Pre-sales for the Kenji x Vonhelmick knife are available now for Patreon and Vonhelmick subscribers. Any unsold knives will go on sale to the public on Wednesday, May 28th at noon Pacific.
Order at www.VonhelmickKnives.com/the-kenji-exclusive using the password "Kenji100VKC". Limit 2 per customer.
2025-05-25 19:00:06 +0000 UTC
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There are as many ways to skin a steak as there are to cook a cat.
Strike that, reverse it.
I would never tell anyone that you need a specific piece of equipment to cook a great steak any more than I’d tell someone they need a jet engine-like burner to wok up some fried rice or a pizza oven to make 2025-05-24 02:22:17 +0000 UTC View Post
This recipe is sponsored by BALMUDA, makers of the the teppanyaki, which is an electric flattop griddle that has been recently introduced to the US. You can order them from BALMUDA using the code “KENJI_15” to get 15% off your entire BALMUDA order. I’m partnering with them because it stands head and shoulders above any other flattop I’ve used at home due to its heavy, tri-ply cooking surface and its ...
2025-05-21 20:53:48 +0000 UTC View Post
At its best, roast chicken is the epitome of comfort food: Juicy meat, crackly skin, aromas that fill the kitchen, and flavor to match. Yet, achieving this ideal can be elusive, often resulting in disappointingly dry breast meat or flabby, flavorless skin. As simple as a roast chicken is, it’s one of the easiest roasts to over- or undercook. (Or, in some cases, do both simultaneously).
The fi...
2025-05-16 18:09:15 +0000 UTC View Post
To anyone not from Seattle–and likely to a good number of locals as well–the Seattle dog is an oddity. The first time I had one, I didn't get it. I ordered it from a hot dog kiosk on the waterfront by the Aquarium. An all-beef frank served in a lukewarm bun with a line of cold cream cheese shot out of a caulking gun and a pile of unseasoned, lightly caramelized onions and peppers. Doesn't sound great, does it? And it wasn't. Despite the onions and peppers, there was very little flavor goi...
2025-05-15 21:28:36 +0000 UTC View Post
As a line cook, I loved making family meal–the daily meal that would feed the other cooks and front of house staff would eat together before service. Restaurant work is all about consistency and repetition whereas family meal is all about making something delicious out of whatever odds and ends you could find in the kitchen.
Back in those days, chicken breasts were far more valuable for customers than chicken legs, which meant that after breaking down chickens–using the breasts for ...
2025-05-14 15:55:33 +0000 UTC View Post
This sandwich starts with a really simple homemade harissa sausage recipe that highlights how easy it is to get bold flavors into your food by keeping your fridge well-stocked with condiments like this. If you don’t care for harissa, try it with a Thai chili paste, or with a dry seasoning mix you love.
Make sure that you add salt to the meat mixture. It’s essential not just for flavor, but ...
2025-05-13 23:46:37 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the best bologna sandwich I've ever had.
Actually, that's a load of baloney.
Actually, actually, the best bologna sandwich I've ever had was a load of bologna. A great big load of bologna piled onto generic white bread with a heavy slather of mayo.
To be fair, I only had a single bite of it. It belonged to my littler sister . My dad bought it for her from a gas station deli in New Hampshire after a camping trip. It's been 35 years since taking that bite, but I still ...
2025-05-09 17:10:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Years ago I wrote a recipe I called "The Ultimate Patty Melt" over on Serious Eats. You can still find that article and recipe right here. In that recipe, I start by browning beef patties then caramelizing onions in the rendered beef drippings. it's a great recipe that produces seriously good results, but it's also a few extra steps–steps I'm not always willing to take when I want a hot beef and onio...
2025-05-08 21:35:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Pizza is magic.
Not in the Harry Houdini, “I’m gonna shackle myself to this pepperoni and escape while it’s in the oven” way. Not in the David Copperfield, “Now you see the pizza oven, now you don’t!” way. Not even in the Harry Potter “enlargium buttocks” kind of way.
