I’ve dabbled in this book before in this column, but this is its first front-and-center appearance.
López-Alt is a really interesting presence in the cookbook world. His prominence is mostly about his work as a food writer, though he had experience in the restaurant world and then in a test kitchen for Cook’s Illustrated. His schtick in The Food Lab followed on that professional experience by trying to build down a whole bunch of classic dishes to first principles and then build back up a fool-proof technique for making the best version of those dishes.
I mostly find his technical approach sound. He’s not overly fussy—one of the tests he’s building into his method is that the improved recipes be readily reproducible by home cooks and that they do not depend on hard-to-get ingredients or expensive gear. Occasionally I think he comes up with something that’s a little soulless or that he sets himself against a rivalrous version of a given dish where the other approach is just as good or has its own virtues. But in some cases, the relentless testing produces truly spectacular results—his Detroit pizza recipe (which does require a particular pan to come out well) has become a staple in our household and everything about his testing approach in that recipe led to a specific payoff in the outcome.
I’ve had The Wok for a while and I’ve frankly been nervous about diving into it because I felt pretty sure he was going to hate the wok that I have. It’s a big, heavy cast iron wok. I felt sure because I know myself that it’s not great for most of the things you’d do in a wok. It’s not terrible but I can’t get those really good sears you get in the best stir-fries.
Sure enough, he hates cast iron woks. He’s not wrong. I thought about getting a carbon steel wok just to live into the book, but I’ve been busy and frankly it’s so hard now to gauge the quality of products via online sellers—most of them are coming from the same set of ephemeral manufacturers who have no quality control to speak of. I might go ahead and buy one anyway if I get the time to really research them—they’re not wildly expensive and I have to agree with his detailed analysis of what wok you want and why.
So that trauma of being mildly reproved by the author past, I have dug into the rest of the book. I have a lot of the ingredients he recommends and I picked up a few more in the past week, but I settled on cooking two basic standards: moo shu pork, which my sister and I used to call “mushy pork” when we were little kids (affectionately: we liked the dish) and dan dan noodles. His preps for both are fairly simple but with his usual precision in terms of technique and ingredients. So we’ll see how it goes tonight.