Samin Nosrat Quotes

Samin Nosrat

Profession : Chef

Birth : November 7, 1979

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

No Persian meal is complete without an abundance of herbs.

Samin Nosrat

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

Samin Nosrat

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

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

Samin Nosrat

Inexpensive and forgiving, kosher salt is fantastic for everyday cooking and tastes pure.

Samin Nosrat

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

Samin Nosrat

The best - and most popular - recipe I've ever written has three ingredients: buttermilk, chicken, and salt.

Samin Nosrat

Steaming offers no opportunity for either seasoning or developing the brown, crisp textures that sauteing and roasting afford.

Samin Nosrat

Fried vegetables, often overbattered and undercooked, tend to disappoint me with their tough or soggy crusts.

Samin Nosrat

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

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

Samin Nosrat

My favorite afternoon snack as a child in San Diego was a still-steaming flour tortilla purchased at the taqueria down the street from my school, and I've yearned for them ever since I moved away.

Samin Nosrat

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

Samin Nosrat

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

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

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

When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.

Samin Nosrat

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.

Samin Nosrat

While other stone fruits grow tender on the surface as they ripen, apricots take an alternate path to maturity, softening from the inside out.

Samin Nosrat