's a two page spread that talks about how great woks are.
And it's like, if I had to pick only one pan
to keep in my kitchen, it would be the wok.
It's the one, like it's the one I use by far the most often,
it's the one that sits on my stovetop all the time,
it's the one that I bought first because it costs $40,
as opposed to most of the other pans
which are much more expensive.
And I use it for like for stir frying, for brazing,
for steaming, all these different things.
And so there's a couple pages
talking about how awesome woks are.
And then because the wok chapter got cut out of the book,
there's no other mention of woks in the rest of the book.
It's like not a single recipe for them,
not, like it doesn't tell you how to use them,
or anything like that.
And so that to me felt like almost,
it felt, well first of all, it felt like an oversight
because it was an oversight.
That should not have stayed in the first book
given that we didn't end up putting woks in the first book.
But it felt like something that needed to be addressed.
And so after
I got the green light to start writing a second cookbook,
the initial plan was that it was going to be like the sequel,
like The Food Lab 2,
and would start with the 780 pages of material
that had gotten cut from the first draft of the book.
But then, because of that it ended up being like a book
that would have been a bunch of like pizza recipes,
and then like a bunch of like stir fried stuff,
and then some hamburger recipes, and then like sous vide recipes.
And so it's just like a bunch,
it's like, and like bean dip, right?
And it's like, how do you fit all that into one book?
And the answer is you don't. And so I was kind of,
what happens between every book I write
is that I kind of blindly start
following a bunch of different threads
and hopefully one of them ends up as a book.
So in this case, I decided, you know what,
like I'm just going to start writing these chapters like
in whatever order feels easiest for me to write.
And so the one I very immediately gravitated towards
was working on the wok chapter again.
And so kind of the same sort of thing happened in the first
as what happened when I was writing the first book,
which was that I was like, okay, if I'm writing about,
if I'm writing about stir frying this,
then I also need to write about stir frying that.
And if I'm writing about like, I'm spending like 10 pages
talking about sort of the science of like,
of heat of the metals in the wok and stuff
and how the wok is heated and all this stuff.
And like that seems like a big chunk of real estate
to set aside
for like all this sort of science and technical stuff
if you don't then include a bunch of recipes.
So I'll add more recipes, and blah, blah, blah.
So again, sort of by the time I was done with the introduction
and the first half of the stir fry chapter,
I was already at like the word count for,
I don't know, like half of the book.
So I told my editor, who, I told my editor
that we should just make this the whole book,
like I can write you,
I can write you like 1,000 pages on just cooking in a wok.
And she seemed excited by that, and so that's what I did.
It was a very fun book to write.
So as I was mentioning at the beginning,
the woks are, to me,
I think the most versatile pen in my kitchen.
I bought a wok at a Target when I was in college for $40.
I can't remember what the brand was,
but I had, it's a carbon steel wok, 14 inches, flat bottom.
It happens to be the same, like what I would recommend
as a wok that anyone should buy today,
like for carbon steel, 14 inch flat bottom.
That's what I would buy today now,
because it's sort of proved so versatile.
It's like I used it
when I was living in college in like a dorm,
and then I used it when I was living with two roommates,
and we used to have like dinner parties and stuff,
and then I used it when I was working as a test cook,
and then I used it like
when I got married and we had a family
and we started having dinner parties,
and now I use it to like feed my kids and stuff.
And it was actually just after, just after the book
was published was,
it was like literally like within a week
after the book was published I was using my wok
and it developed like a little leak near
where the handle is riveted.
So I was like making stock in it and I could just see this
like little bead of stock pooling up
on the outside of the wok and then drizzling down.
So I need to get that fixed, I guess.
But anyhow, the wok had lasted for like 20 something years,
which is about $2 a year for cookware,
which is not a bad rate to rent, I guess.
So yeah. So the wok might -.
I grew up not cooking really, like my -.
My parents, my mom is from Japan,
she's a Japanese immigrant, she moved here
when she was a teenager, and she cooked at home
but she didn't really love cooking.
She cooked at home mainly because, I think,
she saw it as important for us
for us all to sit and have a meal as a family,
which I do think is very important.
But she didn't enjoy cooking, and now that,
now that her kids don't live at home
she doesn't enjoy cooking at all.
And so food for us, like I didn't, we didn't,
I didn't grow up with, we ate some
Japanese food growing up, we ate a lot of, sort of,
my mom cooked a lot of New York Times recipes
and kind of like Betty Crocker type recipes as well.
So stuff that she, I think she kind of felt
she wanted us to have some Japanese food
but she also want us to really understand
like what American food was.
And so, it's like I didn't grow up with like recipes
that I learned, like family recipes
that were passed down,
and I certainly didn't grow up really knowing how to cook.
And so when I went to college,
like I didn't know how to cook anything like intuitively,
I couldn't just walk into the kitchen
and start cooking anything.
My main cooking education came from a couple of places.
Like so up until that point it was watching TV,
it was watching like PBS shows,
and then later on, finally like when the Food Network came out,
watching a little bit of early Food Network.
But I didn't start cooking until I got my first cooking job,
which was like a summer job that I got after my,
after my sophomore year of college,
like I was basically looking for, I was changing majors.
I was a biology major,
I decided I didn't want to work in biology.
The lab work I found to be a little boring.
And so when I was changing majors,
I decided to take that summer off.
