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.^[3][4] The Food Lab expands on Lopez-Alt's "The Food Lab" column on the Serious Eats blog.^[3] Lopez-Alt uses the scientific method in the cookbook to improve popular American recipes^[3] and to explain the science of cooking.^[5] The Food Lab charted on The New York Times Best Seller list,^[6] and won the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for the best General Cooking cookbook^[2] and the 2016 IACP awards for the Cookbook of the Year and the best American cookbook.^[1]

Lopez-Alt developed the cookbook over a five-year period.^[4] 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".^[4] The recipes in The Food Lab are arranged by the technique used to prepare them.^[7] The cookbook also contains charts and experiments aimed at explaining scientific concepts like the difference between temperature and energy and the Leidenfrost effect.^[7]

Emily Weinstein of The New York Times wrote that "the recipes are sophisticated in their grasp of how ingredients and techniques work" but noted that "it is Mr. López-Alt’s original, living body of work online that to many may seem like his even greater achievement".^[3] Eric Vellend of The Globe and Mail wrote that "Lopez-Alt's relentless pursuit of perfection yields hundreds of unconventional kitchen tricks".^[5] Silvia Killingsworth wrote in The New Yorker that The Food Lab resembles a "hybrid reference text" more than a cookbook, and that "Kenji’s appeal is that he channels the shameless geekery of hobbyists everywhere into inexpensive, everyday foods".^[7] Penny Pleasance of the New York Journal of Books called The Food Lab "a seminal work that is encyclopedic in scope and can be used as a reference by even the most experienced home cooks".^[8]