How I became a chef and writer
Samin Nosrat taking over the culinary world.
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Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers. (Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
With a new show on Netflix based on her James Beard Award-winning book of the same name, it’s safe to say that Samin Nosrat is taking over the culinary world. The author of “Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking” and the writer of a column in New York Times Magazine, Nosrat knows food – and she knows how to write and talk about it.
USA TODAY caught up with the chef, author and writer.
Question: What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Samin Nosrat: For sure making this series. When we first announced the show, it was at this industry event where there was a press junket, and I went into TV Guide, which was one of the places that took my photo. They were like, ‘How are you today?’ I don’t know about you, but I grew up reading TV Guide. I did not grow up thinking one day I would be in it. I just cannot believe that I get to do this amazing project.
Q: Who’s been your biggest mentor?
Nosrat: I feel like one of the things that is unique about the way I work in the world is that I exist in a bunch of different worlds, a bunch of different industries and landscapes. I’m just a deeply curious person, and so I feel very lucky that I have a career in cooking, and a career in writing, and now I have a career in making television.
Michael Pollan is absolutely my writing mentor – he has been so generous with me throughout my career. My cooking mentor is a chef named Christopher Lee, who really sort of took me under his wing and protected me and gave me so many opportunities throughout my cooking career.
Q: What does your career path look like?
Nosrat: There’s this amazing Steve Jobs anecdote. He gave the story in a commencement speech about how you can only connect the dots when you look backward, but looking forward, there’s not really a very clear way to be able to predict what’s going to happen. I think that is very applicable for me, certainly from where I sit now looking back, and as I figure out what’s next.
Originally, I wanted to be a poet. Then, I fell into cooking and sort of realized that I might need to make some money to support my poetry habit. Cooking became this amazing part of my life, and probably for 10 years, I just cooked and put all of my time and energy into becoming a better cook for the sake of trying to master this skill. At some point, I realized that cooking and food were just another medium for me to tell stories. That set the path for me to start writing about food, first in magazines and newspapers and then eventually in a book. So then that turned into the amazing opportunity to tell stories, ultimately about people but while talking about food, in this new medium of film and of TV. For me, there is this theme of storytelling that so clearly ties it all together.
Q: What’s your biggest career high and biggest career low?
Nosrat: I’m definitely riding a tidal wave of a high right now with this show. But what may have even been more meaningful – because it was something that I really just wanted to do since I was a little kid – was writing and publishing my book.
I ran a restaurant for five years, and ultimately we closed it in 2009. I wasn’t that happy doing that job, I wasn’t prepared to be a manager. I was unhappy and stressed out and feeling the burden of a restaurant – in which I was not an owner or a partner – but, I felt like it was mine. The biggest low was, in those years, when I was mean to people because I didn’t know another way to be a leader. I think that the thing I learned from that was that I needed to go to therapy and deal with my temper and figure out how do I make better decisions to put myself in situations where I’m going to be able to use the skills and the tools I’m working on developing to communicate better with people? Looking back, the thing I feel the most regret and pain over is that I didn’t treat everyone that I worked with (with) total respect and kindness.
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned throughout your career?
Nosrat: No matter what I do my diehard rule is that the people you surround yourself with are everything. I want to be around creative, vulnerable, transparent, communicative, empathetic people. Of course we’re all flawed, we’re not always our best selves, but I think making the choices to work with people who will work their butts off, who will give everything they have, who care and who are nice to each other, even in really tricky situations, is to me what determines my joy or happiness in a particular project or situation more than anything else.
Q: What’s your favorite dish to make?
Nosrat: Any sort of dish that involves vegetables. I love vegetables so much. I love being fed vegetables. It’s an act of self-care for me to eat them. Any vegetable to bring the best out of it is my greatest joy, so feeding people vegetables where I think they might assume they’re going to be underwhelmed or maybe being sent something that they don’t want to eat or they don’t like, and then surprising them? That gives me so much joy.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who follows in your footsteps?
Nosrat: You have to build up a resistance, like an immunity, to failure. It’s a really big part of both being a cook and being a writer. And yet the beautiful thing about cooking is there’s always tomorrow. There’s always another opportunity to eat. Practice is everything in cooking. Nobody is born knowing how to be a great chef.
The same thing is applicable in writing. Nothing I say or write or think comes out perfectly the first time, and usually the biggest part of writing for me is revising. When people only see your unfinished product, they assume, ‘ You whipped that cooking right up!’ or ‘ You whipped that article right up!’ But a lot of work goes into it. I did maybe whip up that roast cauliflower, but you know what came before that was 17 years of practice. Be ready to fail, and get up and try again. And practice, practice, practice, no matter what you’re doing.