“You can cook a limited number of sous vide recipes in a beer cooler, but if the person you're buying for wants to start cooking like the pros, they'll need a dedicated circulator that's designed to maintain the temperature of a water bath to within one degree.”

American chef and food writer

J. Kenji López-Alt is an American chef and food writer known for bringing a scientific approach to home cooking. He wrote The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, which grew out of his Serious Eats column of the same name. The book became both a critical and commercial success, reached the New York Times Best Seller list, and won the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for Best General Cooking cookbook. His work often explains why recipes behave the way they do, while showing how science can make familiar American dishes more reliable.