I just need to make money,
and so I was looking for a job as a server
and I accidentally got a job as a cook
because a restaurant needed a cook
and I needed like a paycheck for the summer.
And so that was my first cooking job.
And so I learned cooking
and how to cook basically 100% on the job in restaurants,
and there's a lot of ways in which cooking differs
when you're cooking at home versus cooking at a restaurant.
So when I finally transitioned,
I worked in restaurants for a number of years
and when I finally transitioned from restaurant work
to test kitchen work, the biggest learning curve
I had was like trying to think like a home cook,
because I never experienced that,
like I didn't cook at home very much growing up.
I didn't cook at home as an adult.
Like I went straight from nothing
to working only in restaurants.
And so being able to then think about like,
all right, well this is like what we do,
what our goals are in a restaurant,
like how does that differ from what a home cook goals are?
And how does like the type of equipment we have differ,
how does the different ingredients we have differ?
Like that was sort of the biggest learning curve for me.
And I think still the one that I put the most
the most effort into, and in fact I think the one
that probably any sort of reasonable recipe developer
will probably put the most effort into,
is really making sure that you understand what a home cook
is sort of looking for
and how, yeah, how your perspective is not the,
is not the only important perspective,
and making sure that your recipes
are sort of adaptable to that.
So case in point, like the wok, for a long time
my knowledge of how, say Chinese food, right,
came from, like I didn't grow up in a Chinese household.
I grew up in New York
and so we went to a lot of Chinese restaurants,
like my dad was a Chinese restaurant fanatic.
So we went to a lot of restaurants,
but that's a very specific experience, right?
That's mainly like you're getting like Hong Kong
and like Cantonese style Chinese food,
at least like in the 80s and 90s, early 90s.
Maybe a little bit of Sichuan food,
like going into the 90s you're getting,
and then you're getting Chinese American food.
And so, for a lot of people, like myself included,
I think a lot of people who grew up in my generation in the US,
like who didn't grow up in Chinese households,
like my perception of what Chinese food was
is strictly relegated to like
what like Cantonese style restaurant food is.
Which would be sort of like thinking like, all right,
like the only experience you have eating, say beef,
is like going into like a Peter Luger steakhouse, right,
where they're cooking like a specific kind of beef
using Restaurant Style equipment,
which is different from what you cook at home.
And so for a long time I was under this impression,
that I think a lot of people still are,
that in order to like properly cook
in a wok you need this like crazy hot burner,
you need this like giant inferno
under your, like what they use at restaurants
in order to get that sort of, that
Wok hei flavor, that smoky flavor.
But then when you sort of actually like stop
and think about it you're like, wait a minute, like,
but there are like, I mean,
there's literally like hundreds of millions of people
who are cooking with a wok every day
and not every one of them has
like a restaurant inside their kitchen.
So like that can't possibly be true.
And it turns out of course it's not true.
It's just like, it really,
I think the analogy of like a steakhouse really works,
it's like if you want the specific style of experience
that you find like at a specific type of restaurant,
then yes, you can get yourself like an outdoor
wok burner that can get to like 120,000 BTU
and then learn how to use it properly.
And then you can recreate
what you can order from the restaurant down the street.
If you'd like to do that.
But the vast majority of what people do in woks every day
doesn't require any of that and is stuff
that's like very, very suitable for home cooking.
So anyhow, I don't remember
where I started talking about this.
We were talking about home cooking, talking about-.
Oh yeah, going to Chinese restaurants with my dad.
Yep, yep, went a lot of Chinese restaurants with my dad.
So yeah, so one of the dishes
and one of the dishes in this book I can,
I would like to talk about, so there's a recipe in the book
for Cantonese style Salt and Pepper Shrimp,
which is a dish that we ate growing up.
So there was a restaurant in the,
on the Elizabeth Street Mall in Chinatown in New York
called Phoenix Garden that was around in the mid-80s,
and they, a Cantonese restaurant,
and they had really,
really great Salt and Pepper Shrimp.
So basically like you have these like jumbo shrimp, head on,
that are butterflied but the legs are left intact,
and then you kind of dredge them in this salt, white pepper,
ground white pepper and toasted salt mixture with some starch,
and then you flash fry them,
and then you stir fry them with like chilies and garlic.
Anyhow. So we loved them at that restaurant
and so we would go there,
we would go there relatively frequently until it burned down.
And then eventually, this place reopened in New Jersey
as a place called Phoenix Garden 2.
And so we went to, we started going to this one in New Jersey
called Phoenix Garden 2 that was as good,
if not better than the original,
and until that one also burned down.
And then it eventually reopened again in Midtown.
So it was open, I believe it was on like,
it was on like maybe
30 34th on the east side, somewhere like that,
but somewhere in Midtown, and reopen.
And they still continued to serve the shrimp
until eventually they closed down a little bit
before the, a little bit before the pandemic.
But this particular shrimp dish, so when I was,
when I was working on the recipe for it one of my goals is to,
was to get some of this sort of this
Wok hei flavor in there, right.
You know that smoky flavor in there.
And so I was doing these experiments at home
where I was trying to,
well see sort of what gives that actual flavor,
what are the elements that give that flavor.
And one of the sort of, one of the hypotheses I had
was that there's something in like the, you know
when you have a well season wok, when you have like something
that's carbon steel or cast iron,
that there's something in the polymer layer that is vaporizing
and getting onto your food and that's part of it.
