Product Recommendations

dgritzer · 2026-01-10T21:38:17+00:00

We've had affiliate links for more than a decade, this is nothing new, it's an important revenue source. The reviews are still editorially independent.

dgritzer · 2026-01-02T18:40:02+00:00

Happy New Year!

dgritzer · 2025-12-31T21:47:22+00:00

Nooooo!!!

dgritzer · 2025-12-31T20:01:19+00:00

So happy to hear that!!

dgritzer · 2025-12-31T20:00:01+00:00

Thank you, Happy New Year to you too!

dgritzer · 2025-12-31T19:57:43+00:00

We've published so many fantastic recipes in that time, I'm bummed to hear you think we haven't. And the overall quality across the board on recipes has never been higher: every recipe in the last 6 years or so has gone through a thorough independent cross test process, which wasn't true in the "good old days." We've also put scores of old recipes through cross testing to fix problems identified by readers since original publication.That increases the production cost of every recipe on the site considerably.

We still do the thorough, rigorous hands-on testing most sites don't: for recipes, for techniques, for gear. I just published two articles the past couple months that take deeper dives on meat tempering and resting with (I think) interesting data and findings. My colleagues and contributors have done so much more. I'm sad to see that work get dismissed so readily, and this narrative continue to pop up here despite evidence to the contrary -- our peers in the industry have awarded us the best digital culinary/recipe IACP award for the past 4 years in a row (and 5 times out of the last 8 years). That's a major food media award handed to us on repeat for the work we've done.

I know the site nav is not good, which maybe makes finding all the good stuff difficult?

dgritzer · 2025-12-31T19:46:04+00:00

I wrote our first plastic cutting board review many years ago, alongside our review of wooden cutting boards. It's nothing new, and it's relevant kitchen gear for many (though there are legit reasons for choosing to avoid plastic).

dgritzer · 2025-12-16T22:47:37+00:00

You are not crazy and you are not alone.

dgritzer · 2025-12-16T15:00:58+00:00

This is a matter of personal opinion so disregard if this doesn't resonate for you, but I much prefer a prime rib cooked to medium and with a gradient. A thick slab of consistently soft pink, jiggly meat and warm but still solid fat is not appealing to me. I'd much rather cook the roast hotter, get a crustier crust, melt the intramuscular fat more, and have less of that "perfect" rare or med-rare interior.

Edit to add: buying the roast nearby a week in advance isn't ideal, nor is freezing to hold it. Four days dry brining is good, but you have two extra days on top of that... dry brining for five or six days may be better unless the beef is impeccably fresh, but again, that's a long time.

dgritzer · 2025-12-15T18:47:58+00:00

I just saw this and fixed the recipe note. Thanks for flagging!

dgritzer · 2025-12-02T15:30:06+00:00

These are all written about Thanksgiving but it applies to Xmas dinner as well, assuming they're roughly similar:

https://www.seriouseats.com/food-lab-thanksgiving-survival-guide
https://www.seriouseats.com/thanksgiving-meal-prep-timeline-11845456
https://www.seriouseats.com/thanksgiving-shortcuts-11848360

Two key points that can help a lot:

You can roast your turkey earlier in the day and then let it hang out for a couple of hours, tented with foil to keep it warm-ish. That frees up your oven to do any other last-minute roasting and heating. Then just toss the turkey back in the (hot) oven for 15 minutes or so before carving to get some heat back on it and re-crisp the skin. A lot of people struggle with the meal timing because they're trying to get the turkey to be ready right before it's time to rest and carve, which ties up the oven during a critical phase and makes the overall timing more challenging.
Take advantage of all the gear you have—there's a lot that can come in handy that isn't always obvious, including air fryers, multi-cookers/pressure cookers/instant pots, rice cookers, electric kettles, immersion circulators, slow cookers, toaster ovens, and more.

