Kenji López-Alt Cooks Differently Now

Plus: The one thing he thinks you should really know about salads.

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Heads up, fans of The Food Lab and The Wok: J. Kenji López-Alt is working on a new book.

In this week’s episode of The Dinner Plan podcast, Kenji shares some intel on his new project, along with some reflections on how his cooking has changed over the 15 years we’ve known each other.

He’s been thinking a lot, he says, about what’s actually practical for home cooks, and how to write a book that serves people in their real lives. “A recipe is really like a photograph,” he says. It captures a moment in time, and the way a recipe works for that person’s situation. “What are the chances that your life is exactly the same as whoever is writing?”

So Kenji’s upcoming project aims to teach you how to take a recipe in whatever direction works for you. Learning a bit about how recipes are developed can help you adapt them to your life, your likes and dislikes, your time constraints, and any dietary needs. “It's a book that's designed to sort of teach you how to cook,” Kenji says, “as opposed to just teaching you to follow directions.”

Listen to the episode to get more book details, plus hear Kenji’s advice for drastically improving your salads, and his thoughts on what you absolutely shouldn’t cook for a dinner party.

While you listen, you can whip up Kenji’s go-to cucumber salad and quick stir-fried egg and tomato—scroll down to see the full recipes.

Win a copy of The Wok

Kenji’s next book won’t be out for awhile, which gives you time to work through this tome of more than 200 recipes. Try Kenji’s Moo Shu Mushrooms and Pad Ka-Prao, Kung Pao Shrimp and really good fried rice.

To win a copy, make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter and leave a comment below by Friday, February 21.

Winner will be alerted by DM and email—be sure to check your messages! U.S. addresses only, 18+, no purchase necessary. Giveaway not sponsored or administered by Substack or Instagram. Ends Friday, February 21, 2025.

Kenji mentioned:

Kari Kari Chili Crisp
Ideas in Food
Fresh Eggs Daily by Lisa Steele
Why You Should Fry Your Eggs in Cream
Kenji’s Mapo Tofu (Serious Eats)
5-Minute Miso-Glazed Salmon in the Toaster (Serious Eats)
3-Ingredient Stovetop Macaroni and Cheese (Serious Eats)
Jacques Pepin’s Lyonnaise-Style Onion Soup
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice
Jacques Pépin’s La Technique and Essential Pépin

Maggie mentioned:

Rebecca Firkser’s Buttermilk Dry-Rubbed Turkey (or Chicken) (Food52)
Dried Olive and Miso Shake (Serious Eats)

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You can support The Dinner Plan by shopping any of the affiliate links in this newsletter—or buying any of the guest-recommended books on this Bookshop list. Looking for a no-cost way to help? Share the show (or this newsletter) with a friend!

Photo: J. Kenji López-Alt

Cucumber and Dill Salad With Yogurt and Chile Oil

Reprinted from The Wok: Recipes and Techniques by J. Kenji López-Alt. Copyright © 2022 by J. Kenji López-Alt. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The flavor combination of yogurt and Sichuan Málà Chile Oil (included below) is one that I can’t get enough of. It’s great on everything from hamburgers to meatballs to roasted carrots to grilled vegetables. It’s also excellent with cucumbers that are very lightly dressed with plenty of dill. Fried peanuts are also great in this salad.

Serves 4
Total Time: 5 minutes

1 large English or 4 small Persian or Japanese cucumbers (about 1 pound/450 g total), chopped into bite-sized pieces
2½ ounces (75 g) red onion, thinly sliced
Big handful of fried (page 319) or roasted peanuts (optional)
Big handful of minced fresh dill fronds
2 tablespoons (30 ml) extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon (15 ml) white wine or rice vinegar
Kosher salt
½ cup (120 ml) Greek yogurt or labneh (any percentage fat)
A few tablespoons Sichuan Málà Chile Oil (see below) or any other chile oil

Directions

1. Combine the cucumbers, onion, peanuts, dill, olive oil, vinegar, and a big pinch of salt in a large bowl and toss.

2. Spread yogurt over the bottom of a serving platter. Pile the cucumber salad on top of the yogurt, then drizzle with chile oil. Serve.

Sichuan Málà Chile Oil

Yield: 2½ cups (625 ml)
Active Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 45 minutes

There is a wide range of chile-infused oils used throughout Asia, from sweet-hot versions with nubs of crispy garlic spooned into Japanese ramen to savory soy-sauce-laced Chaozhou-style (Chiu Chow) chile oil, to trendy Lao Gan Ma spicy chile crisp, with its crunchy bits of chile and peanut. Sichuan málà chile oil is among the most complex and satisfying to make, and I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a batch of it in my fridge.

