Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

by Samin Nosrat

  Praise for SALTFATACIDHEAT

  “This beautiful, approachable book not only teaches you how to cook, but captures how it should feel to cook: full of exploration, spontaneity, and joy. Samin is one of the great teachers I know, and wins people over to cooking with real food—organic, seasonal, and alive—with her irrepressible enthusiasm and curiosity.”

  —Alice Waters, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Simple Food

  “Everyone was impressed when Michael Pollan managed to summarize the huge and complex subject of what we should be eating in just seven words: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.’ Samin Nosrat has managed to summarize the huge and complex subject of how we should be cooking in just four words: ‘salt, fat, acid, heat.’ Everyone will be hugely impressed.”

  —Yotam Ottolenghi, New York Times bestselling author of Jerusalem

  “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a must for anyone wanting to be a better cook. Samin Nosrat, along with Wendy MacNaughton’s fun illustrations, teaches the fundamentals of cooking and dives into the four elements that make food taste great. So do yourself a favor and buy this book. I promise you won’t regret it.”

  —April Bloomfield, James Beard Award–winning chef and author of A Girl and Her Pig

  “Like the amazing meals that come out of Samin Nosrat’s kitchen, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is the perfect mixture of highest-quality ingredients: beautiful storytelling, clear science, an infectious love of food, and Wendy MacNaughton’s powerful art. Nosrat’s prose combined with MacNaughton’s beautiful illustrations are a perfect guide to employing the science of cooking for maximum deliciousness.”

  —Rebecca Skloot, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

  “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a very important book not because it contains many excellent recipes, although it does, or because it is written by a Chez Panisse alum, although it is. It is important because it gives home cooks a compass with which to navigate their own kitchens, and it places trust in them that they will be able to use that compass. Samin’s easygoing, cook-by-feel approach is never condescending or elitist. It is a step toward cooking without recipes and true empowerment (and joy!) in the kitchen.”

  —John Becker and Megan Scott, fourth-generation stewards of the New York Times bestselling Joy of Cooking

  “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a wildly informative, new-generation culinary resource. Samin Nosrat’s wealth of experience comes together here in a pitch-perfect combination of charm, narrative, straight-talk, illustration, and inspiration. Ticking all the boxes for new and seasoned cooks alike, this book meets you wherever you are in the kitchen, in all the right ways.”

  —Heidi Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Super Natural Cooking

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  How to Use This Book

  PART ONE

  The Four Elements of Good Cooking

  SALT

  What is Salt?

  Salt and Flavor

  How Salt Works

  Diffusion Calculus

  Using Salt

  FAT

  What is Fat?

  Fat and Flavor

  How Fat Works

  Light

  Using Fat

  ACID

  What is Acid?

  Acid and Flavor

  How Acid Works

  Using Acid

  HEAT

  What is Heat?

