For avid home cooks who came of age in the digital era, there may be few voices more authoritative than that of J. Kenji López-Alt, the nerd king of Internet cooking.

Mr. López-Alt, 35, is the managing culinary director of the food website Serious Eats and the author of its most popular feature: the Food Lab, where he writes about food science with jokey, geeky effervescence, seeking answers to the seemingly quotidian questions that bubble up in the kitchen, like how best to boil eggs. Go to your browser, enter your search terms and the name Kenji, and you’ll have your answer.

Since he began the column in 2009, Mr. López-Alt, who studied biology and architecture at M.I.T. and then worked in restaurant kitchens and in the Cook’s Illustrated test kitchen, has developed a following for those detailed answers and his recipes, which are tested exhaustively. If you’ve read his post on why you should add that egg to boiling water, rather than cold, you likely won’t feel the need to get a second opinion.

Image J. Kenji López-Alt Credit... Peter Tannenbaum

This month he leaps to print with the release of his first book, and it’s an enormous one: “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science” (W. W. Norton, $49.95) is nearly 1,000 pages of recipes, instruction and explanation of why ingredients behave the way they do in the pan.