I start by toasting the whole chiles in a dry wok to bring out their flavor, then grind them up in the food processor or in a mortar and pestle (the latter method offers better texture and is, in fact, easier—dried chiles have a tendency to ride around the blades of a food processor). Next I slowly infuse oil with a variety of aromatics—garlic, ginger, shallots, cinnamon, bay leaf, star anise, fennel, and a piece of fresh orange zest (an addition I tried on a whim one year during California’s lengthy citrus season). There’s a relatively small ideal temperature window for this infusion. Below 200°F and you will barely get any flavor transfer and transformation at all, but above 250°F and you’ll start to burn your aromatics before they have a chance to fully give up their flavor. For this reason, I strongly recommend using an accurate digital instant-read or deep-fry thermometer while you make the infusion. Around 30 minutes at 225°F is what to aim for.

Once the oil is infused, I strain out and discard the aromatics, then reheat the infused oil with my toasted and pounded whole chiles, as well as the ground chile flakes. As with the aromatics, slowly heating up the chiles and making sure that they don’t heat past 250°F is key to developing aroma and color without introducing any burnt off-flavors. I find that this technique offers much more control over the flavor of the finished oil than the admittedly more dramatic sizzling pour-over method.

Notes: For a more authentic flavor, use whole er jing tiao and chao tian jiao chiles in step 1. If authenticity is not your goal, you can use whatever chiles you like for this, or a mix of chiles, the more the merrier. I like to use a minimum of two different types of whole chiles for this, but even one type will work just fine.

Caiziyou is roasted rapeseed oil and considered by some to be an essential flavor in Sichuan cooking. You can find it online at the Mala Market or at a well-stocked Chinese supermarket. The easiest way to identify it is to look for bottles labeled “rapeseed” with a significantly darker, more amber-yellow color.

When adding the chile flakes in step 4, note that Sichuan er jing tiao chile flakes will be significantly spicier than Korean chile flakes.

2 ounces (60 g) mixed dried chiles, such as árbol, Japones, pasilla, California, negro, or ancho (see Notes above)
3 tablespoons (15 g) Sichuan peppercorns
2 cups (500 ml) oil, preferably caiziyou (roasted rapeseed oil; see Notes)
4 medium garlic cloves (10 to 15 g), lightly smashed with the side of a knife
One ½-inch knob fresh ginger (about 30 g), smashed with the side of a knife
1 medium shallot (about 1½ ounces/45 g), roughly chopped
1 cinnamon stick
3 dried bay leaves
2 whole star anise pods
1 tablespoon (8 g) whole fennel seeds
One 2-inch piece orange zest removed from a fresh orange with a vegetable peeler

To Finish:
¾ cup (75 g) ground Sichuan er jing tiao or Korean chile flakes (see Notes)
2 tablespoons (16 g) white sesame seeds (optional)
½ teaspoon (2 g) MSG (optional) 1 teaspoon (4 g) kosher salt

1. Using a pair of kitchen shears, cut all of the whole chiles into ½-inch pieces and discard the seeds. Toast the cut chiles and 1 tablespoon (5 g) of the Sichuan peppercorns in a dry wok or saucepan over medium heat, stirring and shaking constantly, until fragrant and lightly darkened in color, about 2 minutes. Transfer the toasted chiles to the bowl of a food processor or mortar and pestle and pulse or pound until the chiles break into ⅛- to ¼-inch pieces that resemble store-bought red-pepper flakes or flaky sea salt. (Be careful not to overprocess.) Set aside.

2. Combine the remaining 2 tablespoons (10 g) Sichuan peppercorns, the oil, garlic, ginger, shallot, cinnamon stick, bay leaves, star anise, fennel seeds, and orange zest in your wok. Heat over medium-low heat until gently bubbling, then reduce the heat until the bubbling mostly subsides (the oil should register 200° to 225°F (95° to 105°C) on an instant-read thermometer). Cook until the garlic and shallots are pale golden brown and the oil is intensely aromatic, about 30 minutes.

3. Strain the oil through a fine-mesh strainer and discard the spices and aromatics (you can save the lightly browned garlic and shallots to chop and add to eggs or noodle dishes, or just season with salt and eat them on their own; they are delicious).

4. Return the oil to the wok and add the pounded chile/Sichuan pepper- corn mixture as well as the ground chile flakes. Heat over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the chile flakes begin to bubble gently, then reduce the heat until the bubbling mostly subsides (the oil should register 200° to 225°F (95° to 105°C) on an instant-read thermometer). Cook stir- ring occasionally, until the oil is deep red and has a slightly nutty aroma, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the sesame seeds, MSG, and salt. Allow the oil to cool completely, then transfer to sealable containers. For best flavor, let the oil rest overnight in the refrigerator before using. The oil should last for several months or longer in sealed containers in the refrigerator.