  How Heat Works

  Using Heat

  What to Cook

  Balance, Layering, and Restraint

  Using Recipes

  PART TWO

  Recipes and Recommendations

  Kitchen Basics

  Choosing Tools

  Choosing Ingredients

  A Few Basic How-Tos

  Recipes

  Salads

  Bright Cabbage Slaw

  Three Classic Shaved Salads

  Vietnamese Cucumber Salad

  Shaved Carrot Salad with Ginger and Lime

  Shaved Fennel and Radishes

  Summer Tomato and Herb Salad

  A Panzanella for Every Season

  Summer: Tomato, Basil, and Cucumber

  Autumn: Roasted Squash, Sage, and Hazelnut

  Winter: Roasted Radicchio and Roquefort

  Spring: Asparagus and Feta with Mint

  Torn Croutons

  Dressings

  Light

  Red Wine Vinaigrette

  Balsamic Vinaigrette

  Lemon Vinaigrette

  Lime Vinaigrette

  Any-Other-Citrus Vinaigrette

  Tomato Vinaigrette

  Rice Wine Vinaigrette

  Cream

  Caesar Dressing

  Creamy Herb Dressing

  Blue Cheese Dressing

  Green Goddess Dressing

  Tahini Dressing

  Miso-Mustard Dressing

  Peanut-Lime Dressing

  Vegetables

  Cherry Tomato Confit

  Six Ways to Cook Vegetables

  Blanch: Greens

  Sauté: Snap Peas with Chilies and Mint

  Steamy Sauté: Garlicky Green Beans

  Roast: Butternut Squash and Brussels Sprouts in Agrodolce

  Long-Cook: Spicy Broccoli Rabe with Ricotta Salata

  Grill: Artichokes

  Stock and Soups

  Stock

  Chicken Stock

  Soup

  Brothy: Stracciatella Roman Egg Drop Soup

  Chunky: Tuscan Bean and Kale Soup

  Smooth: Silky Sweet Corn Soup

  Beans, Grains, and Pasta

  Persian-ish Rice

  Five Classic Pastas

  Cheese: Pasta Cacio e Pepe

  Tomato: Pasta alla Pomarola

  Vegetable: Pasta with Broccoli and Bread Crumbs

  Meat: Pasta al Ragù

  (Shell)fish: Pasta alle Vongole Pasta with Clams

  Eggs

  Kuku Sabzi Persian Herb and Greens Frittata

  Fish

  Slow-Roasted Salmon

  Beer-Battered Fish

  Tuna Confit

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Chicken

  Crispiest Spatchcocked Chicken

  Spicy Fried Chicken

  Chicken Pot Pie

  Conveyor Belt Chicken

  Chicken Confit

  Finger-Lickin’ Pan-Fried Chicken

  Sage- and Honey-Smoked Chicken

  Chicken and Garlic Soup

  Adas Polo o Morgh Chicken with Lentil Rice

  Chicken with Vinegar

  Glazed Five-Spice Chicken

  Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken

  Sicilian Chicken Salad

  Meat

  Spicy Brined Turkey Breast

  Pork Braised with Chilies

  Kufte Kebabs

  Sauces

  Herb Salsa

  Basic Salsa Verde

  Fried Sage Salsa Verde

  Classic French Herb Salsa

  Mexican-ish Herb Salsa

  Southeast Asian-ish Herb Salsa

  Japanese-ish Herb Salsa

  Meyer Lemon Salsa

  Nort
h African Charmoula

  Indian Coconut-Cilantro Chutney

  Salmoriglio Sicilian Oregano Sauce

  Yogurt Sauce

  Herbed Yogurt

  Persian Herb and Cucumber Yogurt

  Borani Esfenaj Persian Spinach Yogurt

  Mast-o-Laboo Persian Beet Yogurt

  Mayonnaise

  Basic Mayonnaise

  Classic Sandwich Mayo

  Aïoli Garlic Mayonnaise

  Herb Mayonnaise

  Rouille Pepper Mayonnaise

  Tartar Sauce

  Pepper Sauce

  Basic Pepper Paste

  Harissa North African Pepper Sauce

  Muhammara Lebanese Pepper and Walnut Spread

  Pesto

  Basil Pesto

  Butter-and-Flour Doughs

  All-Butter Pie Dough

  Classic Apple Pie

  Classic Pumpkin Pie

  Light and Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits

  Aaron’s Tart Dough

  Apple and Frangipane Tart

  Sweets

  Nekisia’s Olive Oil and Sea Salt Granola

  Four Things to Do with Fruit

  Juice It and Make Granita

  Poach It in Wine

  Roast It on a Bed of Fig Leaves

  Make Compote

  Two Favorite Oil Cakes

  Lori’s Chocolate Midnight Cake

  Fresh Ginger and Molasses Cake

  Almond and Cardamom Tea Cake

  Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding

  Buttermilk Panna Cotta

  Marshmallowy Meringues

  Scented Cream

  Salted Caramel Sauce

  Cooking Lessons

  Suggested Menus

  Tips for Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Index

  For Alice Waters, who gave me the kitchen, and for Maman, who gave me the world

  Anyone who likes to eat, can soon learn to cook well.

  —Jane Grigson

  FOREWORD

  As I write these words, this book hasn’t even been published yet, but already it feels indispensible.

  That must sound over-the-top, I know, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book on cooking that was this useful or unusual. I suspect that’s because reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat feels less like being in the pages of a cookbook than at a really good cooking school, standing in your apron around the butcher-block island listening as a smart, eloquent, and occasionally hilarious chef demonstrates how to repair a broken mayonnaise. (Add a few drops of water and then “whisk with the urgency of a swimmer escaping a shark.”) Now she passes around the bowl of silky, no-longer-broken emulsion so you can dip a tasting spoon and feel it on your tongue. I get it.

  In Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat manages to take us so much deeper and farther into the art of cooking than cookbooks ordinarily do. That’s because her book offers so much more than recipes, a literary genre that, while useful, has severe limitations. A well-written and thoroughly tested recipe might tell you how to produce the dish in question, but it won’t teach you anything about how to cook, not really. Truth be told, recipes are infantilizing: Just do exactly what I say, they say, but don’t ask questions or worry your little head about why. They insist on fidelity and faith, but do nothing to earn or explain it.

  Think how much more we learn—and retain!—when a teacher doesn’t just enumerate the step-by-step instructions but explains the principles behind them. Armed with reasons, we no longer have to cling to a recipe like a lifeboat; now we can strike out on our own and begin to improvise.

  Even though it contains plenty of excellent recipes, this is a book concerned foremost with principles. Samin Nosrat has taken the sprawling, daunting, multicultural subject we call cooking and boldly distilled it to four essential elements—or five, if you count the core principle of tasting along the way. Master these principles, she promises, and you will be able to cook delicious food of any kind, in any tradition, whether a salad dressing or braise or a galette. Season food with the proper amount of salt at the proper moment; choose the optimal medium of fat to convey the flavor of your ingredients; balance and animate those ingredients with acid; apply the right type and quantity of heat for the proper amount of time—do all this and you will turn out vibrant and beautiful food, with or without a recipe. It’s a big promise, but if you take her course—i.e. read this book—you will find that Samin delivers. Whether you are new to cooking or have decades of experience under your apron, you will understand how to build striking new layers of flavor in whatever you cook.

