Cooking Food with Science in Mind, The Food Lab Founder Shares How This Can Produce Better Dishes

Kenji Lopez-Alt, a 'little nerdling' who's the grandson of an organic chemist and the son of a microbiologist, happens to also love cooking. So what he did is he combined all his knowledge, skills and passion to create an innovative way of cooking - cooking with science in mind. This unique combination of cooking and science produced various dishes that were huge in flavors.

Kenji recently shared and proved this concept in Boston at Roxy's Grilled Cheese, according to NPR. He used one of the recipes from his book 'The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science' to teach the cooks how to maximize surface area in breading as well as maintaining moisture in chicken. The result was phenomenal with the diners enjoying the Korean-inspired chicken sandwich they created at Roxy's and one even saying that it had "sex appeal."

In Kenji's cookbook, he shows various food-science "experiments" and explains how one can reach the optimum flavor of any dish using scientific methods. According to The New Yorker, one explanation he shared about a common conundrum most home cooks experience regarding pork chops is that "pork chops tend to twist and buckle during cooking because the fat and lean tissues shrink at different rates; scoring the fat will help." In his cookbook there are "Four pages of cheeses and their melting points and flavor profiles" as well as sections on "the best ways to cook various cuts of beef, and the smoke points of common cooking oils."

Aside from the chicken sandwich at Roxy's all these techniques led to some seriously good recipes and cooks, from beginners to intermediate, have treated Kenji's methods and recommendations as indispensible kitchen wisdom. Helen Rossner of Eeater even went far as saying "When I need to make sure I'm using the best possible technique, my usual m.o. is to google the thing I'm trying to figure out, plus the word 'Kenji.'"

Who know science and food would go well together? With Kenji's case, he's proved that it's a match made in heaven.

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