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Samin Nosrat” ‘I learned that, if I was still enough, I could hear if a braise had come to a boil without having to lift the lid and check’.
Samin Nosrat: ‘I learned that, if I was still enough, I could hear if a braise had come to a boil without having to lift the lid and check’. Photograph: Barry J Holmes/The Observer
Samin Nosrat: ‘I learned that, if I was still enough, I could hear if a braise had come to a boil without having to lift the lid and check’. Photograph: Barry J Holmes/The Observer

How to cook like a pro. Step one: listen to the sound your food makes

This article is more than 6 years old

Samin Nosrat could barely dice vegetables when she began working in Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in California. Here, she reveals how learning to tune in to all of her senses changed everything

I was born in San Diego in 1979, on the eve of the Iranian revolution, and my twin brothers followed a few years later. My parents had arrived there several years earlier, unsure whether they’d ever be able to return to Iran. So our mum made it a priority to immerse us in the culture of our homeland. Maman especially infused our food with that sense of heritage. The highest compliment anyone could give a food was that it “tasted like Iran”. Having never been to Iran, I had no idea what this meant. But the search for that taste of home motivated Maman in her shopping and her cooking. My brothers and I spent nearly half of our childhood packed into our blue Volvo station wagon as Maman traversed San Diego and its bordering counties in search of the cheese, bread, lamb, citrus, fish and herbs that could transport her back to Iran.

Then, each night, we’d gather around the table with our aunts, uncles and grandparents to dine upon fragrant heaps of saffron rice, steaming pots of stew, fresh herbs and yogurt. I loved all of the aromas and flavours – the heavenly scent of rosewater, the sour shock of pomegranate seeds and plum leather, sweet quince preserves and salty feta cheese. As a kid, I was always aware that I wasn’t really American or Iranian. I had some sort of third, nameless identity, But my palate? It was the most Persian part of me.

I loved eating, but pursuing a culinary career didn’t ever cross my mind. I moved north to Berkeley to attend university, and in 2000 a series of serendipitous events led me to a part-time job bussing tables at Alice Waters’s landmark restaurant Chez Panisse. With a daily-changing seasonal menu and an employee roster of more than 100, each day at Chez Panisse brought with it new delights and learning opportunities. Everyone had something to teach me, from how to vacuum quickly and efficiently to how to hold three plates without dropping them and how to properly slice crusty bread.

But the most enchanting things were, of course, the food and the cooks who made it. Every time I tasted a dish, whether it was grilled quail, spiced carrot salad or rhubarb galette, the flavours rebounded around the walls of my mouth like a bouncy ball. My taste buds had never been worked so hard, or rewarded so well! Within a few weeks of my hiring, I was begging the chefs to teach me how to cook. It took some persistence, but they finally agreed to take me on as an apprentice.

By design, Chez Panisse’s kitchen is built to teach the countless young cooks who come through its doors. The restaurant is a product of the counterculture and, even now, 46 years after its doors first opened, the didactic methods used within are unconventional to say the least. I’d always been a dedicated student, and I figured I’d be given some textbooks to study and recipes to follow and be set on the path to good cooking. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Instead of technical texts, Chris Lee, the chef who first took me under his wing, gave me a list of two dozen literary cookbooks to read, so I could learn the way cooking well should feel. Other than that, his only explicit instructions to me were: “Cook at home every day. Pay close attention to what the other cooks do. And taste everything thoughtfully.”

As someone who’d never before worked in a professional kitchen, let alone alongside world-class cooks, I was overwhelmed by all the different ways we treated the constantly changing stock of ingredients in our walk-in refrigerators. Some days, our menus were inspired by the cooking of Italy, France or Spain. Other days, we made dishes that were Tunisian, Indian and even Chinese in origin. Each day, each cook would be assigned a new dish using a different cooking technique. They never consulted recipes, bothered with oven thermometers, or used measuring spoons to parse out salt. How did everyone else know how to grill, braise, roast, fry, bake and sauté any ingredient that was assigned to her? How did they know which ingredients would take a dish to Tuscany and which would take it to the Basque region?

As a total amateur I had a hard enough time just dicing a mountain of cucumbers or slicing onions evenly. I couldn’t tell parsley from coriander, let alone conjure up a recipe for bouillabaisse or Bolognese sauce from memory. How would I ever learn to cook like the cooks who surrounded me? I thought back to what Chris had said when he’d given me the apprenticeship and decided to pay closer attention to what the others were doing.

And so began my sensual education.

From watching Lori Podraza, a focused, curious cook from Chicago, I learned to use my hands as instruments to tear rustic croutons and pieces of salmon, delicately and evenly dress salads, and roll pizza dough into balls to proof. I learned how to know when to pull a pork chop off the grill by constantly touching it as it cooked, until it was firm around the edges and still tender in the centre. I learned how to tell when a pasta dough was wet enough by poking it, letting it rest, and then poking it again. I learned how to cook by touch.

