by Samin Nosrat
Transform
Shred an oversalted piece of meat to turn it into a new dish where it’s just one ingredient of many—a stew, chili, a soup, hash, ravioli filling. Add more salt to oversalted raw, flaky, white fish and turn it into baccalà, or salt cod.
Admit Defeat
Sometimes the best thing you can do is call it a loss and start over. Or order some pizza. It’s okay. It’s just dinner—you’ll get another chance tomorrow.
Never despair. View mistakes of under- or overseasoning as opportunities for learning. Not long after my salt epiphany over polenta with Cal, I was tasked with making some corn custards for the vegetarian guests in the restaurant. It was the first time I was trusted with cooking an entire dish from start to finish. I could hardly believe that paying guests would be eating something I cooked! It was thrilling and terrifying, all at once. I made the custard just as I’d been taught: cooking onions until soft, adding corn I’d stripped from the ears, steeping the cobs in cream to infuse it with sweet corn flavor, making a simple custard base with that cream and eggs, and then combining everything and gently baking it in a water bath until barely set. I was thrilled with how silky the custards had turned out, and toward the end of the night the chef came by and tasted a spoonful. Seeing the hope in my eyes, he graciously told me I’d done a good job, and then gingerly added that next time, I should increase the seasoning. Even though he’d delivered the criticism just about as gently as any chef ever could, I was floored, and completely embarrassed. I’d been following all of the instructions for making the custards so intently that I’d completely forgotten the most important rule in our kitchen—one that I had thought I’d already internalized, but clearly hadn’t: taste everything, every step of the way. I’d never tasted the onions, the corn, or the custard mixture. Not once.
After that experience, tasting became reflexive in a whole new way. Within a few months, I was consistently cooking the most delicious food I’d ever made, and it was all because of a single tweak in my approach. I’d learned how to salt.
Develop a sense for salt by tasting everything as you cook, early and often. Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust. Make salt the first thing you notice as you taste and the last thing you adjust before serving a dish. When constant tasting becomes instinctive, you can begin to improvise.
Improvising with Salt
Cooking isn’t so different from jazz. The best jazz musicians seem to improvise effortlessly, whether by embellishing standards or by stripping them down. Louis Armstrong could take an elaborate melody and distill it down to a single note on his horn, while Ella Fitzgerald could take an utterly simple tune and endlessly elaborate upon it with her extraordinary voice. But in order to be able to improvise flawlessly, they had to learn the basic language of music—the notes—and develop an intimate relationship with the standards. The same is true for cooking; while a great chef can make improvisation look easy, the ability to do so depends on a strong foundation of the basics.
Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are the building blocks of that foundation. Use them to develop a repertoire of basic dishes that you can cook anytime, anywhere. Eventually, like Louis or Ella, you’ll be able to simplify or embellish your cooking at the drop of a porkpie hat. Begin by incorporating everything you’ve learned about salt into all of your cooking, from the casual frittata to the holiday roast.
The three basic decisions involving salt are: When? How much? In what form? Ask yourself these three questions every time you set out to cook. Their answers will begin to form a road map for improvisation. One day soon, you’ll surprise yourself. It might be when, shortly after standing before a near-empty fridge, convinced you don’t have the makings for anything worth eating, you discover a wedge of Parmesan. Twenty minutes later, you could be tucking into the most perfectly seasoned bowl of Pasta Cacio e Pepe you’ve ever tasted. Or, it might be after an unplanned shopping spree at the farmers’ market with friends. Returning home with an abundance of produce, you’ll lay it all out on the counter, pull the chicken you seasoned the night before out from the fridge, and preheat the oven without skipping a beat. Pouring your friends a glass of wine, you’ll offer them a snack of a few sliced cucumbers and radishes sprinkled with flaky salt. Without a second thought, you’ll add a palmful of salt to the boiling pot of water on the stove, then taste and adjust it before blanching the turnips and their greens. As your friends take their first bites, they’ll ask you to share your culinary secrets. Tell them the truth: you’ve mastered using the most important element of good cooking—salt.
Just after I began cooking at Chez Panisse, the chefs held a contest to see which employee could come up with the best tomato sauce recipe. There was only one rule: we had to use ingredients readily available in the restaurant’s kitchen. The prize was five hundred dollars in cash and an acknowledgment on the menu each time the recipe would be used . . . forever.
As a total novice, I was too intimidated to enter, but it seemed like everyone else—from the maître d’ to other bussers, porters, and, of course, the cooks—wanted to try.
Dozens of entrants brought in their sauces for a blind tasting by a team of “impartial judges” (i.e., the chefs and Alice). Some sauces were seasoned with dried oregano, others fresh marjoram. Some entrants crushed their canned tomatoes by hand while others painstakingly seeded and diced them. Others added chili flakes while still others channeled their inner nonnas and puréed their sauces, pomarola-style. It was tomato mayhem and we were all atwitter, waiting to hear who would be the winner.
At one point, one of the chefs came into the kitchen to get a glass of water. We asked him how it was going. I’ll never forget what he said.