I’m talking the much more exciting kind of magic. The kind that can transform a few simple ingredients—water, flour, salt, yeast, and a few toppings—into one of the pinnacles of human culinary...
2025-05-02 14:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Classic pizza Marinara is one of the grandfathers of all pizza. It’s a cheeseless Neapolitan-style pie made with nothing but good quality crushed tomatoes, olive oil, salt, garlic, and oregano. This is definitely one of those times to pull out the fancy Calabrian oregano if you’ve got it. (And if you don’t, you can get it here.)
While even without cheese, a Marinara pizza is wonderfu...
2025-05-02 07:59:45 +0000 UTC View Post
This pizza dough uses the basic no-knead method, which allows yeast and time to take the place of traditional kneading. By combining the basic ingredients in a bowl, covering it, and letting the dough rest to rise overnight, enzymes break down flour proteins, allowing a network of gluten to form more easily. Meanwhile, yeast, digesting carbohydrates and producing bubbles of carbon dioxide gas work as an army of miniature kneaders, kneading that bread with the gassy by-products of their digest...
2025-05-02 07:42:26 +0000 UTC View Post
My daughter Alicia is a fennel fiend. It makes biking in the spring and summer a pit stop-laden journey, as she requires me to pull over next to any and all of the fennel stalks that grow around the bike trails in Seattle to grab a handful of the sweet, anise-flavored fronds and pop them in her mouth to chew as we ride. So when we went to the produce section of the supermarket on our recent trip to Moab and I spied the plump fennel bulbs on the shelf, I knew we were going to grab one...
2025-05-01 09:26:26 +0000 UTC View Post
A couple weeks ago I made a batch of my Caramelized French Toast ("The French Toast That East Like Crème Brûlée"™). My recipe is a pan-fried version of the dish inspired by the excellent baked recipe in Debe Perelman's second book, Smitten Kitchen Keepers 2025-04-30 18:52:58 +0000 UTC View Post
If you're new to fried rice, I suggest reading The Rules for Fried Rice first!
This recipe was a product of a fridge full of various odds and ends, as fried rice recipes often are. It first appeared in my book, The Wok (you can get signed, personalized copies at 2025-04-25 10:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Is it ever OK to pre-mince your garlic or to—brace yourself—use store-bought pre-minced garlic?
Before we can answer those questions, let’s have take a quick look at what garlic flavor actually consists of. What makes garlic taste like garlic.
Garlic is a member of the allium family, and like other alliums, contain a number of sulfurous chemical compounds that attack our taste buds and olfactory receptors, inciting them to perk up and pay attention. Garlic and onion...
2025-04-23 07:11:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I'd never been much good at TV or video work. If you've seen any of my older video content, such as America's Test Kitchen's very first YouTube video, you can see how awkward and stilted my demeanor is.
That's good ol' social anxiety for you. It's a thing I've dealt with ever since middle school, which may be surprising considering public speaking...
2025-04-18 07:13:19 +0000 UTC View Post
I was making a few versions of French Toast a couple weeks ago in preparation for the upcoming French Toast episode of our podcast, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. One of the recipes I tested was for Caramelized Cinnamon Sugar French Toast from my podcast partner Deb Perelman's third book, ...
2025-04-16 11:00:26 +0000 UTC View PostFried rice at home is easy--so long as you follow the rules. If you want a long breakdown of the testing that went into developing these rules, check out my article on Serious Eats over here.
Start with Cooked and Slightly Dried Rice: Using cooked rice that has had some time to dry out (even just spread on a plate for a bit) is crucial. This helps prevent the rice from steaming and becoming mushy in the hot wok or pan, allowing it to fry properly and develop a s...
2025-04-12 01:08:26 +0000 UTC View PostMy friend and colleague Dan Souza demonstrated this technique for cutting broccoli on his Instagram account a while back and I've been using it ever since.
