Chef J. Kenji López-Alt Talks Curiosity, Cuisine, and Science

When award-winning chef and author J. Kenji López-Alt walks on stage to deliver the IFT FIRST opening keynote on Monday, July 13, he will have something important in common with his audience—an unwavering commitment to scientific principles.

Both his father and grandfather were scientists, and although he graduated from MIT with a degree in architecture, López-Alt started out as a biology major. His interest in science has remained a constant in his career. He is known for applying scientific principles and experimental methods to cooking, and his landmark book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, reflects that perspective. On his website, López-Alt describes himself as “a guy who can’t stop asking why.”

In advance of López-Alt’s IFT FIRST keynote, Food Technology posed several questions to the chef/author. Here’s some of what he had to say.

How has your strong scientific orientation informed your approach to food preparation?

How it informs my cooking is that I like to get a really good understanding of how and why things work so that when I’m cooking in the future I’ll know what will happen if I change a recipe in a particular way or what will happen if I use a different pan or a slightly different ingredient. And understanding the technical details of how all that works helps you to be prepared to make decisions and take your food where you want it to go.

Read More

Read more of J. Kenji López-Alt’s thoughts on science communication in IFT’s Brain Food blog.

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Why is it so important that the public has a better understanding of the role science plays in daily life?

I think there’s a sort of public misconception, a common misconception [about science]. When people think of scientists, they think of lab coats and pipettes and things like that. And really science is much broader than that, and it’s a process. … It’s a process that can be applied to everything with the goal of understanding how the world works and understanding that it can be applied to food or rocket ships or great paintings all in the same way.

What are some of the culinary and flavor trends that you see having the potential to translate into CPG product development?

I think when the Internet came around and people started to be able to really access ingredients and instruction and culture in a way that they weren’t able to do in the past, at least in the United States, the first places we turned to were places we were familiar with from a basic American restaurant context, so basic Cantonese food and maybe Sichuan food and Thai food and what we call Indian food, and then Western European food.

And I think we are expanding toward those other areas where there was maybe less of a cultural footprint already in the United States, so turning to Eastern Europe and the Middle East and a better understanding of regional cuisines in some of the larger Asian countries and also Southeast Asian countries outside of Thailand and Vietnam. [With] regional Mexican cuisine, I think people have a better understanding of the differences between Yucatán cuisine and cuisine from Mexico City, for instance. So, I think more specificity on regional cuisines is something that people are looking to now.