Quotes from Samin Nosrat

My students regularly spend 20 hours or more in the kitchen with me. I try to teach them that even the most well-written recipe for, say, gazpacho can never take into account the ways in which a tomato that's lapped each morning and evening by coastal fog will taste completely different from one grown in a hot, inland valley.

I live by myself, so I derive a lot of joy from being with my friends and their families.

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

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.

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

Salt's relationship to flavor is multidimensional: It has its own particular taste, and it both balances and enhances the flavor of other ingredients.

Things taste less salty when they're cool.

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

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

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.

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.

Chez Panisse is a sensory temple - you might have to be made of stone not to fall for it.

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

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

The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.

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

Apricots are the most private fruit, loath to reveal their secrets.

In sausage, fat is a source of both delightfully porky flavor and a springy texture. Without enough fat, sausage will be dry and tasteless.

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.

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.

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

No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.

A successful shrimp boil requires layering ingredients into the pot so that everything is done cooking at once. A carefully timed choreography dictates the order in which ingredients are added to ensure no one has to eat raw potatoes or chewy shrimp.

A burger is a black dress; a kebab is a Met Gala gown.