KEYS TO COOKING EVERYTHING
If you learn these basics, you can cook without using any recipes
SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT Samin Nosrat Simon & Schuster
Use your fingers to season food; say goodbye to the salt shaker.
Use fat to create “crisp, creamy, tender and light” textures.
Use acid — “salt’s alter ego” — to balance flavour.
Use your senses instead of timers when applying heat.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat represents 17 years of culinary experiences.
Chef and writer Samin Nosrat arrived at her theory of the four elements of good cooking through practice, using it as a mnemonic device to guide her.
“The Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat theory slipped in alongside these philosophies that were handed down to me about cooking, which is the idea of practice makes perfect. You have to travel and taste and learn every day,” Nosrat says.
“It was very much drilled into me that, ‘You don’t know anything until it’s reached a point where you don’t have to think about it anymore.’ Where it’s just in your body; your mouth knows what to taste for and your hands know how to cut something.”
Nosrat had only been cooking professionally for a year — at the esteemed Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse — when she first mentioned her four-element theory to a more experienced colleague, chef Christopher Lee.
“It was just one of those moments where I really felt like I’d stumbled onto something and I brought it to him and he just laughed,” she says.
“He was like, ‘Oh, you think you’ve figured something out? We already all know that.’
“But for me, what was so shocking in that moment was that I felt like I had come to this great realization. It wasn’t a great realization because they already knew it, but nobody had ever told me.”
When Nosrat started at Chez Panisse, she dove into the restaurant’s list of essential cookbooks.
What surprised her, she says, is that these guiding principles weren’t articulated in any of them.
She knew then that she would eventually write a book on the subject. The only problem was, as a “baby chef,” she needed the expertise to back it up.
“I got out a notepad, I started writing and I didn’t have much to say,” she says with a laugh. “So, it stuck with me and it became the system that I was filing everything I learned into. Whether or not I was actively paying attention to it, everything seemed to naturally fall into these four elements, more or less.”
Today, Nosrat is an accomplished instructor and has taught her theory to the likes of professional chefs, junior high school students and influential food writer Michael Pollan. (She appeared in his book, Cooked, and the Netflix docu-series of the same name.)
Whereas cookbooks squarely centre on recipes, Nosrat designed Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat to “give people independence” — highlighting the science and techniques that underscore good cooking.
This is a book that can help you decide what to cook, how to cook it and why.
Part 1 of the book is devoted to mastery of the four elements, Part 2 includes 100 of Nosrat’s “most essential and versatile recipes” — a panzanella for every season, sweet corn soup, kuku sabzi (Persian herb and greens frittata), chicken confit and allbutter pie dough.
“My job in these recipes is … to give you some room but also, very counter-intuitively to be as precise as possible and clear and thorough as possible so that you can get to the end and be successful,” she says.
Whether using a recipe or improvising, Nosrat says the goal is cooking thoughtfully, with your senses — considering salt, fat, acid and heat every time you cook, before setting out and throughout the process.
She quotes the late chef Judy Rodgers of San Francisco’s Zuni Café, who once said, “Recipes do not make food taste good; people do.”
Rather than abandoning critical thinking in favour of following a recipe, Nosrat writes, “Be present.
“Stir, taste, adjust.” Graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton collaborated with Nosrat on art for the book.
Infographics and illustrations are peppered throughout: Knife cuts are hand-drawn to scale and basic skills such as how to dice an onion are beautifully presented; charts and diagrams depict lessons such as when to salt your food.
Nosrat explains that her mission is to empower people to cook intuitively; to view recipes as inspiration rather than instructions. In this spirit, instead of showcasing immaculately presented finished dishes in the book, she emphasizes concepts.
“There is this disingenuousness built into the world we’re living in where people are being pelted with these ideas of what dinner should look like without the backstory. And that’s a great disservice,” Nosrat says.
“What I was taught (as a cook) and certainly as a child even before I was a cook, was the importance of practice, the importance of messing up and trying again.
“That doesn’t seem to come across in the extremely styled, glossy pictures of food and messages that we’re constantly getting about what our food should look like.”