A biography for Samin Nosrathasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The delicate sweetness of just-picked vegetables is always worth savoring.”
“I love bitter broccoli rabe tossed with Calabrian chiles and hidden under a mountain of snowy shaved Parmesan.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Steaming offers no opportunity for either seasoning or developing the brown, crisp textures that sauteing and roasting afford.”
“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.”
“While other stone fruits grow tender on the surface as they ripen, apricots take an alternate path to maturity, softening from the inside out.”
“I just drink regular drip coffee, but I'm kind of a coffee baby.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice, or polo.”
“Very early in my culinary career, while helping another cook prepare the staff meal, I stirred some chopped raw garlic and herbs into a bowl of leftover lentils. The atonement for this sin was so extreme that I've never repeated it: After being chastised, I spent the next 20 minutes fishing out the minuscule pieces of garlic.”
“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 could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.”
“The best - and most popular - recipe I've ever written has three ingredients: buttermilk, chicken, and salt.”