The Food Lab Add a review

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science is a 2015 cookbook written by American chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. The book contains close to 300 savory American cuisine recipes. The Food Lab expands on Lopez-Alt's "The Food Lab" column on the Serious Eats blog. Lopez-Alt uses the scientific method in the cookbook to improve popular American recipes and to explain the science of cooking. The Food Lab charted on The New York Times Best Seller list, and won the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for the best General Cooking cookbook and the 2016 IACP awards for the Cookbook of the Year and the best American cookbook.

Lopez-Alt developed the cookbook over a five-year period. He described the book not as a recipe book but as "a book for people who want to learn the hows and the whys of cooking". The recipes in The Food Lab are arranged by the technique used to prepare them. The cookbook also contains charts and experiments aimed at explaining scientific concepts like the difference between temperature and energy and the Leidenfrost effect.