And so to test that I was taking some salt and putting it inside,
basically putting it inside the wok,
elevating it on like a little, like a stainless steel spoon,
so like a nonreactive spoon
elevating the salt off the bottom,
and then putting a lid on it and heating it up
until it got kind of smoky inside to see
if a salt would pick up any of the,
that sort of smoky flavor. And it turns out, yeah,
you can make like this kind of smoked salt
that doesn't taste smoky the way that like wood smoke does,
but it tastes smoky in the way that the smokiness
of a cast iron or carbon steel wok does.
So anyhow, that dish we end up using,
I ended up using, yeah, this smoked salt along with,
I'm just going to go on a long meandering train
of thought here by the way, because I just feel like,
because now we can also talk about Sichuan peppercorns.
So in that dish we used,
it's a combination of smoked salt that I grind up
with Sichuan peppercorns and white peppercorn.
Back in the day when we were,
when we had it like in the late 80s and 90s,
we didn't have it with Sichuan peppercorn here
because Sichuan peppercorns weren't,
they were banned for import
because of fear of a parasites. And so for a long time
you couldn't get Sichuan peppercorns,
like which is one of the signature flavors
of Sichuan cuisine, Mala, like one of the numbing part
of the numbing hot spice combination.
So like Sichuan peppercorn,
so they give you that numbing sensation,
they also have like a really sort of unique sort of,
kind of piney citrusy aroma. So dishes like Mapo tofu,
dishes like kung pao chicken, those dishes like really,
really heavily rely on this aroma.
And so for a long time,
I remember, like I remember the first time
I had actual Sichuan peppercorns.
I can't remember what year it was,
but sometime in the 1990s, it was at a place in Boston
called New Taste of Asia,
and it was just after the Sichuan peppercorn ban
had been lifted again.
And I remember like, yeah, like tasting this lamb dish
that I'd been familiar with,
but familiar with without the, sort of the key flavor,
the actual numbing element to it,
and just having my mind blown. That flavor-.
So I don't know if everyone here is familiar
with Sichuan peppercorn,
but it has this effect on your mouth
where it feels almost like your mouth
is getting an electric shock.
And so-. Like the way it does like
if you put like a battery on your tongue, you know?
Everyone puts batteries on their tongues, right?
That's how you test if a nine volt battery
has any power left, right? You stick it on your tongue.
Anyhow, that's sort of what it feels like.
And so there's this,
I can't remember where they did this experiment,
but there was some scientists that did this experiment
where they had people biting on these vibrating metal rods
between their teeth,
and they could adjust the frequency of the vibrations.
And so they asked people to eat Sichuan peppercorns
and then vibrate the metal rod against their tongue
until it felt similar.
And most people ended up putting it at around 50 hertz,
which is, which is a, let's see, a-.
It's like, I think it's like a very, very low B, right?
I'm pretty sure it's a very, very low B.
Anyhow, so yeah, so if you ever find
that we have like a ban on Sichuan peppercorns again,
you can just walk around with like a, like a tuning fork,
just wrap it and just stick it against your teeth
every time before you-.
Has anyone seen those chopsticks, by the way?
There's these Japanese chopsticks that supposedly like,
so they complete the circuit,
like you they have some kind of electrode
that you stick on your finger and something
on your shirt or something, and then when you eat with them
they give you some kind of electric signal
that tricks your tongue into thinking
that it's salty when it's not.
People know what I'm talking about,
these chopsticks that make your food taste salty?
Anyhow.
Yes, so okay, so jumping back, where are we jumping back to?
All right. Okay, so jumping back to,
so post restaurant years, so getting into-.
And if anyone finds this fascinating,
you're welcome to stay. And if you find it boring
you're welcome to not stay.
So post restaurant years, I went, I left
restaurants mainly because, well it was a number of reasons.
Partly it was sort of the environment of restaurants,
like your goal in a restaurant
is very different from your goal in say,
well in like a recipe development environment.
In a restaurant the goal is sort of consistency and efficiency,
and cooks are basically seen as machines,
like cooks would be replaced by robots if they could be,
and probably will be soon at some point.
Maybe even are already in some cases, but.
So in a restaurant the types of skills you gain
are much more, much more in sort of the efficiency realm
and the repetition realm and being able to do
the exact same thing over and over very, very precisely.
Which is a, I think a valuable skill to have,
but it does mean that when you,
when you ask questions like, why do we fry this potato twice?
The answer you get is, because it works. Right?
It's like, because we do, because the chef said so.
Which is, again, like a reasonable approach
to take in a restaurant when you know something works,
like you don't want to mess around with it,
you don't really have the time
or resources to mess around with it too much.
But it does get frustrating when you don't,
you aren't really able to sort of ask
or get answers to those questions.
And so, throughout the time that I was working in restaurants
I kind of had this backlog of questions in my head
that some of them you could find the answers in books
or in journals, but not, there weren't a ton that,
a ton of resources as far as,
as how these types of questions really applied
specifically to sort of the technical aspects of cooking.
So like there's a lot of food science articles
about food science, but food science
is not necessarily the same as cooking, right?
Like I'm mostly interested, and I think my audience is
mostly curious about what, what does know,
how is knowing this going to help me cook better at home?
Or cook, not necessarily even cook better,
but like help me cook more, I don't know,
thoughtfully or more creatively, or feel like
I have more control in the kitchen at home.
And so that was always sort of my goal,
or what I was always curious about
when I was working as a restaurant cook.