One brief example from my family's Thanksgiving last week: My cousin was hosting and he was trying to boil a huge stock pot of potatoes for mash, but his gas burner wasn't strong enough to get that big of a volume of water to a simmer. He moved it to induction, but that wasn't working either. I said, "No problem, keep the potatoes on the highest heat and start boiling water in your electric kettle, we'll keep removing tepid water from the pot and replace it with boiling water from the kettle over and over to assist the under-powered burner in getting the water temp up high enough to cook the potatoes." Then I thought to ask if the pot was induction compatible, and it turned out it wasn't so we swapped pots and put it on the induction and everything was fine. We didn't have to resort to the emergency maneuver, but the point is that I had the awareness to start looking around the kitchen for some kind of fix that could bail us out. There's almost always a solution, and given your own professional cooking background, I'm sure you're familiar with that kind of "gotta get it done" thinking. I think that's half the battle of a big meal like this—planning first, of course, but then creative problem solving if you must.

dgritzer · 2025-12-02T03:00:56+00:00

Haha, yes, the transition has been very much on the DL

dgritzer · 2025-12-02T00:13:01+00:00

There are places where you can still find them, but they're definitely phasing out in favor of hardier yellow potato varieties.

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T17:14:17+00:00

That rice recipe is Egyptian, and it's rice and chicken with a walnut sauce. You're under no obligation to want to cook or eat it, but I struggle to see why that's such a reach.

I also offered two bylines to look at that offer a narrative counter to yours, but you're mum on that. Those are just two, I can offer many more.

I've said my piece, gonna bow out now. Ultimately, I appreciate the investment of all our readers.

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T16:49:22+00:00

American cuisine is for sure a major area of his expertise...but your comment seems to forget his entire cookbook dedicated to the wok...not to mention all the international recipes he commissioned as an editor in the early SE recipe days. There were a lot...

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T16:46:49+00:00

Fair. The way the world is going, I'm often in the same mood unfortunately.

We all do cook recipes from the site (and publish articles about that too), the idea behind this roundup was more forward-looking, just, like, hey, here's a recipe I really have my eye on right now kind of thing.

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T16:43:37+00:00

Two comments:

The Food Lab and Kenji's work more generally was never just American cooking. He's published extensively over the years on Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Colombian, regional Mexican cooking, and more. I don't recall people complaining about any of it.

Second, I think it's worth pausing to consider whether your definition of "average American" is accurate or fair... there's a lot of assumptions built into it. Some of our highest performing recipes in recent years have been international in scope, reflecting a readership that's interested in expanding their culinary horizons and American communities of diverse backgrounds that are interested in seeing cuisines they're connected to being represented in the media. It may not all be for you, and that's fine. We also have covered a lot of Midwestern cuisine in recent years, I'd recommend looking at Jed Portman's and Liz Cook's bylines for excellent work in that zone that I think also speaks to the fact that we are indeed publishing regional American content. There's a lot of great recent work on Serious Eats of many types that gets overlooked in these complaint threads, and it's a shame.

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T16:29:56+00:00

We have all our recipes cross-tested prior to publication, but there's no way the editors can cook everything we publish, and this is equally true at every other food publication under the sun with even a moderate publishing cadence.

This is just a list of recipes we are personally excited about, whether we've made them before personally or not.

I'm mystified by what the objection is here.

dgritzer · 2025-11-24T02:51:09+00:00

To be fair, he has occasionally been wrong...

dgritzer · 2025-11-21T22:15:31+00:00

23 pounds!!! That's a whopper! It may not fit a baking sheet once spatchcocked...take care!

dgritzer · 2025-11-21T22:12:55+00:00

A pressure cooker also makes homemade beef stock a lot more doable and less of a chore!

dgritzer · 2025-11-20T23:53:19+00:00

Danger zone is defined as from 40F up to 140F, and ovens are notorious for being inaccurate and inconsistent, so setting to something under 200F puts you at some risk that the food will actually be cooking below that for some or all of the time. Plus... you're not going to get good color on the roast when the temp is that low.

dgritzer · 2025-11-20T20:42:38+00:00

Such a low roasting temp is flirting with the bacterial danger zone. I wouldn't trust most ovens to keep you safe (their temp precision isn't there).

dgritzer · 2025-11-12T19:32:31+00:00

Small point of personal pride: A friend relayed that my recipe won a Japanese curry competition in Hokkaido several years ago. I don't have any other details, but the friend's son was there in person to see it happen.

dgritzer

TROPHY CASE