Home cook superheroes J. Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman team up on a new podcast
They are superheroes to home cooks everywhere: J. Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman.
They’ve written countless recipes and have millions of followers online. Now López-Alt and Perelman are teaming up to launch The Recipe, a new podcast where they obsess over recipes and how to make them work. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
López-Alt — who went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained in some of Boston’s best restaurants — is a New York Times food columnist and James Beard Award-winning author of “The Food Lab: The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science” and “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.”
Deb Perelman is a self-taught home cook and one of the Internet’s first food bloggers when she launched Smitten Kitchen. She is the author of three New York Times bestselling cookbooks, including “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook.”
Both of them were recent guests on Globe Opinion’s Say More podcast with Shirley Leung. Listen at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts.
They debated stovetop mac and cheese and how having kids changed the way they cooked.
Here’s an edited excerpt of the conversation:
You two are both big deals in the world of recipe writing. How did you decide to team up on a podcast?
Perelman: I actually just met Kenji one year ago. I was on a book tour for my third cookbook, “Smitten Kitchen Keepers.” Kenji interviewed me onstage in Seattle, and we quickly discovered that if we started to talk about cooking and recipes we could go on forever. What better place for that than to start a podcast?
López-Alt: Deb and I have been on a parallel career path for almost over 15 years now. We both started off in the old days of food blogs and saw it through what blogging has become now and what food on the internet has become now. We just have a lot of stories so it’s like telling war stories.
How do you decide what recipes you want to develop?
Perelman: Kenji and I have been kicking around things we thought would be fun episode topics. We start with an episode on stovetop mac and cheese because it’s different from baked mac and cheese in a casserole. We’re going to talk about meatloaf after that, and we’ve recorded an episode on pancakes.
These are really fun, classic topics with a lot of variation and recipes that give us a lot of things to discuss.
López-Alt: Macaroni and cheese was a good starting point because it is extremely simple. But a lot of times simple foods have the most interesting things to talk about, because slight changes in technique or slight changes in ingredients can have a very vast effect on the end result.
Perelman: A lot of the stuff that Kenji and I get into on the podcast are underlying questions: when is the recipe perfect and what is a perfect recipe? We don’t have one answer. This isn’t a competition. It’s not like it’s Kenji’s recipe or mine. It’s just that we both are keeping different things in mind as we’re getting towards this place of what we consider a perfect recipe.
But Kenji, I have one question about your three-ingredient mac and cheese. You lost me when you said that sometimes you put frozen peas or broccoli in your mac and cheese. That’s an unholy alliance. Deb, what did you say on the podcast about that?
Perelman: One time I tried to put broccoli florets in the macaroni and cheese … [my kids] like broccoli, they like macaroni cheese, and they were so betrayed. I have never seen my kids eat less of anything I’ve made.
Both of you have a lot in common, but you’re also very different. Kenji, you have this food science background, whereas, Deb, you’re a pioneer
in home food blogging, writing more practical recipes. So how would you describe each other’s superpower as recipe writers?
Perelman: Because of Kenji’s deep knowledge of science and food chemistry and the way that ingredients are going to work together, he’s able to write recipes that understand what they’re doing at a really high level. Even when people aren’t using Kenji’s recipes, I think they’re using things that they’ve learned from Kenji’s recipes. He’s influenced home cooking in a very significant way over the last 15 years.
López-Alt: Her superpower is that she has the solutions. If you have a problem that can be solved with a plate of food, Deb is the person who will tell you what that food is going to be and how to make it. When you’re in her hands, you’re going to come up with something that is delicious and almost all the time relatively simple and one that really balances the realities of everyday life.
You both are parents, and I have two kids, 11 and 13. Having children destroyed my cooking ambitions.
Perelman: I actually have many times joked that I think it’s actually good for somebody who’s a recipe developer or cookbook writer to have a very picky kid. It’s humbling. It’s almost like the worst commenters are in the room with us. And if you do not feed them, it will also be your problem.
Often what happens is you just make the same foods over and over again week after week. So how do we break out of our rut?
‘These are really fun, classic topics with a lot of variation.’
DEB PERELMAN
Perelman: I want us to have the same excitement and fun with cooking and delight in the outcome that we used to have when we had more time ... I want it to be like, “I just made this buffalo chicken salad on a Monday night, or I made this tomato soup in a very short period of time and it was awesome.” I’m definitely one of these people who if I’m having an okay day, but I make something I love for dinner I have suddenly just rewritten the script of my day.
López-Alt: I wish I was able to just say, all right, every Tuesday is taco night. My kids would be happy, my wife would be happy, it would be no-brainer dinner for Tuesday. But I just can’t. I need to make something different every time.