J. Kenji López-Alt is Seattle’s reluctant powerful food influencer
His Youtube is very, very good. Two Kenji videos that changed my life a little during the pandemic, in that I now make these things all the time:<p>Spanish tortilla: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYk9W9v-bI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYk9W9v-bI</a><p>Oyakadon: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzpCqKdUA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzpCqKdUA</a><p>I feel like --- I might be wrong here --- Kenji's origin story is the Cook's Illustrated vodka pie crust, which replaces water in the dough with vodka to minimize gluten formation (the alcohol cooks off). I think that's where I first heard of him, and I've been following ever since. He's pretty great.<p>An irony of this article, BTW, is that it highlights Kenji's love of Windy City Pizza in Seattle, but Kenji made waves on Twitter a few years ago for taking down Chicago-style deep dish pizza on the grounds that no mainstream Chicago place properly seasons their crust. As I recall, he even went to Pequods and was unimpressed.<p>Extremely cool fun fact, by the way: Kenji's wife Adriana is a cryptographer at Google with a PhD from NYU; her thesis is dedicated to Kenji, "for loving a crypto nerd".