#kenji lopez-alt

It is the story of how I slowly came to terms with the fact that Kenji from Serious Eats doesn’t really give great recipes, at least not for the majority of home cooks. The final straw was just this past weekend. In a weird way I’m still a huge Kenji fan even though I’ll probably never lean on his recipe work again unless I’m working with a near-professional level kitchen. And that’s only just to test out the theory that maybe he’s not writing for me specifically given my present confines in apartment living. Even though available evidence says, no, look at his set up in the header picture. That’s not much better than what I’ve got.

The thing I still look to Kenji for is inspiration. He puts words together well and he drops enough food science into his writing that it’s worth reading even if you never do exactly what he’s advocating. For instance: his perfect chocolate chip cookies recipe is kind of a mess but it offers two ‘hacks’ that actually work wonders in a standard Toll House Cookies recipe. First, after you’ve proofed your cookies, tear them in half to get some nice craggy, crispy edges and second, after you pull the cookies from the oven but before you take them off the pan sprinkle a little bit of salt over the tops. My other very simple addition to the old standard is to use 50-100% more egg than the recipe calls for but I just got that through my own experiments.

With that set up that gives away a little bit of the end of the story let’s see what went wrong on Sunday when I made this ricotta gnocchi recipe. On the whole the results weren’t bad but I noticed a similar timing issue that seems to crop up for me every time I do anything written by Kenji. Namely, everything takes way longer to do than he recommends. Like double the time. When you’re baking (cookies above) you can see where things are going wrong and make your own adjustments on the fly based on what you’re seeing. With gnocchi that you’re boiling and the water is spider-webbing because of all the protein and gluten in the pot? There’s not really a second take you can do.

His claim is that the pillows will rise to the top in about two minutes and then be cooked all the way through about a minute after that. He offers great advice (as per usual) to say that you’re better off over-cooking gnocchi than under-cooking it but it’s not like pasta noodles that you can test by throwing against the wall. You take these bitches out and dress them and then find out they’re still doughy. My advice would be to take all of Kenji’s recipes and follow them for assembly as needed then ignore all the temps and cooking times he posts and go source those from more common sources, like those cookbooks that nobody really uses any more that have way better bona fides behind them or go to allrecipes.com and find something similar.

The problems with allrecipes.com are all about attribution. As in, if you accused a recipe on there of sex trafficking then the whole site would get shut down. It’s a company that lives on other people’s ideas being used to sell advertising with none of that money going back to the originators and contributors. (AHEM!)

That beautiful pie baked in a tart pan is my own handiwork. I didn’t bother taking a picture of my gnocchi because I was angry at it but this beautiful beast deserved some shine. And goddamn was it easy and gloriously uneventful!

The filling came from - ta da! - allrecipes.com and the crust, which I didn’t think of a day ahead like you’re supposed to, came from something called instructables. Everything worked exactly as described for both parts and I was able to put this thing together from scratch in about 45 minutes and then bake it in about an hour. That’s perfect and now my wife has to come close to admitting that rhubarb fucking rules.

I’ve loved rhubarb pie from the first time I ever tried it but I’d never made one because who the fuck is out there buying rhubarb? It showed up in my produce box, though, and my mind went a-racin’. I don’t think there are a ton of uses for those rubbery slimy celery looking things and I’d always just lived with an unbased assumption that it’s difficult to work with. It’s not. You just rinse it and chop it and let the oven do its work. Apparently the leaves will actually kill you so be careful if you must when you go to recreate.

The crust was something of a revelation. Pie crusts are usually a horrible pain in the ass in cramped space and you have to plan ahead to let them chill and set before you can use them (usually just a day ahead but that’s still more thought than the average bear wants to put into a dessert they’re mostly going to give away.) The only thing I changed from the way the recipe is written was that I forgot to hold back the egg white for a wash because I cooked it up and gave it to my dog. When I realized the error I just switched to doing a butter rub each time I rotated the pie (about 4 times over the course of baking.)

So the pie came out perfectly and tasted exactly like I wanted my rhubarb pie to taste. It’s fucking beautiful. And Kenji’s gnocchi came out mushy even though I stretched out the cooking time a decent bit (probably 5 total minutes in the water instead of 2-3 as proscribed.) So I’m saying all this to announce a good bye to the recipes of Serious Eats and a renewed devotion to the simplicity found (and then usually exported online because I don’t feel like having a book open in front of me while I cook) in the 1961 edition of Fanny Farmer’s Cookbook that was edited by James Beard himself. That is all.