And at some point in my career as a restaurant cook,
I had been kind of doing the typical restaurant cook thing,
which I think is a little different now,
but at the time was work five days
a week for your chef like on the clock,
work like two days a week for your chef off the clock
at their other restaurants, spend like extra time
at nights going in and doing prep work.
Just basically doing everything you could
in the name of experience, you know?
And there's only so long
I feel like you can do that before your body,
before your body kind of gives up on it.
It's not something you can do forever.
So I did, I was pretty aware of like what was going on
and that I wanted to at some point find
some kind of exit strategy,
as far as being a line cook goes.
And thankfully, I mean, I am sort of thankful
that things seem better,
better now than they were 20 years ago for sure.
Although there's still a lot of issues in the industry.
But anyhow.
I've found this job as a, this advertisement for a job
as a test cook at Cooks Illustrated,
this was when like people still advertised in newspapers.
I found like a written newspaper advertisement for a job
as a test cook at Cooks Illustrated Magazine,
which is, happened to be in Brookline, very close to Boston.
And so that seems sort of like the perfect job for me,
and so I applied for that job, which is a months,
months long process, like you have to develop recipes,
you have to go in for multiple interviews,
you have to go in and spend a day cooking for them.
It was a very, very strenuous and long interview process.
But a fun one. And I, and so I got my job there
and immediately thought like that it was a,
it was a wonderful quality of life improvement
because I went from making like $9 an hour to like $11 an hour.
But at least, but at least it was I was like a magazine
so we had 9 to 5.
Like I remember my second day there, I was out,
I was still in the kitchen at like 5:20
just like sweeping up because I was just like,
yeah, of course I'm going to sweep up.
And like Keith Dresser,
who's still one of the senior editors there,
he comes in he's like, you burning the midnight oil here?
I was like, it's like 5:20, what do you mean?
And yeah, so it was a very strict 9 to 5 thing,
which I found difficult to adapt to.
In fact, I found a lot of stuff difficult to adapt
to going from like having been in restaurants for years
to like an environment where,
I don't know, people are kind of kinder
to each other than in restaurant kitchens.
And again, I think restaurant kitchens are better
now than they used to be, but going from that environment
to like an actual, like an environment
where people like where real people interact,
was a big, a big learning process for me.
And one I still sometimes find myself like,
just like dropping back into restaurant mode.
It's like, like you inadvertently find yourself
like getting annoyed if the person in front of you
is like taking up a little bit too much space in the isle
and like not making it clear which side you should pass on.
You know? Or if like someone comes up behind you
without saying that they're behind you.
I mean, I try not, it's a lot easier now
that, I mean, you're forced to get over that
when you have kids because they never announce.
I mean, I guess they announced themselves in some ways,
but they can also like go into stealth mode when they,
when they feel like it.
Anyhow, so at Cooks Illustrated I found the environment
there was wonderfully supportive of, yeah, if you want to answer
a question like this, like take all the time you need.
It's like, I worked on a pie crust recipe
there in like 2008 or so, or 2007,
and it was the first time
I'd ever made pie crust in my life.
And so they asked me to come up with a new way
to make pie crust, and I was like,
I don't even know the old way to make pie crust. No problem.
But it was cool because I was like encouraged, like all right,
like, well, you don't know how to make pie crust,
so like go and find out how to make pie crust
and like go find every recipe you can, every resource you can,
and like, make it every way that you find it,
which is what I did. And then,
and then it's like I had a bunch of questions, like okay,
well, like these books say that like the humidity
can affect the pie crusts, and so like on humid days,
you're probably not going to use as much water.
And so it's just kind of a wishy washy thing,
like do I really need this much water?
Do I need that much water? And so like,
that often adds like to the complexity of the recipe.
It's like you're not, it's a way for the recipe writers
to like to get away with like, it's like,
okay, whatever percentage of the audience this doesn't work for,
they're going to blame themselves anyway,
so it's all right.
But so I wonder, it's like, oh does it really
make a difference? And so they're like, yeah, go,
well I don't know, how could you find out?
And so I was like, well, I'll build like,
I'll build a big box that I can control the humidity of inside.
And so I did with like, like complete
with like the gloves that go in and stuff and everything.
And so I made pie crust in this box
that we got extremely, extremely dry
and extremely humid. It doesn't make a difference.
How you store your flour can make a difference,
but most people store their flour like in,
they come from sort of an air conditioned supermarket,
where they've been sort of conditioned on,
flour gets packed in paper bags
because it needs to breathe on the way from its packaging
on the way to the supermarket shelves.
But it's in controlled environments
for pretty much that whole time,
and then most people when they get it home,
they're either in a controlled environment
or they're in like a, they put it in a bin anyway.
So it's not really going to change much.
Anyhow, the point is, you don't have to worry
too much about the humidity when it comes to your flour.
The other point was that I found like a really cool place to work
where I was sort of encouraged to do all this stuff.
The one the one problem I had with,
at Cook's Illustrated was that,
I don't know how many of you are subscribers to it.
It's also changed over the years.
This was, I guess 18, 17 or 18 years ago
when I started there, has changed
a lot over the over the years, especially now that my friend
Dan Souza's in charge, as opposed to Chris Kimball
who's doing his other own thing. But the one thing about Cooks
Illustrated is that the writing all just sounds like
Cooks Illustrated writing,
which is like, it's like very, it's very Cooks
Illustrated writing.
