Top 80 Samin Nosrat Quotes

As a student of Alice Waters, the patron saint of salad, I’m no stranger to the art of lettuce washing.

The delicate sweetness of just-picked vegetables is always worth savoring.

The temperatures required for caramelization and browning almost always far exceed the boiling point of water. So the presence of water on the surface of a food, or on the bottom of a pan, is a signal that browning can’t yet occur.

I love the look of delight on my guests’ faces when I serve them a bowl of olive-oil aioli alongside roasted potatoes or a grand Nicoise salad.

People love giving cooks spoons, I’ve noticed. Or, at least, they love giving them to me.

People never used to look at me twice. That was my superpower: When I met someone, I could decide whether to care about them based on whether they cared about me.

I love a Yorkshire pudding. It’s basically pancake batter that’s fried in beef fat and puffs up; it’s like you can’t go wrong.

For me, I am very much a champion of home cooking and home cooks.

Persian cuisine is, above all, about balance – of tastes and flavors, textures and temperatures. In every meal, even on every plate, you’ll find both sweet and sour, soft and crunchy, cooked and raw, hot and cold.

Steaming offers no opportunity for either seasoning or developing the brown, crisp textures that sauteing and roasting afford.

A successful shrimp boil requires layering ingredients into the pot so that everything is done cooking at once. A carefully timed choreography dictates the order in which ingredients are added to ensure no one has to eat raw potatoes or chewy shrimp.

Chez Panisse is a sensory temple – you might have to be made of stone not to fall for it.

In sausage, fat is a source of both delightfully porky flavor and a springy texture. Without enough fat, sausage will be dry and tasteless.

After coating pasta with tomato-rich meat sauce, my mom would drizzle the bottom of a nonstick pot with oil and put it all back in to form a dark crust of tangled noodles. Once she unmolded it at the table like a cake, my brothers and I would excitedly cut into it, verbally laying claim to our preferred pieces.

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!

I know pastry chefs who are overwhelmed by the idea of tasting, rather than measuring, their way to a balanced vinaigrette.

I love mayonnaise. It’s one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion – that creamy, satisfying third thing – feels like magic.

I always turn to Wendell Berry for inspiration on food, community, agriculture, and, well, just being a human.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle.

The best – and most popular – recipe I’ve ever written has three ingredients: buttermilk, chicken, and salt.

Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.

Browning butter affects more than just the color and the flavor of its milk solids; the water that butter contains also simmers away.

One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.

There’s never been anyone like Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and there never will be. She is such an important source of inspiration for me, reluctant recipe writer and follower that I am.

I wake up naturally and begrudgingly around 6:10 A.M. That’s wired in so deeply that I wake up at that time no matter where I am, in any time zone. I wish I could sleep later.

The beach has always been a constant in my life.

I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don’t know if it’s completely placebo or not, but I’m super committed to these supplements: like, I can’t face the day without them.

At some point during every cooking class I teach, I do my signature move: dramatically add handful upon handful of salt to a large pot of boiling water, then taste it and add even more.

Unlike leftover pasta, leftover risotto is viewed by Italians as a gift. Cooks shape it into balls or stuff it with a pinch of stewed meat or cheese. Then they bread and deep-fry the fritters until golden brown, yielding arancini, the indulgent ‘little oranges’ I can never resist.

Growing up, I was aware of the kids-don’t-like-vegetables trope, but it didn’t make much sense to me. I never had any choice; all the traditional Iranian dishes my mom cooked teemed with herbs and vegetables.

At some point during every cooking class I teach, I do my signature move: dramatically add handful upon handful of salt to a large pot of boiling water, then taste it and add even more.

Throughout my time working in restaurants, I developed an illogical dread of some basic kitchen tasks. None of them – picking and chopping parsley, peeling and mincing garlic, browning pans of ground meat – were particularly difficult. But at the scale required in a professional kitchen, they felt Sisyphean.

We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don’t eat, to what we’ve eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people’s hearts and their minds.

Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.

I’ve always believed that pastry chefs are born, not made. They’re patient, methodical, tidy, and organized. It’s why I stick to the savory side of the kitchen – I’m far too messy and impulsive to do all the measuring, timing, and rule-following that pastry demands.

After coating pasta with tomato-rich meat sauce, my mom would drizzle the bottom of a nonstick pot with oil and put it all back in to form a dark crust of tangled noodles. Once she unmolded it at the table like a cake, my brothers and I would excitedly cut into it, verbally laying claim to our preferred pieces.

Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.

I love the look of delight on my guests’ faces when I serve them a bowl of olive-oil aioli alongside roasted potatoes or a grand Nicoise salad.

Growing up, I thought salt belonged in a shaker at the table and nowhere else.

I’ve had an untraditional trajectory with food: I was in my mom’s home, then I was a college kid making mac and cheese and quesadillas, and then I was a professional cook. I never had that time where you figure out how to cook for yourself at home.

I love roast chicken, juicy summer tomatoes, and carrot cake slathered with tangy cream-cheese frosting.

I could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.

Long-stemmed broccoli should be tossed with olive oil and flaky salt and roasted in a hot oven until the florets turn the color of hazelnut shells and shatter on the tongue.

While a pot of boiling water may not offer the char or smoke of a grill, it does give the cook an advantage when it comes to seasoning food.

There’s nothing historically in my life very flashy. I’m not exceptionally beautiful. I’m not exceptionally wealthy.

I know pastry chefs who are overwhelmed by the idea of tasting, rather than measuring, their way to a balanced vinaigrette.

My favorite afternoon snack as a child in San Diego was a still-steaming flour tortilla purchased at the taqueria down the street from my school, and I’ve yearned for them ever since I moved away.

I’d never been religious, but I’d always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.

I grew up in San Diego with immigrant parents, before the food blogs, before this kind of celebrity chef culture we know now.

I love bitter broccoli rabe tossed with Calabrian chiles and hidden under a mountain of snowy shaved Parmesan.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle.

Most canele recipes begin with an instruction to brush $30 copper molds with melted beeswax. Unsurprisingly, I’ve never made it past the Internet search for ‘used canele molds’ before giving up.

I’d never been religious, but I’d always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.

Inexpensive and forgiving, kosher salt is fantastic for everyday cooking and tastes pure.

I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin’ restaurant type – and what I had at home never measured up to that.

I’ve never tasted a store-bought tortilla that compares in texture or flavor with one made by hand, so I’m happy to invest some time. It’s worth it just to see a friend take her first bite and understand, finally, that a flour tortilla is meant to be an essential component, not just a lackluster wrapper.