The way I used to cut broccoli, I'd run my knife through the whole stalk. It worked fine for separating florets, but I'd inevitable leave behind a scattering of broccoli flowers strewn across my cutting board that were too small to cook.
<... 2025-04-09 09:07:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Broccoli cheese soup is not something I grew up with, but it's something I've grown to love. My favorite versions are intensely cheesy, but I wanted to create a version that actually celebrated broccoli, without sacrificing that creamy, cheesy goodness. Here's how I did it:
Layering Broccoli Flavor:
I separated the broccoli into stems and florets.
The stems were sautéed with onions, carrots, and garlic, then simmered to create a dee...
2025-04-04 18:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Miso soup, one of the world's simplest soups made with nothing but dashi stock, miso paste, and garnishes, is comfort food to me, especially when it has bits of silken tofu, seaweed, and scallions floating in it. It's a meal I ate countless times at my grandmother's table, and one I still crave whether first thin in the morning or late at night.
Thankfully, it's extremely simple to make.
One of ...
Of the thousands of burgers I've cooked in my time and the dozens of burger recipes I've published or put on restaurant menus, this is my all-time favorite.
Correction: This is the current iteration of my favorite branch of the burger evolutionary tree. This is a style of burger I love more than a big, fat, juicy backyard burger. ...
2025-03-29 07:11:55 +0000 UTC View Post
This recipe is sponsored by BALMUDA, makers of The Toaster. Shop for BALMUDA products at us.BALMUDA.com using the code “KENJI_15” to unlock 15% off on all purchases.
Every recipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.
What I like about this recipe:
Broccolini get sweet and nutty when charred.
Incor...
2025-03-21 17:42:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m teaching a virtual cooking class this coming Tuesday with my friends at Milk Street. You can sign up at the link here to get the recipes and prep list so you can cook along!
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chinese-american-classics-with-j-kenji-lopez-alt-tickets-1244886080779
2025-03-20 17:48:50 +0000 UTC View Post
This recipe is adapted from my book The Wok: Recipes and Techniques. You can get personalized copies shipped anywhere in the world from Book Larder.
Fanqie chao dan, or tomato and scrambled eggs, is a dish that is both humble and beloved across China. It’s similar to, say, toast in America—while everyone may make it slightly differently, it’s so common and simple that a recipe is almost superf...
2025-03-19 17:09:43 +0000 UTC View Post
This recipe is adapted from my book, The Wok (you can get signed and personalized copies here.)
I wasn't always a fan of egg drop soup. My only experience was from those all-day lunch special steam tables, where it morphed into a thick, neon-yellow mess with rubbery egg bits, the occasional raw mushroom, and–if you were especially unlucky–a bit of "skin" from the top of the tureen. It was... unpleasant.<...
2025-03-15 00:33:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Melenzane Alla Parmigiana (Italian-Style Eggplant Parmesan)
In my youth, my relationship with eggplant parm was almost purely visual. It was the thing I conspicuously avoided if a friend’s parents served it at a playdate. I’d opt for the PB&J line if it was on the menu at the school cafeteria. I’d had some early, formative experiences with eggplant—that mushy, bland, slimy vegetable—to know to avoid it when I saw it.
No doubt that formative eggplant was poorly cooked...
2025-03-12 06:48:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks! I’m teaching a virtual Chinese American cooking class with my friends at Milk Street on March 25th at 6pm EST. We’ll be cooking beef with broccoli, egg drop soup, and stir-fried lo mein.
Learn how to get restaurant-tender beef, egg drop soup that’s flavorful and just the right texture, and lo mein with plenty of vegetables and smoky wok hei.
Cook-along instructions and recipes will be provided in advance so you can have all your ingredients and tools ready to go.<...
2025-03-11 17:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
This recipe is excerpted from my James Beard Award-Winning book, The Wok. You can get personalized copies shipped anywhere in the world from The Book Larder
My friends Steph Li and Chris Thomas from the YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified posted a video for what they called “2025-03-07 04:27:55 +0000 UTC View Post