Samin Nosrat Quotes

Samin Nosrat

Profession : Chef

Birth : November 7, 1979

Tart and sweet, tinged with the faint scent of almonds and flowers, the Blenheim is the ideal apricot for both eating and preserving.

Samin Nosrat

Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.

Samin Nosrat

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

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. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.

Samin Nosrat

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

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

Most canele recipes begin with an instruction to brush $30 copper molds with melted beeswax. Unsurprisingly, I've never made it past the Internet search for 'used canele molds' before giving up.

Samin Nosrat

I know pastry chefs who are overwhelmed by the idea of tasting, rather than measuring, their way to a balanced vinaigrette.

Samin Nosrat

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

Hello, my name is Samin, and I'm an artisanal-bread hoarder.

Samin Nosrat

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

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

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

Samin Nosrat

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

Samin Nosrat

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

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

At home, Mom served us turkey breakfast links that she got at the health-food store. But whenever we went out for breakfast, she let my brothers and me order pork sausages (though, inexplicably, not bacon).

Samin Nosrat

In the wake of a failed relationship, I'm often flooded with if-onlys.

Samin Nosrat

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.

Samin Nosrat

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