Travel food show, a first for Netflix, sets itself apart

One word perfectly summarizes the new Netflix cooking show, and it emerges over a meal that the star of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” Samin Nosrat, is enjoying with her hosts in Japan, where she has just learned the traditional way to make soy sauce.

As they tuck into some chicken and rice balls, the elderly woman who has helped prepare the meal laments that the rice balls aren’t the perfect shape.

“The thing I love is wabi-sabi, that handmade quality that makes it human,” Nosrat told her host, using the Japanese term for finding beauty in imperfection.

Wabi-sabi is one of the things that makes “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” — named for the four factors of successful cooking and her cookbook of the same name — remarkable.

The show and its star exude it.

“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” is the first instructional cooking show from Netflix, and it looks nothing like the rest of that genre, which is too often the domain of cheerful domestic goddesses in glossy, polished kitchens.

It’s also a travel show (Nosrat takes her viewers to a different country that exemplifies each component in the show’s title), but neither does it look anything like those shows (which are usually full of brash men eating organ meats and throwing back beers).

Instead, it looks like Nosrat’s life, beautiful in its imperfections.

“It’s funny, when I first started getting cuts of the show and I would show my friends ... everyone’s reaction was, ‘It’s really you!’ Nosrat said by phone. “I kept asking them, like, ‘What did you expect me to be?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we thought maybe they would glam you up, or you would be acting differently, but you’re just acting exactly like you act.’”

Although Nosrat doesn’t cook the way normal people cook — she’s much, much better — she does some of the same things home cooks do. She winces and cries her way through dicing a pile of onions. She makes mistakes and owns up to them. She throws a dinner party in her Berkeley, Calif., home, and serves her guests roast chicken, and no one drinks out of fancy stemware.

“I’m a total ham, and I have no problem being portrayed as a person who doesn’t know everything,” she said.

She also eats the way real people eat, even while on camera: Sometimes taking too big of a bite, so she has to pause and chew before she can speak again. She slurps her pasta. When she eats something she really likes, pleasure spreads across her face.

The show, shot documentary-style, spans four episodes. You can binge all of them in one day, but Nosrat hopes you won’t. (“Don’t they know it took me years to make?” she joked.)

Each episode focuses on one element of cooking, paired with a location: Fat in Italy, where she makes pasta and eats prosciutto and cheese; salt in Japan, where she collects seaweed and makes miso eggs; acid in Mexico, where she eats fiery salsa and harvests honey; and heat in Berkeley, where she returns to the restaurant where she got her start, Chez Panisse, to cook over a wood fire.

The show has an opulent cinematography style, like “Chef’s Table,” but you’ll come away from each episode with practical tips and recipe ideas.