Hello everyone, welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. I understand

that people have been doing a lot of cooking recently, more cooking than usual. Sour

dough bread seems to be the thing that people have cotton onto as an interesting thing to

tackle. I have no idea why that thing in particular. I mean, good for you if you're making

bread out there. It's not my thing, but the idea of creating something in the kitchen

is kind of my thing. I'm not especially good at it, but it appeals to me as both sort

of creative and scientific at the same time. And in that vein, we have a great guest today

in Kenji Lopez Alt, who is both a wonderful chef and food writer and also someone very

scientifically inclined. He's a very Minescape kind of chef. Kenji got a degree from MIT.

He's been writing for a long time for the Sirius Eats Food Blog, where he has a column

called the Food Lab. And he's actually turned the Food Lab into a wonderful, wonderful

book that not only tells you recipes to make things, but explains why they work. Like,

literally, for decades now, I've been wanting a book like this that didn't just give me

recipes. But when through the science said like, okay, you want to soak beans? Well, how

long should we soak them? What happens if you soak them for an hour or 24 hours with

salt without salt? Let's do the experiment and learn it. It's a really wonderfully written

and very informative book. So it was wonderful to get the chance to talk to Kenji about some

of the big questions about cooking and eating and taste and flavor. So we talk about the

science of cooking, you know, the famous Myard reaction that gives you the wonderful grilled

flavor, how different ingredients and flavors go together, and also things like how different

people and cultures tend to enjoy different foods. I asked whether there's a grand unified

theory of cooking. I'm not sure if that's going to be a realistic thing to shoot for, but

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