Champion of Amateurs: Samin Nosrat on Finding the Know-How to Feel at Home in the Kitchen
The bestselling author of “Salt Fat Acid Heat” shares her imperfect path to success in a seemingly perfect food world.
Samin Nosrat is “a champion of the amateurs.” One major soufflé faux pas (of all things), kickstarted her path from busser to aspiring cook to celebrated cookbook author. Tinkering and training at Chez Panisse, she developed an intuitive, casual approach to cooking by getting at the very basic elements of good food: an experience that would shape her now bestselling cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat. I chatted with Samin about how she built her culinary foundation, the hazards of Instagram-perfectionist-style cooking, and how she turns to cooking when everything feels upside down.
So, like you, I’m very comfortable and intuitive in the kitchen. And sometimes when I talk to people about feeling relaxed when I cook, they’re like “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
[Laughs] Yes totally!
Do you have advice for someone who wants to get comfortable in the kitchen, but they’re having a hard time?
For sure: it’s not your fault. A big part of why it’s not your fault is because as a society, the messaging that we’re sending and receiving around cooking is a message of perfection.
I think people are afraid to fail because you open your Instagram and it’s all pretty food pictures. But guess what? No one is making perfect food 24/7. I want to be the champion of the amateurs, and I want to encourage you to be an amateur. A big part of being an amateur is failing and practicing and learning from your mistakes.
As a society, the messaging that we’re sending and receiving around cooking is a message of perfection.
It’s easy to think that you don’t know anything. But the truth is that you have been eating every single day of your life and you actually know a lot! If you get a burrito and the first bite you take is really dry, what’s the first thing you do? You get some sour cream, some salsa, and you tinker with it until you get a good bite. That thing, that good bite–you just need to learn how to recognize it in your own cooking so it becomes what you’re after in everything you make.

You learned how to cook at Chez Panisse–basically, the dream place to get a culinary education. How did that happen?
When I moved to Berkeley, I’d never heard of Alice Waters or Chez Panisse. Then, my sophomore year of college, I fell in love with a San Franciscan who had always wanted to eat there. We saved our money for seven months to afford the meal–a whopping $220. The night before we went, I was trying to back out of the dinner, like “We can’t do this! It’s unconscionable to spend this kind of money on one meal!” But we went and we ate, and it was really, really special. I think to me the most mind-blowing part of the experience was eating in a place where I felt so taken care of. In a way, it felt like returning home.
We ended the meal with chocolate soufflé. I had never had it before, so the server had to show me how to eat it. I took a bite, and when she asked how it was, I told her it was really good, but a glass of cold milk would make it better. Clearly I had no idea that it was totally rude to tell somebody in a restaurant how to make your meal better when they ask you how it is! But she brought us the milk…along with a few glasses of dessert wine, to show us the refined accompaniment.
I was so enchanted that I drafted a letter to Alice Waters, wrote up my resume, and brought both in. I was taken to the floor manager’s office, and when the door opened, I immediately recognized her as the souffle lady! She remembered me, asked “Can you start tomorrow?”, and I started bussing tables the next day.

Was there an “aha!” moment that inspired you to write Salt Fat Acid Heat?
When I first started at Chez Panisse, there was this disconnect between what I learned cooking from cookbooks and what I saw in the kitchen, because they never used a recipe. I really struggled to keep up, especially because I didn’t even know the difference between parsley and cilantro.
But over time I started to see that no matter what we were making, we were always sort of following these basic rules. We were always tinkering and saying “Does this need a little something?” That certain something was most regularly a sprinkle of salt, a drizzle of oil, a little bit of fat, or a squeeze of lemon or something tangy. I told Chris this theory one day and he said, “Yeah we all know that, that’s how we all cook.”
I started to see that no matter what we were making, we were always sort of following these basic rules. We were always tinkering and saying “Does this need a little something?”
I felt really betrayed, like why hadn’t they told me?! I thought if I didn’t know, probably no one else at home knows. So I had this idea to start writing what would become Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat for those home cooks. But I didn’t know anything about writing, and still didn’t really know anything about cooking. With the idea in the back of my mind, I began to organize everything I learned into that four element system until it made sense to start writing the book.
As a champion of the amateurs, are you willing to share your biggest kitchen failure?
Oh my god, there are so many. I always joke that I’ve probably wasted so much of Chez Panisse’s money in my extended learning and mistake-making.
We were hosting an event for Hillary Clinton back when she was First Lady, and I was asked to double a batch of pork sauce.
I knew the basics of the recipe, and just figured I would get a bigger pot and put twice as much of everything in. So I took out this massive pot, put in all these pork bones, and cranked the heat all the way up. I put so many bones in there that they were just weighing themselves down at the bottom of the pot. Since the fire was cranked up so high, and the bones were so close to the heat, they all just burned. The whole bottom of the pot just burned, scorched.
I was so embarrassed, and hundreds of dollars of pork bones got thrown away. I got in trouble, but it was a lesson for me–I wasn’t paying attention, I didn’t use my noggin. Honestly even today, I still make plenty of mistakes in my everyday cooking.
I love cooking for myself in my own life because I’m a really cerebral person. I’m so glad that I didn’t abandon intellectual pursuits, but I think I’d go crazy if I spent all my time in my head. It’s amazing and wonderful to get to spend some time in my body, too. Every day I learn stuff about cooking. That will never end, you know. It’s one of the things that’s so great about cooking: you start over as a beginner every single day.
Get three of Samin’s recipe bundles perfect for a weekday lunch, here. And pick up a copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat here.