“There are a lot of great entries. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to narrow them down. But Alice’s palate is so sensitive she can’t ignore that some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.”
Alice couldn’t understand why everyone hadn’t used the high-quality olive oil we cooked with at the restaurant, especially when it was always available to employees to buy at cost.
I was shocked. Never before had it occurred to me that olive oil would have much effect on the flavor of a dish, much less one as piquant as tomato sauce. This was my first glimpse of understanding that as a foundational ingredient, the flavor of olive oil, and indeed any fat we choose to cook with, dramatically alters our perception of the entire dish. Just as an onion cooked in butter tastes different from an onion cooked in olive oil, an onion cooked in good olive oil tastes different—and in this case better—than one cooked in a poorer quality oil.
My friend Mike, another young cook, ended up winning the contest. His recipe was so complicated I can hardly remember it all these years later. But I’ll never forget the lesson I learned that day: food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked.
While I was taught to appreciate the flavors of various olive oils at Chez Panisse, it wasn’t until I worked in Italy that I saw fat as an important and versatile element of cooking on its own, rather than simply a cooking medium.
During the olive harvest, or raccolta, I made a pilgrimage to Tenuta di Capezzana, the producer of the most exquisite olive oil I’d ever tasted. Standing in the frantoio, I watched rapt as the day’s olive harvest was transformed into a yellow-green elixir so bright it seemed to illuminate the dark Tuscan night. The oil’s flavor was as astonishing as its color—peppery, almost acidic, in a way I never imagined a fat could be.
The following autumn I was in Liguria, a coastal province, during the raccolta. Olio nuovo pressed on the shores of the Mediterranean was wholly different: this oil was buttery, low in acid, and so rich I wanted to swallow spoonfuls of it. I learned that where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavor. After tasting the oils I could see how a peppery oil would overwhelm a delicate preparation such as fish tartare, while the more subtl
e flavor of a coastal oil might not be able to stand up to the bold flavors of a Tuscan bistecca served with bitter greens.
At Zibibbo, Benedetta Vitali’s Florentine trattoria, we used peppery Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil more liberally than any other ingredient. We used it to make salad dressings. We used it to drench the dough for the focaccia we baked each morning. We used it to brown soffritto, the aromatic base of onions, carrots, and celery at the foundation of all of our long-cooked foods. We used it to deep-fry everything from squid to squash blossoms to bomboloni, the cream-filled doughnuts I ate with gusto every Saturday morning. Tuscan olive oil defined the flavor of our cooking; our food tasted delicious because our olive oil was delicious.
As I traveled throughout Italy, I saw how fat determines the particular flavors of regional cooking. In the North, where pastures and the dairy cattle they sustain are abundant, cooks use butter, cream, and rich cheeses readily in dishes such as polenta, tagliatelle Bolognese, and risotto. In the South and on the coasts, where olive trees flourish, olive oil is used in everything from seafood dishes to pastas and even desserts such as olive oil gelato. Because pigs can be raised in just about any climate, though, one thing unites the diverse regional Italian cuisines: pork fat.
As I immersed myself in the culture and cuisine of Italy, one thing became clear: Italians’ remarkable relationship to fat is essential to why their food tastes so good. Fat, then, I realized, is the second element of good cooking.
WHAT IS FAT?
The best way to appreciate the value of fat in the kitchen is to try to imagine cooking without it. What would vinaigrette be without olive oil, sausage without pork fat, a baked potato without sour cream, a croissant without butter? Pointless, that’s what. Without the flavors and textures that fat makes possible, food would be immeasurably less pleasurable to eat. In other words, fat is essential for achieving the full spectrum of flavors and textures of good cooking.
Besides being one of the four basic elements of good cooking, fat is also one of the four elemental building blocks of all foods, along with water, protein, and carbohydrates. While it’s commonly believed that fat, much like salt, is universally unhealthy, both elements are essential to human survival. Fat serves as a crucial backup energy source, a way to store energy for future use, and plays a role in nutrient absorption and essential metabolic functions, such as brain growth. Unless you’ve been directed by your doctor to strictly reduce your fat consumption, you don’t need to worry—there’s nothing unhealthy about cooking with moderate amounts of fat (especially if you favor healthy plant- and fish-based fats). As with salt, my aim isn’t so much to get you to use more fat as it is to teach you how to make better use of it in your cooking.
In contrast to salt, fat takes on many forms and is derived from many sources (see Sources of Fat). While salt is a mineral, used primarily to enhance flavor, fat plays three distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning. The same type of fat can play different roles in your cooking, depending on how it is used. The first step in choosing a fat to use is to identify the primary role it will play in a dish.
Used as a main ingredient, fat will significantly affect a dish. Often, it’s both a source both of rich flavor and of a particular desired texture. For example, fat ground into a burger will render as it cooks, basting the meat from within and contributing to juciness. Butter inhibits the proteins in flour from developing, yielding tender and flaky textures in a pastry. Olive oil contributes both a light, grassy flavor and a rich texture to pesto. The amount of cream and egg yolks in an ice cream determine just how smooth and decadent it’ll be (hint: the more cream and eggs, the creamier the result).
