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:Spanish tortilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYk9W9v-bIOyakadon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzpCqKdUAI 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.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.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".