Good morning. Welcome to fall. I’m delighted to introduce you today to a new contributor to The New York Times and NYT Cooking, J. Kenji López-Alt.
Kenji’s a mad scientist chef and home cook and restaurateur who has for years championed a style of developing recipes that is rooted in testing, testing and yet more testing, both at Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. His 2015 cookbook, “The Food Lab,” is required reading not just for kitchen nerds but for anyone who believes in the possibility of better cooking through science.
For his debut column in The Times, Kenji takes aim at one of the more bedeviling tasks of the home cook, making perfect hard- or soft-boiled eggs. He enlisted 96 volunteers to come to his restaurant, Wursthall in San Mateo, Calif., to cook more than 700 eggs under his watchful eye, which he thinks may have resulted in “the largest-ever double-blind egg-boiling-and-peeling experiment in the history of the universe.”
The results? Start with hot water. Steam and don’t actually boil. Don’t add vinegar, baking soda or salt to the water. In short, follow his recipe for the perfect hard-boiled egg (above).
And then, with your perfect eggs? Kenji has a few ideas about that. Make egg salad sandos! Make deviled eggs! Tuck a couple eggs into your lunch for tomorrow. Add one to your bowl of ramen. Uplift your big salad with grains. You’ll thank us — you’ll thank Kenji — for the rest of your days.
What else to cook this week? I guess the eggs came first, so maybe skillet chicken with orzo, dill and feta to follow on Tuesday or Wednesday?
You could try out our new recipe for slow-cooker tomato-chicken soup with greens and cheese tortellini. Or give our pasta with green beans and almond gremolata a shot. I like the idea of sheet-pan tostadas with black beans and peppers. Also, this is a good time of the year to cook smothered pork chops for a late-weeknight win.
There are thousands of other possibilities for what to cook this week awaiting you on NYT Cooking, along with some serious instruction on how to up your game in the kitchen. It might be time, for instance, to get serious about making pizza at home. And you certainly should, at long last, really dial in on how to use your pressure cooker or Instant Pot.
Yes, you do need a subscription to access our work, but in return we get to keep coming up with fantastic recipes for you to cook. Not only that, but with a subscription you’ll be able to save and organize the recipes you like, leave ratings and notes on them, and share them with family and friends. And did you know you can save recipes from sites that aren’t NYT Cooking in your recipe box? Here’s how!
Come visit us as well on our YouTube page, where I can’t get enough of Alison Roman making a quick and easy ragu. Find us on Instagram and Twitter as well, and make sure to follow us Facebook, where we’ve built a special community for cooks just like you. (I’m out there as well: @samsifton.)
Do write for help if you run into trouble along the way. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. I’m at foodeditor@nytimes.com, myself.
Now, I doubt she cooks very much, but Cindy Adams, a New York Post columnist, has an incredible apartment on Park Avenue, as this feature on The Cut makes plain. Imagine living there.
Ski season’s coming. This trailer from Teton Gravity Research, for their “Winterland” film, will bring the stoke to those who can’t wait.
As Edward Snowden himself points out, you should absolutely read Janine Gibson on Edward Snowdon, in the Financial Times.
Finally, Stuart Walton in The Los Angeles Review of Books left me wanting to read “This Is Not Just a Painting: An Inquiry Into Art, Domination, Magic and the Sacred,” by Bernard Lahire. I’ll get on that now. See you on Wednesday.