And it's like, it's like, I always called it like the Cook
Illustrated sausage grinder. And later
on as like an editor there, I was like one of the,
one of the gears in the sausage grinder.
But the, Cooks Illustrated editorial sausage grinder,
where it's like no matter what someone writes at the start,
it goes through this process and it comes out as like
Cook's Illustrated sausage on the other hand.
Which is like a tasty functional,
80% of the people who eat the sausage would eat it again,
type of sausage, but it's still just kind of the same sausage.
And so, this was probably around,
let's see, it's when my wife and I moved to New York,
so it must have been like 2008 or '09
that I started writing like a couple of things
for Serious Eats,
which at the time was a blog about like Food News
and like restaurant gossip
and restaurant reviews in New York.
And it was run by Ed Levine who was a New York, New York
Times, former New York Times writer.
But I remember, I sat down and had,
and I wrote an article about making
Heston Blumenthal's hamburger recipe.
I don't know if anyone's familiar with this.
Heston Blumenthal, he's a chef from the UK.
Had a restaurant called The Fat Duck.
Oh, in fact, Seattle connection, you know Chris Young who, Chris
Young who was the chef at Modernist Cuisine
and then started ChefSteps, and now runs a hardware company
called Combustion Ink.
Chris Young, he was the development chef
at The Fat Duck with Heston Blumenthal.
Anyhow, Heston Blumenthal had this series on BBC
Four called like In Search of Perfection
and he had this hamburger recipe that had like
30 something ingredients and took four days to make.
And so I was working at Cook's Illustrated,
I was working on a hamburger recipe at the time.
I was working on a hamburger recipe and simultaneously
I was also, my friend Brian Roof and I, Brian
Roof is now the executive editor of Cooks Country Magazine,
but he and I were also planning to open a burger joint
at the same time, and this was in 2008.
So we were going to open a burger joint
partly based on the research
I was doing on this hamburger at Cook's Illustrated.
And so with that, I'm jumping on another tangent,
everything's just a series of tangents.
But the burger recipe there, so the one that ends up in Cooks
Illustrated, you take meat, right,
and you cut it into chunks.
I can't believe I got like 80% of people
to say they would do this again, because I wouldn't do it again.
But you take meat and you cut it into like one inch chunks,
and then you spread them on a sheet tray,
you put it in the freezer for like 20 minutes
until they're like semi firm,
and then you put them in a food processor
and you pulse them. And then after that,
you don't touch them, like your hamburgers must not be
touched by human hands until they're ready to eat.
So you kind of dump them out onto like a tray with parchment
and you kind of just kind of gently mound them into little,
little hamburger shaped things, but you never lift them again.
And then you pick them up gently with a patty
and then they fry in a skillet and the fat renders out,
and they end up like with all these nooks
and crannies like really, really sort of like craggily,
crunchy, delicious and unique hamburgers.
Anyhow, we were going to open a burger joint
where after you ordered your hamburger,
it would go through a machine that would grind
your meat for you and it would come out as a patty
and then it would not be touched by human hands until you ate it.
But anyhow, because of the, because of the economy in 2008
this did not happen, and he went on to now be
the Executive Editor for Cooks Country,
and then I went on to quit Cooks Illustrated
and move onto, move onto Serious Eats.
So I don't even remember
how I started talking about hamburgers in the first place.
Oh right, right, I was writing an article for Serious Eats.
And so after I wrote that article I sat down
and had lunch with Ed,
and Ed who's now one of my closest friends,
but he's always been an extremely honest guy,
but he was like, like I have a site,
Serious Eats is doing well, but I was talking with,
he was talking with Nick Denton, who was like the Gawker guy.
But he's like, he was telling me,
well, there's only so far you can get
when you're based on like New York,
like you can only reach a New York audience.
But like if you write about recipes,
you can reach everyone in the world.
And so he's like, so he's like, yeah,
so I need you to come and write recipes for me.
I was like, okay.
So I started out, I started out there writing,
editing occasionally and writing recipes.
And oh, and he was like, yeah, what are you in to?
And I was like, oh, I don't know.
I was like, I've always wanted to write about food science.
He's like, all right, like write a food
science column with recipes,
like have the first one in for me next week.
And I didn't ask him how much he was going to pay me.
Which I mean, I would have, I would have agreed to do it
no matter what the answer was,
but the answer, the answer was $30,
which is $5 more than the going rate
for like a blog post at the time.
But I didn't know this until after I'd written it,
which is probably good because like that first article
was about boiled eggs and I was like, this is awesome.
Like, I get-. Oh, and I had like a food,
like a recipe testing budget of $50.
And so I was living at the time,
I was freelance editing at Cooks Illustrated, living in New York,
freelance editing at Cooks Illustrated.
My wife was a grad student.
Is my time running out? Am I rambling too much? Okay.
My wife was a grad student, and so we,
we were living in an apartment in Prospect Heights.
If anyone's seen the movie Ghost,
so there's the scene where Willie,
the guy who stabs Patrick Swayze,
he runs away into, I'm sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone.
So Patrick Swayze's dead the whole time, by the way.
Willie, he runs to this like shady neighborhood
and runs into this decrepit old building.
That was the building we lived in Prospect Heights.
We lived in a basement apartment with no windows,
so completely illegal. Kitchen in the living room,
it was, there's one bedroom, the bedroom had two windows
but they had been covered up
because they built the building next door right next to ours,
and so it had just been plastered over.
