There are cookbooks and then there are cookbooks, and this one is definitely worth the review. We’re really excited to spend a bit of time talking about Samin Nosrat’s “Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking” (2017) because it’s a cookbook unlike any we’ve read before.
There are recipes, sure, but what sets this book apart is its dedication to discussing the principles of good cooking through the four main elements in the title: salt, fat, acid and heat.
Why these four elements?
Salt, Nosrat writes in the Introduction, enhances flavour. Fat amplifies flavour and makes appealing textures possible (like “crispy”). Acid brightens and balances. And heat determines the texture of food.
Understand these four elements better is what Nosrat describes as the necessary foundation for consistently cooking good food. And mastering the four principles in this book will change the way you think about cooking and eating food.
I’ve maintained for years now that cooking is more of an art and baking is more of a science. At least – when it comes to my approach to understanding recipes! To me, there more creativity in recipes for cooking than for baking, by far. And if you’re like me, then this book gives you permission to lean into those intuitive ideas about exploring flavours. It is an invitation to look at a recipe and ask, what would I do differently here? Rather than following the recipe by rote.
What’s in this cookbook?
The book has a great layout:
- Divided in two parts, the first is all about those four main elements of good cooking, with a chapter dedicated to each.
- The second part covers kitchen basics and a number of recipes that specifically align with providing opportunities to try out the principles you learned about in part one.
- There are also a few goodies throughout that I’m excited about! One is the “What should I cook?” foldout “map” that’s in the image below. There are also a bunch of other tips, including things like kitchen skills and fun drawings that amplify the content. An example of this is the “basic salting guidelines” that visually show, by type of salt, a rough guide of where to start for salting foods properly.
- Generally all the illustrations throughout the cookbook – they are wonderfully drawn by Wendy MacNaughton. Many of them made me laugh. Very few were merely decorative.
I really love the humour and humble storytelling in this cookbook. I love love love how Nosrat ambles through her own story of falling in love with food and cooking. Don’t get me wrong – Nosrat has definitely has experience cooking in an elite, upscale restaurant (Chez Panisse in San Francisco is mentioned many times!), but I think the principles in this book are valuable for anyone, including home cooks, to apply and improve their cooking. I don’t think that’s a criticism to not take away the lessons in this book.
Biggest takeaways from this cookbook?
I think one of the most valuable takeaways from this cookbook is that it helps you assess a recipe in a way you maybe didn’t before. As someone who has a garlic intolerance, prefers vegetarian, and has a husband who is lactose intolerant, I am rarely able to follow a recipe as it’s written. At this point I can follow my instinct for what might work to alter a recipe, and it usually works out okay. (Usually.)
Having said that, this cookbook is helping me to understand why sometimes a recipe I’ve altered tastes AMAZING, and why sometimes, it tastes flat. And, it has also given me some tools to help understand how to fix when my soup went flat. It’ll take me more time to get better at applying the principles in the book, but hopefully this review will get you excited to try as well.
As a separate note – I loved the chapter on Salt so much that we’ll take some time in an upcoming blog post to go over our previous post on how to make the perfect pot of pasta again. We’ll take a closer look at our section on salt and apply Nosrat’s princple for salting to that post.
Low on time? Or struggle with dyslexia?
I’d be remiss not mentioning that this cookbook also exists as a Netflix series! It’s a four part limited series that came out in 2018 and is still available on that streaming platform. Each episode of about 45 minutes covers one of the four principles.
The book is hefty – part 1 on the principles is about 200 pages, and the second half is just over that. So, that could be a lot of reading! Know you have options if you, too, want to make your food taste awesome but don’t want to read all those words.
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