The role fat plays as a cooking medium is perhaps its most impressive and unique. Cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures, allowing the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights as well. In the process, these foods become golden brown and develop the crisp crusts that so please our palates. Any fat you heat to cook food can be described as a medium, whether it’s the peanut oil in which you fry chicken, the butter you use to sauté spring vegetables, or the olive oil in which you poach tuna.
Certain fats can also be used as seasoning to adjust flavor or enrich the texture of a dish just before serving: a few drops of toasted sesame oil will deepen the flavors in a bowl of rice, a dollop of sour cream will offer silky richness to a cup of soup, a little mayonnaise spread on a BLT will increase its succulence, and a smear of cultured butter on a piece of crusty bread will add untold richness.
To determine which role fat is playing in a dish, ask yourself these questions:
• Will this fat bind various ingredients together? If so, this is a main ingredient.
• Does this fat play a textural role? For flaky, creamy, and light textures, fat plays the role of main ingredient, while for crisp textures, it’s a cooking medium. For tender textures, fat can play either role.
• Will this fat be heated and used to cook the food? If so, this is a cooking medium.
• Does this fat play a flavor role? If it’s added at the outset, it’s a main ingredient. If it’s used to adjust flavor or texture at the end of cooking the dish as a garnish, it’s a seasoning.
Once you’ve identified which role fat will play in a dish, you’ll be better equipped to choose which fat to use, and how to cook food that will result in the taste and texture you’re after.
FAT AND FLAVOR
Fat’s Effect on Flavor
Put simply, fat carries flavor. While certain fats have their own distinct flavors, any fat can convey aromas—and enhance flavors—to our palates that would otherwise go unnoticed. Fat coats the tongue, allowing various aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer periods of time, intensifying and prolonging our experience of various flavors. Peel and slice two cloves of garlic. Gently sizzle one clove in a couple tablespoons of water, and the other in the same amount of olive oil. Taste a few drops of each liquid. You’ll have a much more powerful impression of the garlic flavor in oil. Take advantage of this capability to intensify and circulate flavor by adding aromatics directly into the cooking fat. When baking, add vanilla extract and other flavorings directly into the butter or egg yolks for the same result.
Fat enhances flavor in another extraordinary way. Because cooking fats can withstand temperatures well beyond the boiling point of water (212°F at sea level), they perform a crucial task that water cannot—the facilitation of surface browning, which typically does not begin at temperatures below 230°F. In some foods, browning will introduce entirely new flavors, including nuttiness, sweetness, meatiness, earthiness, and savoriness (umami). Imagine the difference in flavor between a poached chicken breast and one browned on the stove in a little olive oil, and the incalculable value of this attribute will be clear.
The Flavors of Fat
Different fats have different flavors. To select the right fat, get to know how each fat tastes, and in which cuisines it’s commonly used.
Olive Oil
Olive oil is a staple in Mediterranean cooking, so make it your default fat when cooking foods inspired by Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, North African, and Middle Eastern cuisines. It shines as a medium for everything from soups and pastas to braises, roasted meats, and vegetables. Use it as a main ingredient in mayonnaise, vinaigrette, and all manner of condiments from Herb Salsa to chili oil. Drizzle it over beef carpaccio or baked ricotta as a seasoning.
Your food will taste good if you start with a good tasting olive oil, but choosing the right one can be daunting. At my local market alone, there are two dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil on display. Then there are all the virgin, pure, and flavored oils. Early in my cooking career, as I approached these aisles, I often found myself overwhelmed by choices: virgin or extra-virgin? Italy or France? Organic or not? Is that olive oil on sale any good? Why is one brand $30 for 750 milliliters while another is $10 for a liter
?
As with wine, taste, not price, is the best guide to choosing an olive oil. This might require an initial leap of faith, but the only way to learn the vocabulary of olive oil is to taste, and pay attention. Descriptors like fruity, pungent, spicy, and bright might seem confusing at first, but a good olive oil, like a good wine, is multidimensional. If you taste something expensive but don’t like it, then it’s not for you. If you find a ten-dollar bottle that’s delicious, then you’ve scored!
While it’s a challenge to explain what good olive oil tastes like, it’s fairly simple to describe a bad one—bitter, overwhelmingly spicy, dirty, rancid—all deal-breakers.
Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead, use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter? If so, it’s rancid. The sad truth is that most Americans, accustomed to the taste of rancid olive oil, actually prefer it. And so, most of the huge olive oil producers are happy to sell to us what more discerning buyers would reject.
Olive oil is produced seasonally. Look for a production date, typically in November, on the label when you purchase a bottle to ensure you are buying a current pressing. It will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine! (In this way, olive oil is nothing like wine.)
As with salt, there are various categories of olive oils—everyday oils, finishing oils, and flavored oils. Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavor of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavored olive oils with caution. Flavorings are often added to mask the taste of low-quality olive oils, so I generally recommend staying away from them. But there is an exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press. At Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco, one of the most popular sundaes features bergamot agrumato drizzled over chocolate ice cream. And it is delicious!