But then they decided six months after we moved in that they were
going to tear down the building next to ours,
and so there was like between us and a brick wall being torn down
just a piece of drywall and paint.
Anyhow, my wife and I were living in Prospect Heights
and I was not making a lot of money,
so at that point I was like,
oh, I get a $50 budget, testing budget.
That's going to buy a lot of eggs.
And so we ate a lot of egg salad for like the next,
for the next couple of weeks.
But that article, I cooked hundreds of eggs
and then wrote like 3,000 words about boiled eggs.
And I just thought like, okay,
they're going to edit this down to whatever.
But then like,
nobody edited it down, they just like put it up.
And I was like, this is what happens on the internet?
Like I wrote this thing
and like yesterday like it didn't exist,
and today like there's people reading it,
which is, it is a thing that happens on the internet.
And especially back then, like things were so fast.
And so, for me,
that was sort of like, the ultimate learning experience
because it's like, I had spent a lot of time,
I spent a number of years working at a magazine pace,
which is you're sort of eight months out working on a recipe,
and the feedback that I was getting at the time
was mostly letters,
like handwritten letters from people, you know?
And so when I'm working on a recipe,
we send it out to a bunch of people,
they do a survey, at Cook's Illustrated that is.
They'll do a survey, so you get you get feedback
on sort of what the recipe is like.
And then later after it's published in the magazine,
if it was like particularly successful,
people might send you an email,
send you a handwritten letter back.
But so to move from that to something like Serious Eats
where it's like, all right, I'm going to spend the week
experimenting with this thing,
I'm going to write up what I experimented on,
I'm going to publish it,
and then I'm going to get immediately feedback on this
so that I can start thinking about what
am I going to do with the next experiment,
or what am I going to do the next time?
To me that was like, the most exciting thing in the world,
it's still like the most exciting thing,
is that I have sort of, that the more,
the more I give to my audience and the more sort of open
I am with the audience about sort of the process,
the more I get in return. And if I get,
like I was talking about that smoked salt thing earlier,
that whole process, while I was doing that,
I was kind of like on Twitter, I'm not on Twitter anymore,
well I guess no one's on Twitter anymore.
But I was kind of saying, hey, this is what
I'm working on Twitter, and getting feedback from people
like about like what sort of tests
I can do, and feedback from like chemists and metallurgists,
and people like, people who like knew
who could give me sort of authoritative feedback
that helped me, helped me plan things.
So I think it is, discovering how to write online for me
was sort of an awesome experience.
And the other wonderful thing about writing online
is that it sort of forced me to just write a lot.
And this is a question people ask me a lot,
it's like, well, how do you become a writer?
And the answer is you just write a lot. Right?
And if you do it online, in those days it's like,
I got, every day I got, I saw sort of an experiment,
like I got to write something and get feedback on it.
And if it wasn't good, like who cares,
I get to write again the next day.
It's sort of the way I feel about like,
I guess about cooking and meals also,
it's like, as long, there's very few things
that can go so wrong in the kitchen
that like a meal just literally becomes inedible.
It might not be perfect, it might not be great,
but it's one of those things,
it's like you're in the kitchen, like if you mess up,
like so what, everyone messes up.
Like you get to, you're going to have another meal
like within the next 12 hours, right, so you get to try again.
And so anything where you get the opportunity
to experiment and mess up,
I feel like that's just like a blessing, you know?
And so I've been,
if people who follow like what I do on video these days,
I kind of, I see videos sort of in that same vein
now where it's like, it's like YouTube,
I want YouTube to be a place where I can just try stuff
and put it out there without like,
I don't, like some things are more polished than others,
some things like, it's like I recently put on a thing
before Christmas where I had,
I had like a videographer and we and we had like microphones,
and like I went on location to Easton Cleaver.
And so we had this like segment in there, but.
And so, I find it cool that like there's this platform now
where I can experiment with different formats,
with different, yeah, with different formats,
with different writing styles. Like I've done scripted stuff,
I've done unscripted stuff, until I can sort of find a style
that feels comfortable and right for me.
And I feel like, yeah, there's so many opportunities for people
to just experiment with these things now
and get feedback from like a real audience
that you're kind of, if you're in this field
and you're interested in it all in that
and you're not experimenting with it,
then like you're kind of shooting yourself
in the foot I feel.
I'd say it's almost like, I recently got on TikTok,
and TikTok, like a few months ago
I was like, oh TikTok, like this is where I draw the line,
like I'm not going on TikTok. I did it, I did Instagram
and like that's already gotten too confusing.
TikTok, I don't know what people are doing it.
But then I realized like, you know what, like if I say
I'm not doing TikTok now, like what's going to happen?
What am I going to be doing in like 10 years?
Like I'm just going to be like the old man who quit at TikTok,
and I won't be able to talk to anybody
and I won't be able to connect with an audience.
And so like I feel like why
am I purposely digging myself into a hole?
Like I want to be able to connect with an audience
all the time of course.
And so whether that's through a magazine,
writing letters in a magazine or leaving comments on a blog post
or giving a, what do they give on TikTok?
Is it likes? I don't even know what they give.
Thumbs ups, I don't know.
Getting whatever it is, I don't know how TikTok works.
I don't know. Giving whatever it is on TikTok.
I feel like it's important to always stay sort of connected
with an audience and experimenting.
-I have two questions for you.
