
‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks - tomhoward
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/10/samin-nosrat-salt-fat-acid-heat-netflix/572731/
======
tptacek
I've read the book and watched the series. Both are fine.

The series is in a weird place in between Mind of a Chef (which, in most of
its seasons, is a significantly better show) and a more conventional FoodTV
cooking show. I think they're trying to do too much in each episode, and also
that the travel-show part of each episode works better than the cooking demos
do.

The book is better than the show. I have friends that swear by it. I like it
fine! It sort of joins a pantheon of "if you're only going to own one cooking
book make it this one" books, which would include Bittman's "How To Cook
Anything", Ruhlman's "Twenty", the Cooks Illustrated Cookbook, and, I don't
know, maybe "Joy of Cooking"?

Of those books, I think Ruhlman's "Twenty" is by far the best. It's similar to
"Salt, Fat" in the sense that it breaks cooking down by technique and concept,
instead of courses or dishes. But I think it has a more coherent structure,
covers more ground, and, while wasting less time on narrative, still manages
to establish a conversational tone.

~~~
Nition
In New Zealand that "one cooking book" is the Edmonds Cookery Book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonds_Cookery_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonds_Cookery_Book)

Tells you all the essentials of how to cook meat and veges and make basic
sauces and all that, plus has a whole lot of relatively simple recipes that
use common ingredients.

~~~
seem_2211
What's scary is comparing the old versions of the Edmonds Cook Book with the
more recent versions and seeing how much more sugar we're putting in a lot of
the stuff we're making.

~~~
setr
I remember looking up eggnog recipes and realizing that the 1950s used twice
as much whiskey as the modern versions

That was some good eggnog

~~~
vkou
Was the whiskey of the 1950s lower proof?

~~~
lazerpants
Definitely not. In fact, I think more of it was probably bonded (100 proof).

------
ilamont
I started to watch the video series set in Italy featuring the author. I agree
with the premise, thought a few scenes were interesting (particularly the
butcher and harvesting olives in the first episode), but just couldn't get
into the cooking and dining scenes ... too heavy on the "food porn" and too
light on the "whys" of what they are doing. They just do something, and people
are mostly left to their imaginations of why this combination or process or
amount leads to the terrific outcome shown on the screen.

I will say one thing about the video series that was refreshing: She learned
Italian, and for the most part talks with people who can't speak English. Many
cooking travel shows are forced to rely on interpreters, expats, or locals who
can speak English, which really limits the expertise and viewpoints that can
be shared.

~~~
acomjean
I watched the first episode. I really liked it and will watch the the rest
shortly.

Her enthusiasm about food was pretty contagious. And it was interesting. If
there is a complaint, its a little light on the how-to (it isn't "america's
test kitchen), and it needed a little more content for the length. I found it
interesting to see the Italian attitude to food and also found the "olives"
and butcher interesting (as well as the pesto segment..).

------
Tomte
I'm not a fan of the book. I mean, it's all correct, the illustrations are
beautiful, not much to bicker about.

But it fell flat for me, maybe because I already have Twenty and a few other
books.

I did not find really new concepts, and none of the recipes really jumped out
at me and made me want to cook them, I returned the book.

It's fine, really, but I think there are better ones. Twenty for concepts,
Ratio for "show me quickly how to do X" and, my special tip, How to Cook
without a Book by Anderson.

Just disregard her list of ingredients you should always have in stock,
because you'd probably need to convert one of your larger rooms into a pantry.
It goes on and on for pages.

But the recipes and the whole presentration is top-notch. Including a short
rhyme at the beginning of every chapter that tells you Ratio-like how to do a
basic whatever the chapter is about.

If you read German, get Nahrungszubereitung Schritt für Schritt by Schlieper.
It's a very thin book, full of illustrations, because it is for school use
(including special-needs schools). Very basic. What parts of the beef or pork
are there. What kinds of rice are readily available in the supermarket. Basic
recipes like pancakes, roux, Bologna sauce. They tell you how to cook pasta.

It's conventional. None of the higher-level stuff like "let your steak rest
after cooking" or "more salt into your pasta water". But it's great for all
those little things like roux that "normal people" don't do often and forget
the details.

I just hope they added a real index in a later edition, because I don't find
anything in their botched simulation of an index.

~~~
markdown
> I returned the book.

Wait, what? You read the book, returned it, and feel no shame in admitting it?

