The biggest thing I love about his videos is both showing and highlighting the interstitial moments.

A huge amount of cooking isn't actually cooking, but counter space management, dishwashing, measuring, etc. Doing that well makes cooking easy and enjoyable, as time becomes less limited. Screwing it up multiplies stress by orders of magnitude. Zen, indeed.

The head-mounted-camera format he uses is a big part of that, I think. Seeing the process from the perspective of the cook really gives you a good sense of everything involved.

I do watch his videos but honestly have never tried to make any of his recipes. Pretty much all his recipes look at least slightly worse than a competing recipe in YouTube for the same dish. Or he’ll use something I will never want to keep in my kitchen.

Such a pretentious comment.

Why is it pretentious? I didn’t comment without watching? I’ve seriously considered and compared multiple of his videos to other videos to find the best recipe and his always looked inferior on comparison. Look up his Chile relleno video.

It’s pretentious by almost overtly missing the message of this article, which is: you don’t have to be the best home chef, your food doesn’t have to be the best. Part of that is that “best” is subjective, especially when it comes to food and taste, but more so: Kenji promotes an idea that having some basic kitchen skills and an understanding of the ingredients you’re cooking with is more valuable than the “best” recipe, because it gives you a foundation to develop a dish that is the best in your subjective option.

Obviously you gotta make it, then eat it to know whether a recipe is good? You are just looking.