ENTERTAINMENT

Salt Fat Acid Heat

Netflix

Some people make cooking look so easy, don’t they? Samin Nosrat is one of those people — in fact, she reckons to be a great cook you just need to master the four basic elements that make up the title of her new four-part Netflix series:

Simple!

The TV adaptation of Nosrat’s popular, award-winning book of the same name is comfort viewing at its best. So many delicious slow-motion shots of pasta jiggling on a spoon, pesto slopping around a bowl — a bit more olive oil should do it.

Olive oil is the key to the first episode, in which Nosrat explores how Italian cuisine harnesses the magic of fat. “The fat of a place is the starting point for the flavour of its cuisine,” she explains — in the southern United States that’s bacon fat and lard, in France (and probably New Zealand too) it’s butter.

In Italy, it’s olive oil, which begins life in picturesque hillside groves where the olives are harvested using long poles with cool Edward Scissorhands-style bits on the end. It’s beautiful footage — like the best nature documentaries, you could probably watch the whole thing on mute and still be able to follow and enjoy it.

Nosrat soaks up the wisdom of everybody she meets on her travels — there’s Diego, who makes the lightest, softest, crunchiest focaccia you’ve ever seen, and Lidia, who makes a pesto smoother and silkier than you could ever imagine. Lorenzo the butcher certainly knows his way around a pig and the many types of cured meat it can provide.

It’s enough to make you want to book the next available flight to Italy. Before you do, though, the other three episodes might yet tempt you elsewhere — how about Japan (Salt) or Mexico (Acid)?

Acid Heat. Salt Fat

police department is one of the best they’ve ever done.

That might not sound like the most fascinating topic for a podcast episode, let alone two, but it really is. CompStat, the system designed 25 years ago by a cop with a name straight out of a comic — Jack Maple — is a total nightmare, and the story of how it came to be that way is told so expertly it feels like a thriller. Just goes to show you still can’t beat a good

Batman Reply All. MOVIE OF THE WEEK My Dinner With Herve

SoHo, 8.30pm Sunday

You have to keep reminding yourself throughout all of this more or less really happened. A struggling British writer (Jamie Dornan) is sent to interview Gore Vidal in Los Angeles, but instead ends up spending a wild, weird night with actor Herve Villechaize (Peter Dinklage doing a very full-on French accent), who would end up committing suicide just days later. It’s based on the real-life experience of director Sacha Gervasi, who did that final interview with Villechaize back in 1993.

My Dinner With Herve: FROM THE VAULT