''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 American cuisine consists of the cooking style and traditional dishes prepared in the United States. It has been significantly influenced by Europeans, indigenous Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and many other cultures an ...

recipes. ''The Food Lab'' expands on Lopez-Alt's "The Food Lab" column on the

Serious Eats Serious Eats is a website and blog focused on food enthusiasts, created by food critic and author Ed Levine. A Serious Eats book was published by Levine in 2011. Serious Eats was acquired by Fexy Media in 2015 and then by Dotdash in late 2020. ...

blog. Lopez-Alt uses the

scientific method The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific m ...

in the cookbook to improve popular American recipes and to explain the science of cooking. ''The Food Lab'' charted on ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list, and won the 2016

James Beard Foundation Award The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists in the United States. They are scheduled around James Beard's May 5 birthday. The media award ...

for the best General Cooking cookbook and the 2016 IACP awards for the Cookbook of the Year and the best American cookbook. Lopez-Alt developed the cookbook over a five-year period. 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". The recipes in ''The Food Lab'' are arranged by the technique used to prepare them. The cookbook also contains charts and experiments aimed at explaining scientific concepts like the difference between temperature and energy and the

Leidenfrost effect The Leidenfrost effect is a physical phenomenon in which a liquid, close to a surface that is significantly hotter than the liquid's boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer that keeps the liquid from boiling rapidly. Because of this re ...

. Emily Weinstein of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' 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". Eric Vellend of ''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it ...

'' wrote that "Lopez-Alt's relentless pursuit of perfection yields hundreds of unconventional kitchen tricks". Silvia Killingsworth wrote in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' 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". 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".

References

General references * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Food Lab American cookbooks 2015 non-fiction books W. W. Norton & Company books