From Alan Tangren, a pastry chef with a near-encyclopedic botanical knowledge, I learned the power of scent, and that flavour is hugely dependent on aroma. He taught me that the most astonishing fragrances are often hidden in plain sight – the kernels inside apricot pits, peach and fig leaves, and wild strawberries so tiny they didn’t seem worth eating all offered scents that were maddeningly appetite-whetting. Alan taught me to anticipate the way a cake was browning before I even saw it, by breathing in the steam that rushed out when I opened the oven door. He taught me to cook by smell.

I learned to listen from a soft-spoken chef named Amy Dencler. She showed me that the bubbles a frying food emits in the hot oil, the way a steak hisses when set upon the grill, and the way a strip of bacon sizzles, then spatters, all indicate the rate at which they are cooking. I learned that, if I was still enough, I could hear if a braise had come to a boil without having to lift the lid and check. Careful listening yielded clues about how a food was cooking, and whether or not I needed to adjust the temperature.

From Alice Waters, our visionary, uncompromising leader, I learned how to see. By the time I started at Chez Panisse, Alice was no longer in the kitchen on a daily basis. But she was always buzzing around the restaurant. Watching Alice speedwalk through the kitchen and dining room, I was always struck by her ability to notice the most subtle visual details in the midst of all of the hubbub. Never satisfied with the way the hosts lit the dining room, she constantly fidgeted with the lights until they were right. She brought nature inside, filling the restaurant with wild, overflowing flower arrangements and eye-catching displays of the fresh produce featured on the day’s menu. She obsessed over the way cooks plated each green salad, saying the lettuces “should look like they were showered down from heaven”. Alice taught me to see the kitchen, and the world beyond it, with discerning eyes.

Chris, though, taught me undoubtedly the most important lesson: how to taste. He taught me to be fearless in the kitchen. He took me to the farmers’ market and had me taste each variety of tomato to become familiar with its nuances. We tasted our raw ingredients, tasted throughout the cooking process, and tasted again just before we served each dish. Patiently, over the course of many months, Chris showed me how to extract the most powerful flavours by taking my cooking to the edge: salted, but not salty; creamy, but not greasy; acidic, but not sour; deeply browned, but not burnt. Chris taught me how to guide my cooking by incessant, careful tasting.

As everything I learned from observing the cooks and Alice coalesced into a unified theory, I realised that four basic elements were common to all good cooking: salt, fat, acid and heat. No matter what dishes we were cooking, from which parts of the world, we always evaluated three elements when we tasted. Salt, fat and acid were the tastes we sought to balance in every bite, every dish, every meal. Only when we used the right amount of each would the flavours of a dish come vibrantly to life.

And then, there was heat, the intangible fourth element that ultimately determined the texture of each ingredient. When cooking tough meats, the goal was to coax out tenderness, which could be achieved by long, gentle cooking – it didn’t matter if that happened on the stove, in the oven or over an open fire. When cooking delicate pieces of fish or tender steaks, the goal was to preserve tenderness, which could be done quickly, over intense heat. Again, the source of heat was inconsequential. It was a revelation!

After about a year in the kitchen, I presented my theory of the four elements to Chris. Like the points on a compass, salt, fat, acid and heat could lead any cook to deliciousness, in any kitchen, with any ingredients. Beyond that, all one had to do was consult cookbooks, interview other chefs, and travel to become familiar with the traditional flavour combinations of any particular cuisine. He humoured me with a smile, and said, “We all already know that, Samin. It’s how we all cook.” I was shocked – and felt a little betrayed: if they all already knew, then why had no one ever articulated the idea to me? And why hadn’t I seen it in any of the books he’d had me read?

I knew then I’d write a book of my own one day to elucidate the theory for everyone else. I took out a legal pad and started writing, but quickly realised I didn’t know enough about either cooking or writing to continue. Instead, I made salt, fat, acid, heat the framework into which I organised every lesson I learned about cooking for the next 15 years. Eventually I returned to my notepad and began to write in earnest, and the book was published this year. My aim is to teach anyone – from amateurs to avid home cooks to professionals – to be a better cook using the four elements that have faithfully guided me for all of these years.

When people ask me what the most valuable thing I learned at Chez Panisse was, I suspect that they want me to name some complicated dish. But no, learning to use all of my senses, in the kitchen and out, is the lesson that has most improved both my life and my cooking. Looking back, it’s clear that Maman best prepared me for my untraditional culinary career by teaching me to search uncompromisingly for the flavours and ingredients that will inspire my palate, imagination and memory in a single bite. Everything since has been built atop the foundation she first laid. One might even say that with all of my cooking I’m searching for the taste of home – my uniquely Californian-Persian-Mediterranean home.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat is published on 29 August by Canongate, £28. To order a copy for £23.80, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

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