Photo: J. Kenji López-Alt

Home-Style Tomato and Scrambled Eggs

Reprinted from The Wok: Recipes and Techniques by J. Kenji López-Alt. Copyright © 2022 by J. Kenji López-Alt. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Serves 2 to 3 with rice
Total time: 15 minutes

In China, this dish is called fanqie chao dan (literally “tomato fried egg”), and it’s a dish that is simultaneously ubiquitous—all children are familiar with their own home-cooked version—but also hidden to casual visitors. It won’t appear on restaurant menus, as it isn’t a restaurant dish. It’s unlikely to appear in a Chinese cookbook just as it would be unlikely to find a recipe for buttered toast in an American cookbook. Francis Lam wrote an article for the New York Times about it, in which he described it as “like air, present and invisible [in Chinese cooking].”

As a home-style Chinese dish, there’s a huge amount of variation in technique (and don’t let anyone tell you there’s a right or wrong way to do it—the right way is the way you like it). My favorite way to make it is to think of it almost as a tomato-and-egg sauce for rice, rather than scrambled eggs with tomatoes.

I start by gently stir-frying the whites of a couple scallions in the wok before adding sliced tomatoes. Roma or small cherry tomatoes work best here, as they have a higher pectin content than larger beefsteak tomatoes. More pectin results in a thicker, more concentrated sauce (the same reason Roma-style tomatoes like San Marzano are so revered for Italian pasta sauces), which keeps the dish from being watery.

Once the tomatoes have broken down and started to concentrate, it’s time to transform them into a sauce. For this, I first add a cornstarch slurry, which thickens up the juices and suspends the chunky bits of tomato. While it’s perfectly fine to stop right there, if you want to really boost tomato, use a trick I learned from KP Kwan of the YouTube channel Taste of Asian Food: add a dash of ketchup. Yes, ketchup! My old friend and colleague Chichi Wang suggests the same in her recipe on Serious Eats. As she says, “We could go back and forth all day about whether or not ketchup oughta be a legitimate condiment in Chinese cuisine. My feeling . . . is that ketchup makes the tomatoes taste more like themselves,” and she’s right. A small dab of ketchup adds concentrated tomato flavor while also adding some sweetness and tartness to balance out the dish.

At this point, many recipes will have you remove the tomato sauce from the wok to cook the eggs before stirring the sauce back in. I prefer to drizzle my eggs—seasoned with a dash of fish sauce and moistened with cubes of butter and a cornstarch slurry—directly into the simmering tomato mixture, gently folding them until the entire thing is silky and tender.

Note: You can omit the fish sauce and use 1⁄2 teaspoon salt and an optional 1⁄4 teaspoon MSG in its place. You can also omit the butter, but I don’t recommend it.

For the Eggs:
6 large eggs
2 teaspoons (10 ml) fish sauce (optional; see Note above)
2 tablespoons (about 30 g) unsalted butter, cut into small cubes (see Note above)

For the Cornstarch Slurry:
2 teaspoons (6 g) cornstarch
¼ cup (60 ml) water

For the Stir-Fry:
2 tablespoons (30 ml) peanut, rice bran, or other neutral oil
4 scallions, chopped, dark green parts reserved separately
8 to 12 ounces (230 to 340 g) ripe Roma or large cherry tomatoes, cut into bite-sized chunks (about 5 Roma tomatoes or 1 pint cherry tomatoes)
Kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper
1 tablespoon (15 ml) ketchup
1 teaspoon (4 g) sugar

Directions

1. For the Eggs: In a large bowl, beat the eggs very thoroughly with a whisk, a fork, or a pair of chopsticks. This process should take at least 1 minute, and when you are done, the egg should be completely smooth. Test this by lifting your utensil up out of the eggs, letting them drizzle back down. There should be no visible strands or lumps. If there are, keep beating.

2. For the Cornstarch Slurry: Combine the cornstarch and water in a sep- arate small bowl and stir with a fork until the cornstarch is dissolved.

3. Add half of the cornstarch slurry (set aside the other half for now), the fish sauce, and the butter to the eggs and beat to incorporate (the butter will stay solid at this stage).

4. For the Stir-Fry: Heat the oil in a wok over high heat until shimmering. Add the scallion whites and pale greens and cook, stirring, until aromatic, about 15 seconds. Add the tomatoes, a pinch of salt, a pinch of white pepper, the ketchup, and the sugar and cook, stirring, until the tomatoes break down and release their juices but still have some of their shape, about 2 minutes. Stir the remaining cornstarch slurry and add it to the wok.

5. As soon as the sauce has thickened, add the beaten egg mixture and cook, folding and occasionally stirring gently, until the eggs are barely set and the sauce is silky, rich, and no longer watery, about 1 minute. Fold in the scallion greens, season to taste with salt and white pepper, transfer to a serving bowl, and serve immediately with steamed rice.