Samin Nosrat was born in San Diego, California and did not learn to cook until she was an adult.

While Samin was a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, she ate dinner at Chez Panisse and immediately started working there as a busser. Samin eventually worked her way up to becoming a cook and working with Alice Waters. Alice has called Samin “America’s next great cooking teacher.”

 

Here are 51 delicious Samin Norsrat quotes.

 

 

“A burger is a black dress; a kebab is a Met Gala gown.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“By definition, comfort foods are rich and creamy or evocative of childhood pleasures.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Things taste less salty when they’re cool.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“There’s a certain kind of dark-crusted sourdough bread I’m incapable of resisting. A sixth sense alerts me anytime I veer within a three-block radius of a bakery offering tangy country loaves with mahogany crusts. Without fail, I’ll make my way inside and buy one, even if there’s already half a loaf growing stale on my countertop.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I can only be me!”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Friends have warned me that I can be a bully in the kitchen. With every fledgling relationship, I’m anxiously aware that the simple act of cooking alongside my new paramour can unleash havoc.

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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!”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“The classic French blanch-and-cool technique I learned at Chez Panisse yields the kind of brilliant, picturesque vegetables we all want to see on restaurant plates. Long-cooked foods, on the other hand, fall firmly into the ‘ugly but good’ camp of the Tuscan cucina povera, where flavor far outshines looks.

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“For the timid or uninitiated, leaf-wrapped foods offer an ideal and gentle introduction to fire cooking. Liberated from the need to worry about whether the fish is sticking to the grill or burning, pay attention instead to the rate of browning on the surface of the leaf, which you’ll get to discard whether it chars or remains pale.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I hate recipes.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“No one’s born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I’ve always joked that my food memoirs will be titled ‘Brutta ma Buona,’ the phrase Italians use to describe food that’s delicious but rustic-looking at best: ugly but good.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“The higher a flour’s protein content, the more structure and elasticity it will lend a dough.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Years of cooking have taught me that the harder a flour is, the ‘thirstier’ it is. In other words, harder flours tend to have a greater capacity to absorb water than their softer counterparts.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“The apricot’s fleetingly short harvest – only a few weeks long – explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“My inability to follow recipes as written – without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature – is well documented.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Hello, my name is Samin, and I’m an artisanal-bread hoarder.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I’ll eat anything, even foods I’ve always shunned, when a friend cooks it.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I am very much a champion of home cooking and home cooks.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“I would say, probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food’s really fun, but I’ve always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“It’s easy to discount water’s importance in the kitchen. After all, it has no flavor, and more often than not, it’s left off ingredient lists, making it seem like an afterthought. Yet water is an essential element of almost everything we cook and eat, and it affects the flavor and texture of all our food.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“Salt’s relationship to flavor is multidimensional: It has its own particular taste, and it both balances and enhances the flavor of other ingredients.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

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

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“When I left restaurants, I had to learn to be a home cook.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“No Persian meal is complete without an abundance of herbs.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“My students regularly spend 20 hours or more in the kitchen with me. I try to teach them that even the most well-written recipe for, say, gazpacho can never take into account the ways in which a tomato that’s lapped each morning and evening by coastal fog will taste completely different from one grown in a hot, inland valley.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

“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.”

― Samin Nosrat, Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

 

Watch Samin and Brad Make Focaccia in the BA Test Kitchen: