Quotes from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

The perception of juiciness involves a complex jumble of things, including how quickly juices are squeezed out of meat fibers by our teeth, how much saliva we produce, and the ratio of liquid fat to water-based liquid.

You can cook a limited number of sous vide recipes in a beer cooler, but if the person you're buying for wants to start cooking like the pros, they'll need a dedicated circulator that's designed to maintain the temperature of a water bath to within one degree.

Your goal when searing a steak is to make sure that the temperature and evaporation buckets are as small as possible, so that you can rapidly fill them up and move on to the important process of browning.

Book proposals are written like business plans. You need to identify your market, see what the competition is in the space, calculate how many books you think you can sell, work on building a platform to sell them and promote them.

Though hot sauce preferences are personal, I'm pretty open to all styles. All except stunt sauces, that is - you know, sauces that are primarily designed to test your machismo.

I've tested every imaginable brand of popcorn and popcorn-popping product I could get my hands on.

Kids want to know things - it's just a matter of keeping them engaged with cooking in a way that provides these learning points, while also giving them some degree of control over the finished product.

It's good to recognize your flaws, but it's also good to recognize your skills.

A fridge is basically just a big, cold box with a few shelves in it, right? Well, that's true, but where you store food in the fridge can have quite an impact on its shelf life.

Different hot sauces fulfill different needs, and I wouldn't want anyone to live in a world in which each fridge held only one bottle.

I take my daughter to the San Mateo farmers market every Saturday morning, and despite repeated advice to the contrary, I usually do it on an empty stomach. Bad mistake. I wind up buying far more produce than our small family can eat within a week, which means I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to pack more vegetables into a single meal.

In those rare cases in which you have a dull knife and cooking to do, but no ceramic in sight, the top edge of a rolled-down car window will work just as well. Even a smooth stone or slab of concrete outside can work in a pinch.

A tender beef roast with a well-browned exterior is about as easy to pair with wine as a dish can be. You have your pick of just about any medium- to full-bodied red wine, from any place.

As a recipe tester, it's really easy to fall into the trap of eating only what I'm testing. Sometimes this is okay, but other times it means four straight days of Buffalo chicken wings, lunch and dinner.

The key characteristics of a tempura-style batter are extreme lightness of color and texture: Good tempura should be pale blond with an extraordinarily lacy, light, and crisp coating.

Cooking for a family, and specifically cooking to stimulate exploration of new flavors and textures, has led to mealtimes that are both healthier and more exciting.

I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people.

I like to cook my crepes in a little butter, which gives them a nice, golden-brown color and lacy-looking surface. I rub a thin layer into a preheated skillet, then wipe out all the excess with a paper towel.

Like a good grilled cheese, a good quesadilla is one that takes its time cooking, for a thoroughly melted interior and nice, even browning.

Frying is essentially a drying process. Batters and breadings are formulated to dry out in a particularly graceful way.

Walk into any Japanese fish market, and you'll see neat rows of sea urchin roe sold in little wooden trays.

No matter how your breading or batter is constructed, it serves the same function: Adding a layer of 'stuff' around the item being fried means the oil has a tough time coming in direct contact with it, and thus has a hard time transferring energy to it.

Now, normally I do all my research on existing recipes before I start working on my own version.

Making sea urchin pasta is a lot like a toddler playing with Play-Doh: There are a million right ways to do it, and most of them are salty and delicious.