~~~
mlevental
wut. if the book isn't good why would one feel ashamed of returning it? is
there a moral obligation to keep a bad product?

~~~
markdown
After you've used it, absolutely. I wouldn't dream of using something I paid
for and then demanding money back after I've used the item.

> is there a moral obligation to keep a bad product?

No, but I feel there's a moral obligation to not ask for your money back for a
product you didn't like _after_ using it. This of course doesn't apply if the
product is faulty/broken such that it can't be used.

Do you do that for other things in your life, like demanding money back after
watching a movie you later decide you don't like, or do you just walk out of
restaurants without paying if you decide you didn't like the food (after
eating it)?

A cultural difference, I guess.

~~~
cthalupa
It's not a fiction book you read for entertainment. Books of this nature are
meant to be a reference and resource you continue using.

~~~
markdown
I feel that's beside the point. The vendor can no longer sell it as a new
book. You've deprived them of some value, and you refuse to pay for what
they've lost.

I feel there's in inherent risk in any trade. You rarely know for certain that
you'll love what you're paying for, and you should accept that risk.

One shouldn't feel entitled to 100% satisfaction when one makes a purchase,
and certainly shouldn't deprive the vendor of money just because you decided
after the fact that you didn't like what you bought.

I suppose this is to be expected from people raised in an environment where
multi-billion dollar corporations compete for customers and can afford to
offer "just because I didn't like it" returns free of charge.

It's foreign to me.

~~~
leetcrew
> I suppose this is to be expected from people raised in an environment where
> multi-billion dollar corporations compete for customers and can afford to
> offer "just because I didn't like it" returns free of charge.

you hit the nail on the head. amazon has a policy where they will let you get
a full refund within _n_ days as long as you haven't significantly damaged the
item yourself. they're not stupid; they do realize some people will just use
the thing a couple times and return it. so they do the math on their end and
figure out what kind of return policy they can afford to offer. why _wouldn
't_ you take advantage of this? companies only offer this kind of policy
because they expect to make even more money because of it.

~~~
cyphar
> as long as you haven't significantly damaged the item yourself

As an aside, my limited experience with buying "new" books from Amazon is that
they are always significantly damaged on arrival.

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nemo44x
Great book - every home cook should read it. A truly effective philosophy for
building dishes. You’ve maybe heard the expression “the acid cuts through the
fat” before and this book explains why and is useful in finding ways to adapt
this technique.

Having 50 or so pages dedicated to salt is great. Knowing when to salt
something and what effect it will have on the food is particularly useful.
Effective brining and salting is critical to cooking.

I didn’t care too much for the show. Just unremarkable imo. But the book is
great.

~~~
f2f
love the book. didn't think the show captured the essence of it that well,
looked like a 4-episode set piece for a future cooking series. but the book is
really good. sits on top of the educational pile for me, together with the
"silver spoon" book.

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amb23
If we're on the topic of how to cook rather than just what to cook: I just got
A New Way to Dinner (a cookbook from Food52) earlier this summer and have been
using it religiously pretty much every week since. It's a strategy guide on
how to prep all your food on the weekend and have diverse meals throughout the
week. You basically do 1-3 hours of cooking on the weekend to make the
components for your dishes, and then a bit of assembly work during the week to
combine different components and build your meals (i.e. A roast chicken on
Monday can turn into a chicken salad with fennel on Wednesday and a chicken
salad sandwich for lunch anytime during the week)

If I don't plan and cook my meals like this, then I end up either spending an
hour plus to make a new dinner every weeknight, or getting lazy and frying up
some eggs, or making a huge batch of whatever and reheating the same thing
again and again. It's been such a timesaver during the week, I really wish
more recipes & cookbooks were formatted like this.

~~~
knight17
Thank you for mentioning it. It is a useful way to organise a book for busy
people who wants to cook. I found this aspect of the book interesting and
searched for some reviews and found this critique of its ingredient list; that
it is expensive:

>>> ... seem unaware of their privilege ... ask you to buy near industrial
quantities of certain expensive ingredients. Worse, there’s often no
suggestion as to alternatives if the budget cannot quite stretch to a kilo of
black raspberries ... painfully unconscious of this element to their book ...
an expressly upper middle class lifestyle cookbook. [] <<<

I usually discount criticisms of privilige but in this case of a cookbook it
seems to be synonymous with expensive.

[] [http://cookthesebooks.com/a-new-way-to-dinner-amanda-
hesser-...](http://cookthesebooks.com/a-new-way-to-dinner-amanda-hesser-and-
merrill-stubbs/)

Anyone know of other books or resources along similar lines?