  Besides being a gifted and deeply experienced cook with years of experience in some of the best kitchens in the Bay Area, Samin is a natural teacher—exacting, inspiring, and eloquent. I happen to know this firsthand, because Samin, who had once been my writing student, became my cooking teacher when I set out to research my book Cooked.

  We had met a decade earlier, after Samin had written asking if she could audit my graduate class in food journalism at Berkeley. Letting her in was one of the best decisions I’ve made, not only as a professor of writing but as an eater of food. Samin more than held her own with the journalists in the class, demonstrating the winning voice and surefooted prose now on display in this book, but she really put the rest of us in the shade when it came to snack.

  This being a class about food, naturally we ate, taking turns each week bringing in a “storied snack”— some food item or dish that tells a little story, whether about the student’s background, project, or passion. We’ve snacked on baguettes salvaged from a Dumpster; on foraged mushrooms and weeds; and on ethnic foods of every description, but we seldom got to consume more than a bite or two plus the story. Samin served us a whole meal: a sumptuous spinach lasagna made completely from scratch and served on actual plates with linens and silverware, items that had never before crossed the threshold of my classroom. While we ate the best lasagna any of us had ever tasted, Samin told us the story of how she learned to make pasta, mixing the flour and eggs by hand, while in Florence, apprenticed to Benedetta Vitali, one of her most influential teachers. We were all captivated, as much by her storytelling as her cooking.

  So years later, when I decided to get serious about cooking, there was no question whom I would ask to teach me. Samin agreed immediately, and so once a month for more than a year, she would come over, usually on a Sunday afternoon, and together we would cook a three-course meal, each one organized around a different theme. Samin would burst into the kitchen with her market bags, apron, and roll of knives, announcing the theme of that day’s lesson, which often matched the principles laid out in this book. “Today we’re going to learn all about emulsions.” (Which she memorably described as “a temporary peace treaty between fat and water.”) If meat were on the syllabus, Samin would often stop by or phone the night before, to make sure the roast or chicken was properly seasoned, which is to say early and amply: at least twenty-four hours in advance, with about five times as much salt as your cardiologist would recommend.

  The sessions began as one-on-one tutorials, with Samin and me chopping and chatting around the kitchen island, but in time, my wife, Judith, and our son, Isaac, found themselves drawn into the kitchen by the aromas and the laughter emanating from it. It seemed a shame not to share the delicious meals we began turning out more widely, so we began inviting friends to join us for dinner, and in time, our friends began arriving earlier and earlier in the evening and then in the afternoon, so that they might help roll out a piecrust on the kitchen island or turn the crank on the pasta machine as Isaac fed it amber discs of eggy dough.

  There is something infectious about Samin’s teaching, in the combination of her passion, humor, and patience, but especially in her ability to break the most complex operation down into steps that immediately made sense because she never failed to explain the principle behind them. You salted meat so early to give it time
to diffuse into the muscle, where it dissolves strands of proteins into a liquid-retaining gel, thus making for moister meat at the same time it builds flavor from the inside out. Every such step has a little story behind it; and as soon as you know it, the step makes perfect sense and, eventually, it becomes second nature, part of your culinary muscle memory.

  Yet as logical and even scientific as Samin can be about the techniques she’s imparting, in the end she believes cooking with distinction depends on tasting and smelling—on educating our senses and then learning to trust them. “Taste, taste, and then taste again,” she would tell me, even as I did something as simple and seemingly boring as sautéing an onion. Yet there was an intricate evolution unfolding in that pan as the rectangles of onion went from crisply acidic to clean and sweet to faintly smoky as they caramelized and then bittered slightly as they browned. She showed me how a half dozen distinct flavors could be teased from that single humble ingredient, all depending on how you managed principle number four, heat—and deployed your senses, for each stage in the onion’s evolution carried its own distinct and learnable aroma. Now what recipe ever conveyed all that? As Samin likes to say, quoting another of her teachers, “Recipes don’t make food taste good. People do.”

  What I love most about this book is that Samin has somehow found a way (with the help of Wendy MacNaughton’s equally inspired and informative illustrations) to bring both her passion for, and intelligence about, cooking to the page. The result is a book that instructs and delights in equal measure (no mean feat in any piece of writing) and one that I predict will soon find its place on the short shelf of books on cooking that you can’t imagine living without. You will want to make room for this one.

  —Michael Pollan

  INTRODUCTION

  Anyone can cook anything and make it delicious.

  Whether you’ve never picked up a knife or you’re an accomplished chef, there are only four basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food. Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are the four cardinal directions of cooking, and this book shows how to use them to find your way in any kitchen.