Is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's hotly anticipated book The Food Lab worth it?

The Food Lab was one of the most hotly anticipated books to have been published in recent months. Its author, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, is the nerdiest - and one of the most respected - of all food nerds (he even writes in the introduction, "I am a nerd, and I'm proud of it").

After attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (graduating with an architecture degree), he worked in biology labs before becoming a cook. Eight years of restaurant cooking later, he began working as a test cook and editor for Cooks Illustrated magazine. Of which he writes, "Here was a job that finally combined the top three of my four greatest loves: tasting great food, the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the physical act of cooking (my wife would be the fourth) and it was a truly liberating experience. I discovered that in many cases - even in the best restaurants in the world - the methods that traditional cooking knowledge teaches us are not only outdated but occasionally flat-out wrong."

Lopez-Alt writes, "The first step to winning is learning how not to fail. Have you ever made the same recipe a half dozen times with great results, only to find that on the seventh time, it completely fails?

"Oftentimes it's difficult to point to exactly what went wrong. If you're a tinkerer in the kitchen, you like to modify recipes a bit here and there to suit your own taste or mood. That's all well and good, and luckily, the first six times, your modifications didn't affect the outcome of the recipe. What changed on the seventh time?