~~~
amb23
I haven’t found the ingredients to be too expensive for most of the menus
honestly, but I also live by a really cheap fruit and veggie store. (A kilo of
blackberries isn’t gonna break the budget when it’s $1.00 a carton.) The
book’s recipes are sized for a family of four hence the huge portions; I’m
single so I usually cut the recipes in half and save a lot for leftovers. I’d
say there’s a lot of substitutes you can make in the book for rare/pricier
items and it’s realistic for most middle class budgets. They also group menus
by season, so you buy the ingredients for the week when the produce is at its
cheapest. But yeah, they do have the occasional ingredient like ground lamb or
garlic scapes that can make the menus annoying/expensive to put together
exactly.

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cantrevealname
Has anyone else noticed that there has been a massive surge in cooking books,
videos, and shows in the last 10-15 years? Especially on TV, it's wall to wall
cooking shows. I remember that cooking was a big interest 20-25 years ago, but
it seems so much bigger now. Anyone have any theories about why this may be,
or if my impression is wrong?

My own theory is that many more men are into cooking nowadays, so the market
for cooking-related things may have expanded up to 100%. Also, car ownership
is becoming a burden rather than fun, and new home ownership is becoming
unaffordable, therefore conversation about something everyone has in common
has shifted from cars and homes over to cooking.

~~~
idunno246
My grandparents made a cookbook for all their children, and it was full of
microwaved recipes and dumping jars of processed foods together. I looked into
remaking it with better bindings as it was falling apart, but the recipes are
all so gross. So I feel like part of it is generational, that we can get good
ingredients, and value high quality food more than before. As much as people
hate on blue apron, they kinda proved there's a demand for it, even if its not
a viable price point.

The other thing wrt television... old cooking shows were boring. Throw in a
dose of reality tv, make it exciting, and people will watch. It's also one of
the few tv shows where a person could pretty reasonably recreate it, probably
simplified, within their own home.

~~~
nemo44x
It’s interesting - I assume you’re American as am I. The approach to food was
completely changed after WW2 in the USA. There was so much new food tech that
looking back isn’t so nice but that people of that time embraced (and many
still do). And for good reason it would seem looking back through their lens.

Food and cooking lost a lot of value in our culture for many years. We started
optimizing around the wrong things (fast and easy - cooking is a struggle!)
and then again after more wrong things (lets replace fat with extra salt and
processed foods!). And only lately has the idea of “fresh and seasonal”
started to become more mainstream - again. Where as before the War it was what
people did because it was how it was.

There’s a lot of good cooking in the USA that just vanished from before the
War. Very localized dishes, lots of stews. Some old cookbooks reveal how much
we’ve changed and have also reclaimed old values.

~~~
pfranz
I remember hearing that after WW2 processed foods were seen as futuristic. It
was more consistent batch to batch, less likely to spoil, and safer to eat.
After a few generations of that it's seen as generic and bland.

This digging up of pre-industrialized food cherry picks the best of each area
and uses higher standards for food quality and safety (that would have been
unfeasible generations ago).

I'm not knocking regional food, I'm glad this is happening and love to see and
try new things. I hate seeing the US covered by the same handful of chain
restaurants.

~~~
nemo44x
A big part of it was we had the factories, machines and workflows to convert
wartime manufacturing into peacetime manufacturing. We mastered the concept of
processing and preserving food for GI's and converted it to households.
Cooking was sold as a laborious task wrought with potential for failure. From
there the next phase of industrial mastery was developing fast food
restaurants and selling the idea that even preparing the pre-made meals was
too much work and hassle - a true victory of Madison Ave.

We've come full circle now where inefficiently producing and purchasing high
quality ingredients and having the time and resources to cook them is now the
higher class activity VS the efficient processed food sold to the masses.