One is, you went from this program
and then you pivoted into cooking.
How did you deal with revealing that to your, to your parents?
-Right.
-No convincing them, hey, Mom and Dad,
I'm going to do this, you know?
And second thing, obviously cooking is your passion
and a lot of things about food is your passion.
But sometimes if you spend a lot of time into passion,
you can also start to hate it, right?
-Yeah. -If you make it your work.
So how do you deal with that also?
-Yeah, those are good questions.
Okay, so the first question,
how did I reveal it to my parents?
Okay, so my, well, it was easy revealing to my dad.
My dad is just doesn't care too much either way.
I think my dad was excited
because I was working at restaurants in Boston
and he likes going to restaurants in Boston.
And so he would like come to restaurants
I was working at and drop my name and expect free stuff,
which he would get, he likes that kind of stuff.
So my dad was happy. My mom was different, yeah.
So my mom is Japanese, very, very typical
sort of first generation Japanese mom
who had a certain vision of success for kids
that did not involve being a cook,
it did not involve being an architect either,
like just going from like a hard science degree
to architecture's like, oof.
And none of her kids became doctors or lawyers.
But yeah, so it was difficult. I told my mom after I graduated
I was going straight into restaurants.
And yeah, her reaction was,
well you might, like why are you doing that?
Like you might as well get a job at McDonald's
because like a cook is a cook. And first of all, like I agree,
I think they're, like a cook is a cook
and there's nothing wrong with being a cook at a McDonald's,
but I don't think she saw, yeah,
cooking as a viable career path for sure.
And that was, let's see, that was in, that was in,
I got my first cooking job I think in 2000s,
and then I went full time in 2001.
So things are, things are different now, like,
and especially like-. So 2001
there was like a little bit of like celebrity chef culture,
there was like early Food Network stuff.
Kitchen Confidential had just come out.
So there's like, this like image of chefs as like rock stars,
yeah, like macho rock stars was like a thing, you know?
So there was some appeal to being a cook at the time,
I guess, but certainly none
that had spread to my mom's generation.
And no, and to be honest, it took a lot,
like she was really happy with any of those decisions
until, until the book, until my first book came out
and got decent reviews, and then it's all like,
she's like, now she can tell people,
like oh, my son's in the New York Times,
like she can tell people that. So yeah, my answer is,
my answer is, yeah, be respectful of your parents
but do what you have to do. And then, I'm sorry,
then the second the second question again was?
-When you work on your passion.
-Oh, right, right, right. Okay.
The danger of a passion turning into a job.
So yeah, I mean that is definitely a big danger,
and I think part of it is,
part of it comes down to making sure you identify
what part you're passionate about.
And so for me, I actually think the cooking is not really
the part I'm passionate about. Like I love cooking
and I love sort of the fundamental acts of cooking,
and so that part, like I don't get tired,
like the acts of cooking.
I think the part I'm actually passionate about
is more of the communication element of it.
So like I could be,
like I feel like I could be writing a book about like,
I don't know, wooden toys,
if I just had happened to get a summer job
as a toy maker instead of a cook.
So that's the part that's my passion
and that's the part that I do try
and like consistently allow the freedom to feed, you know?
So talking about just being able to have a place to experiment
with writing voices. And so I guess,
yeah, the creative parts, like the explaining things,
whether it's via writing or video, or audio or whatever,
whatever format medium I'm working in.
But having the freedom to experiment with those
and making sure that I sort of make career choices
along those lines. So like moving from,
moving from restaurants to Cooks Illustrated,
that was a career choice decision,
mainly to get sort of better hours,
but also sort of afford me the opportunity to answer
some of these questions that I wanted answers to,
and sort of, it just seemed like a more viable way
to stay in the industry.
But then basically every career choice since then, has been,
is this going to give me like fewer bosses,
or like more freedom or less freedom?
Like am I going to be able to continue feeding my passion
in a way that it feels organic and makes me excited to do it?
Because that's, I feel like that's when I do my best work.
So yeah, working towards fewer bosses has always been my goal.
-I love it. There's a question up at the top here.
-You seem like, speaking of passion,
you seem like a very passionate, successful person.
And I was wondering about your work ethic.
Like do you find
that you ever enter a hyper focused flow state,
maybe when you're writing or cooking,
or are you more like scatterbrained?
I know you've taken us on a really long journey of tangents,
which has been awesome. But like,
even maybe, I don't know, if you ever edit your own videos
or you send them off, but like, what's your work ethic?
Like your style?
-I could have a more efficient workflow for sure.
I tend to, I mean, so like one of the big places
where my wife and I butt heads,
as far as like managing household chores,
is that she likes to have a strategy in place
before we start tackling it.
Whereas I like just have like the hat approach, you know?
It's like here's a hat of things we have to do,
I'm just going to grab one and do it.
And I kind of, I kind of am the same way with the writing,
which makes, the most difficult, the most difficult part
of writing for me is the organization,
especially when it comes to, when it comes to books.
Like doing one off videos and one off articles,
like that's really easy these days,
like that I feel like I have a ton of practice doing it,
it's just this, that just rolls out.
But like right now I'm working on a new book
and figuring out what of all these like million ideas,
what can be shaped into a book, and then how to organize
that book in a way that's useful to people,
and like what balance I need to strike between what's like,
what's most interesting to me versus what is,
what potential sort of target audience would want,
like sort of how to weigh those things out.
