Kenji Lopez-Alt: Mapo Tofu
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.4 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Kenji makes a late-night grilled cheese sandwich in his kitchen, with a Go-Pro camera strapped to his head, more than 10 million YouTubers tune in to watch. His recipe for scrambled eggs was the New York Times' most clicked on recipe in 2021 and every book he writes goes straight to the bestseller list, including his newest, The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.
But his last meal goes back to his childhood, when he was more focused on being a scientist than a sous chef. The defining ingredient of Kenji's last meal is Sichuan peppercorn, a spice that numbs and tingles the tongue and is, frankly, not a peppercorn at all. Dr Stuart Farrimond joins the show to explain the science behind the Sichuan peppercorn and answers host Rachel Belle's questions about spice, such as: can you learn to like spicy foods or is a tolerance for heat genetic?
But if there's one reason to listen, it's to learn Kenji's well-researched method of how to boil eggs with guaranteed easy-to-peel shells.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights. |
| 0:05.8 | Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show. |
| 0:11.6 | I'm Rachel Bell, and this is your last meal, a show about famous people and the stories |
| 0:29.5 | behind the foods they love most. Today on the program, Kenji Lopez Alt. Kenji is a best-selling |
| 0:36.0 | cookbook author, food writer for serious eats and the New York Times, |
| 0:40.1 | and more than a million people are subscribed to his YouTube channel, where he cooks with a |
| 0:44.2 | GoPro camera strapped to his forehead. |
| 0:46.6 | Kenji won a James Beard Award for his first cookbook, The Food Lab, has a best-selling |
| 0:50.8 | children's book called Every Night is Pizza Night, and his brand new cookbook |
| 0:55.3 | is called The Walk, recipes and techniques. |
| 0:59.2 | A prominent ingredient in Kenji's last meal is Seshwan peppercorn. |
| 1:03.5 | Peppa corn, neither peppa nor a corn. Discuss. |
| 1:07.1 | Which is exactly what we're going to do, because botanically, Setshman peppercorn is not a peppercorn, nor is it a chili. |
| 1:14.5 | So I consult with Dr. Stuart Faramond, food science specialist and author of Science of Spice. |
| 1:20.4 | We talk about what a Setschwan peppercorn actually is and why it numbs your mouth when you eat them. |
| 1:26.8 | But first, my conversation with Kenji Lopez-Alt. |
| 1:35.4 | I am curious how you came to food in the first place because you went to school for |
| 1:40.0 | architecture. |
| 1:41.0 | So how did you shift over into this career? |
| 1:44.0 | I mean, it was all accidental. I actually |
| 1:46.2 | started school as a biology major. And I'd spent some time working, you know, summers in biology |
| 1:50.6 | labs. And then I realized that I loved biology and science, but the actual lab work was not something |
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