------
methodover
Does anyone know of a cookbook that provides _complete_ meals? The ones I’ve
had recommended all assume you kinda know what you want to make. But I want
someone else to tell me what to make, and I’ll just put it all together.

~~~
papa_bear
It's not really a cookbook, but check out my website
[https://www.EatThisMuch.com/](https://www.EatThisMuch.com/)

You can set it to just one meal if you want (and something like 600 calories)
and keep regenerating it until it looks like something you'll like. I started
it because I'm terrible at thinking about what I want to eat :)

~~~
dmos62
I love this! I'm having trouble balancing my diet, largely because I don't put
in the time in research, and this does all these things. Great idea.

However, I follow a vegetarian diet (as in 95% of my intake is vegetables,
legumes and grains), and the generator is having trouble composing meal plans.
It says so if you click on Details next to the calorie target. The picked meal
plans differ from the carb/fat/protein targets significantly, and the meals
are all uncooked: salads, smoothies and deserts. So the vegetarian "menu"
doesn't really work, unfortunately.

I thought that the database is severely skewed towards animal-based diets, but
if I pick "anything" in the diet menu, I still get mostly salads, sandwitches,
scrambled eggs, and stuff like yogurt, nuts, cheese slices, with some meat and
eggs here and there of course. What stands out is that most things seem to
require very little preparation. Is this tool oriented towards people
unexperienced in the kitchen? Or maybe people who don't want to spend time
preparing food? That's a nice option to have, but to only have recipes like
that is a bit strange. Also, since I was told by a physician I should avoid
raw vegetables and eat them well cooked (I used to eat raw or minimally cooked
in the past), at least 3/4 of the suggested meals are no-go for me.

~~~
papa_bear
Thanks for the feedback!

You're right that the default settings are pretty skewed towards simple meals.
We need to make these options more prominent I think, but if you click the
3-dot menu next to a meal's title, you can change the allowed prep-time and
desired "meal complexity".

The meal complexity has a huge impact on what recipes are available, and if
you bump a couple meals up to moderate or complex, you'll get a lot more
variety. Let me know if that improves things at all for you (I think a lot of
the more interesting vegetarian/vegan dishes probably fall under a higher
complexity setting).

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JauntTrooper
My wife is loving this book. It's very different from other cookbooks. It's
more narrative, and teaches you how to think about cooking rather than just
providing recipes to follow.

~~~
jb188
I just finished watching this and LOVED it. I haven't read the book yet, but
it is now on my todo list. I love to cook and found so many tips in here to
make rethink how to assemble a meal.

~~~
war1025
I read the book last year and watched a couple of the episodes of the show
last weekend.

The book is super informative and useful for thinking about how to build
dishes that will taste good. The show seems more like a food travel show that
is semi based around on of the items.

Both are good, but if you were impressed by the show, the book will blow you
away.

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resters
I loved the book and have (so far) watched only the first episode of the show.

I look at the book as being full of low hanging fruit. The salt chapter alone
has improved my cooking tremendously, and I thought I was already fairly aware
of salt before I read it. It made me more bold with something I thought I
already knew.

The acid chapter took away any shame I had about loving sour cream and
ketchup, which was worth the read in and of itself.

I liked the travel show style of the show, and really liked how she built up
the concepts in the focaccia recipe. As educational programming, it was
superb. By the time she actually makes the focaccia the viewer has a
love/appreciation for every single ingredient.

I don't think I've had such a visceral jealousy of someone eating on tv as I
did when they bit into that focaccia.

The point she's trying to make, I think, is that the recipe anchors the
region, the cuisine style, the way of life, and the meal it is enjoyed with.
This was done beautifully. I will always appreciate focaccia more in the
future for it.

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NotANaN
Shelby Stanger had a great interview with her on the most recent episode of
the "Wild Ideas Worth Living" REI podcast.

[https://wildideasworthliving.com/samin-nosrat-the-
adventure-...](https://wildideasworthliving.com/samin-nosrat-the-adventure-of-
good-cooking/)

------
trynewideas
If you get nothing else from watching this show, try making your own focaccia.
It's a relatively simple bread to make, doesn't require special ingredients or
techniques, and bakes in a sheet pan. If you can make brownies, you can make
focaccia.