So yeah, I would say I definitely, I definitely do,
I think like a lot of writers, I go through ebbs
and flows as far as sort of, yeah,
how those kind of creative juices are flowing.
And definitely go through sort of periods of a writer's block.
And so yeah, my writer's block almost always
sort of manifests itself in being too scatterbrained
and like having too much, too much on the plate
at once to be able to really,
it's like, it's like the Thanksgiving plate,
where it's just like a tablespoon of everything
and it's all just kind of brown.
So, and in fact, I do that sometimes when I'm cooking also,
it's like if I feel, if I feel like I'm cooking under pressure,
like say I'm on like a, I don't know,
like a competition show or something,
my problem is always putting,
trying to do too many things at once
and not being able to take the time to self-edit.
But one thing
I have been working on for the last few years
is learning how to say no to more things,
because my general inclination is like,
oh, you want to come talk at the library?
Yeah, of course.
What are we going to talk about? I don't know.
-We're grateful for that. -We'll find out.
But yeah, finding that balance, that sort of work life balance
has been a, is an ongoing struggle,
because my inclination is,
my inclination for solving problems is always just like,
oh work, the work harder inclination.
Like what's the horse from, the horse from Animal Farm?
Inclinations like, if there's a problem
I'll just work a little harder, I guess.
Which is not a healthy way to do it, I think.
-In your book, you talk about using alcohol as a vehicle
to marry the flavors of oil with water.
I believe you have a ground beef chili recipe
where you add alcohol to that.
So could you explain your process
of adding a shot of whiskey to your chili?
-Yeah.
So adding a shot of whiskey-. So there's a couple of things.
So alcohol and fat share a similar shape, right?
And so a lot of, a lot of flavorful compounds
that are soluble in fat are not soluble in water
but are soluble in alcohol. And so certain flavors
that you get from some of the spices or flavors
that you get out of the fat and meat will distribute
more evenly when you add alcohol to your,
to your pot than when you're using just plain water.
And then also because it's more volatile, you get more steam,
you get more vaporization coming out of the,
out of the pot itself and making it up into your nose
and carrying more stuff with it,
and so you get a little bit more,
a little bit of a fuller flavor when you,
when there's a little bit of alcohol in that mix.
Yeah.
-So it's interesting to hear that the Food Lab
had to be edited down to one volume.
And since we're in Seattle and all,
I was wondering about your thoughts on things
like Modernist Cuisine,
and if food literature can get too theory heavy,
and when to not worry about the theory overall?
-Modernist Cuisine I think is a,
I mean, I think it's like an incredible achievement.
We won't talk about, we won't talk about Nathan
and his other ventures,
but the book itself I think is an incredible achievement.
As far as too theory heavy,
yeah, it's a book that takes itself
sort of very seriously and takes it, it takes it.
So I think what, food I think in general
is a subject that in the sort of Modernist Cuisine era
and in the, like the Chef's Table era,
I feel like are probably the two things
that took it the most, that took food
the most seriously recently that I can think of,
and probably took it a little too seriously.
But as far as like too much theory, I'm not,
no, I don't think there's such thing as too much theory,
I think there's too much application of theory
and there's-. You know, it's like,
I think a good analogy with food is always music,
and like with music theory,
I think there's a sort of common misunderstanding
that if you, that if you learn theory,
that theory is like a set of rules for music, right?
And that if you learn theory,
you're confining yourself to the set of rules.
Where it's really the other way around,
like theory is something, is actually,
it's actually kind of just like a set of language
that we use to describe something
that is happening, you know? And so it doesn't define rules.
And in the same way, with cooking, like there's,
I don't think there's any sort of theory in cooking
that should prescribe what you have to do.
There's ways you can understand what's going on better
and there's ways you can achieve certain results better
if those are your desired goals.
But there's nothing like in sort of The Food Lab,
or what they discovered while working on Modernist Cuisine
that I think prescribes what you have to do
as far as food goes. So yeah, so I don't think
there's such thing as too much theory.
I do think, the newest book, Modernized Pizza,
I don't know if people are familiar with Modernized Pizza,
but I think in some, in some ways they miss like,
they miss some of the elements
of what makes certain pizza styles those pizza styles,
because they, yeah, there is a sense of like we,
it's like we were so preoccupied with what we can do
and didn't stop to think what we should.
Element to the to the pizza, to the pizza book I find.
But again, it's like I think they're pretty well aware,
like I think it's all kind of tongue in cheek
and are pretty well aware that like making a ridiculous
over the top pizza is not something that people
are really looking to do at home,
but it's more a sort of a, I don't know,
an interesting thought experiment.
Yeah. I think they're, I think they're pretty cool books.
And no, I don't think there's ever too much,
ever such thing as too much theory.
There's just different ways people apply it.
-So we have a last question here in the middle.
-Hello.
So one thing I really respect about your videos
is that when you sign off you say,
guys, gals, and non-binary pals.
So I guess between the world we live in now,
between kitchen controversies like Teflon and gas stoves,
and the fact that you are a pretty large
social figure yourself now,
is this something that you think about
or like how do you navigate this minefield if so?
-Yeah, I do try and be as inclusive as possible,
because I don't think there's ever any harm in inclusivity.
And, if that's the degree of like outspokenness
that people can't deal with, then like they're welcome
not to watch, you know? Yeah.
-Kenji, thank you so much.
Let's give him one more round of applause.
[ Applause ]