Samin Nosrat: Netflix’s New Star Chef on Success, Race and Chocolate Chip Cookies
The star of the docuseries Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat opens up about Chuck-E-Cheese’s and how ‘silliness and wackiness and clumsiness can disarm people’
By Mayukh Sen
Sometimes, they do a double take. Other times, their jaws drop. A few ask if she is the woman from that Netflix show where she goes to Liguria, Italy, and tastes a sliver of pork fat as sweet as butter, or if she’s the lady whose cookbook has those funky illustrations and the fold-out chart of cooking acids. Most just stare.
Wherever she goes, at least in the US, chef and food writer Samin Nosrat can’t exist without people noticing her.
“Does anybody like being recognized?” she asks me. “I understand that it’s my job. I’m grateful about people who are moved enough by the work to want to say something. But I mourn the loss of anonymity.”
Public recognition is a fact of celebrity life. But it’s new for Nosrat, 38, whose life began to go topsy-turvy after the April 2017 release of her first cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, a James Beard award-winning 480-page bible premised on the belief that the foolproof way to become a deft cook is to harness those…