~~~
girvo
So one of my favourite entrees (in the Australian sense of the word, not the
American) is toasted focaccia with olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip in
it; I never made it often because focaccia is quite expensive here. You've
just changed my world (and likely made me fat! I kid :P)

~~~
cthalupa
>entrees (in the Australian sense of the word, not the American)

Despite traveling pretty extensively, I somehow never noticed this.

For those that are as lost on this as I am, it looks like this is a result
from the compression of meals from 5-15 courses down to the more standard 1-3.
At the time, entree would not match its current use anywhere in the world -
your meal would have both fish and a roast, and the entree would be the course
in between the two. Something like chicken, lobster, ragu, etc.

When meals became less elaborate affairs, a lot of food items that would
historically be the entree became acceptable to be the main course. In France
and much of the English speaking world, to keep what was called the entree
more in line with the French meaning of the root word (Apparently,
specifically the entrance to a theater or musical performance), it became what
Americans would call a starter or appetizer. America and most of Canada
instead kept the word in line with the type of food item being consumed, which
had shifted the previous pre-roast courses to being the primary course.

And no one uses it how it was originally used in France, to refer to a stage
and related set of courses for the dinner, rather than for any one course.

(Sorry for the tangent, but hopefully this clears up the confusion for anyone
else reading this)

------
rjain15
I haven't read the book, but watched the series. I agree with some of the
comments -- it's all about the love for food, watching the series makes you
love the process of sourcing the ingredients, finding the right balance, and
authentic insights from people who have been doing this without the recipe
books. If you want the recipe, there are a million other resources in a quick
google search.

------
jonplackett
I like watching that series when I just want to chill and zone out a bit. I
like seeing how food was originally made. The episode where she is making
pesto properly (ie not with a blender that just chops instead of crushing and
leaves you with crap oily rubbish - what I used to do) made me really want to
visit Italy and just eat everything.

------
chrstphrhrt
She's amazing. So humble and accessible.

~~~
medius
My wife said, after we finished watching her show, that Samin seems to be the
kind of person she would love to be close friends with.

------
funkythings
> Nosrat’s work to diversify the kinds of faces quite literally seen as
> culinary experts is directly connected to her view of food

Can there be anything on the internet WITHOUT injecting social justice talking
points into it? What the fuck does the quality of food have to do with my skin
color?

------
fredley
The best cook books out there right now as far as I'm concerned are Meera
Sodha's. Veg-centric (one book is entirely vegetarian) Indian cooking that's
well-explained and mostly very easy to do at home (and totally delicious).

------
shaklee3
Has anyone seen the documentary with the same name? It comes up on Netflix for
me every time I load it. I'm pretty overwhelmed by the number of food
documentaries out there, so this one didn't stand out for any reason.

~~~
jboynyc
I've been wanting to watch it since seeing it described as "a Marxist fantasy"
in this essay: [https://www.eater.com/2018/10/19/17995884/salt-fat-acid-
heat...](https://www.eater.com/2018/10/19/17995884/salt-fat-acid-heat-marxist-
samin-nosrat-netflix)

~~~
twic
FWIW a Marxist acquaintance denounced that review as anarcho-primitivist.

~~~
jboynyc
ha, love it!

------
NikolaeVarius
I'll probably check this out sooner or later, but how is this compared to the
Modernist Cuisine. I really love that series.

------
easymovet
Luscious 4K HDR too

------
here2day
It's so hard to read articles for the lowest common denominator. This guy
begins by saying he doesnt know what a bay leaf is. He continues that he's
inspired by the message of SFAH that 'anyone can cook anything and make it
yummms', which is a complete rubbish of a premise. In the bin this article
goes like most of the atlantics writing.

------
wangyjx
Talking about cooking, western people really know what it is?

~~~
nf05papsjfVbc
I take it you haven't spent considerable time in Italy?

------
atomical
This reads like every cookbook. Something about culture and connecting food to
some other thing like nature, family, or the garden. There aren't many things
you can do with food that haven't been done before.

------
z3t4
When it comes to cooking, we are still in the stone age. When will we see a
startup that stir up the food market !? It's a really huge market, and
something that would truly make the world a better place. Just an crazy idea:
Teleporting dishes. You scan in the food, then send it over the Internet to a
molecular printer that re-creates it. Or if you are a pirate you download
recipes from the web.

~~~
ohiovr
I recently had a nightmare about eating circuit boards while going down one of
those dreadful 90s style 3d tunnel graphics demos.

Has tech gone too far??

~~~
int_19h
Have you played Supaplex as a kid, by chance?

[https://youtu.be/8dMF3jU-nwc?t=34](https://youtu.be/8dMF3jU-nwc?t=34)

