Quotes from 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.

I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.

I'm the child of immigrants, and there was always a garage filled with food, just in case, and you kept money under the mattress. You were always prepared, because you couldn't trust that you were being taken care of. So that translated into my life into a lot of opportunity hoarding.

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.

I wake up naturally and begrudgingly around 6:10 A.M. That's wired in so deeply that I wake up at that time no matter where I am, in any time zone. I wish I could sleep later.

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).

I love mayonnaise. It's one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion - that creamy, satisfying third thing - feels like magic.

I could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.

Chex mix is this wonderful crunch that you just can't get enough of.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.

People love giving cooks spoons, I've noticed. Or, at least, they love giving them to me.

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

Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.

The apricot's fleetingly short harvest - only a few weeks long - explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.

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.

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.

Like all Iranian kids, I grew up feeling strongly that the best part of dinner was tahdig, the crisp, golden crust that forms at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice - and sometimes other dishes, too.

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!

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

Growing up, I was aware of the kids-don't-like-vegetables trope, but it didn't make much sense to me. I never had any choice; all the traditional Iranian dishes my mom cooked teemed with herbs and vegetables.