Have you ever felt lost without a recipe, or envious that some cooks can conjure a meal out of thin air (or an empty refrigerator)? Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat will guide you as you choose which ingredients to use, how to cook them, and why last-minute adjustments will ensure that food tastes exactly as it should. These four elements are what allow all great cooks—whether award-winning chefs or Moroccan grandmothers or masters of molecular gastronomy—to cook consistently delicious food. Commit to mastering them and you will too.
As you discover the secrets of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat, you’ll find yourself improvising more and more in the kitchen. Liberated from recipes and precise shopping lists, you’ll feel comfortable buying what looks best at the farmer’s market or butcher’s counter, confident in your ability to transform it into a balanced meal. You’ll be better equipped to trust your own palate, to make substitutions in recipes, and cook with what’s on hand. This book will change the way you think about cooking and eating, and help you find your bearings in any kitchen, with any ingredients, while cooking any meal. You’ll start using recipes, including the ones in this book, like professional cooks do—for the inspiration, context, and general guidance they offer, rather than by following them to the letter.
I promise this can happen. You can become not only a good cook, but a great one. I know, because it happened to me.
I have spent my entire life in pursuit of flavour.
As a child, I found myself in the kitchen only when Maman enlisted me and my brothers to peel raw broad beans or pick fresh herbs for the traditional Persian meals she served us every night. My parents left Tehran for San Diego on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, shortly before I was born in 1979. I grew up speaking Farsi, celebrating No-Ruz, the Iranian New Year, and attending Persian school to learn how to read and write, but the most delightful aspect of our culture was the food—it brought us together. Rare were the nights when our aunts, uncles, or grandparents didn’t join us at the dinner table, which was always filled with plates mounded high with herbs, platters of saffron rice, and fragrant pots of stew. Invariably, I was the one who snagged the darkest, crunchiest pieces of tahdig, the golden crust that formed at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice Maman made.
Though I certainly loved to eat, I never imagined I’d become a chef. I graduated from high school with literary ambitions, and moved north to study English literature at UC Berkeley. I remember someone mentioning a famous restaurant in town during my freshman orientation, but the idea of dining there never occurred to me. The only restaurants I’d ever eaten at were the Persian kebab places in Orange County my family trekked to each weekend, the local pizza joint, and fish taco stands at the beach. There were no famous restaurants in San Diego.
Then I fell in love with Johnny, a rosy-cheeked, sparkly-eyed poet who introduced me to the culinary delights of his native San Francisco. He took me to his favourite taqueria, where he taught me how to construct an order for the perfect Mission burrito. Together, we tasted baby coconut and mango ice creams at Mitchell’s. We’d sneak up the stairs of Coit Tower late at night to eat our slices of Golden Boy Pizza, watching the city twinkle below. Johnny had always wanted to dine at Chez Panisse but had never had the chance. It turned out that the famous restaurant I’d once heard about was an American institution. We saved up for seven months and navigated a labyrinthine reservation system to secure a table.
When the day finally arrived, we went to the bank and exchanged the shoe box of quarters and dollar bills for two crisp hundred-dollar bills and two twenties, dressed up in our nicest outfits, and zoomed over in his classic convertible VW Beetle, ready to eat.
The meal, of course, was spectacular. We ate frisée aux lardons, halibut in broth, and guinea hen with tiny chanterelle mushrooms. I’d never eaten any of those things before.
Dessert was chocolate soufflé. When the server brought it to us, she showed me how to poke a hole in the top with my dessert spoon and then pour in the accompanying raspberry sauce. She watched me take my first bite, and I ecstatically told her it tasted like a warm chocolate cloud. The only thing, in fact, that I could imagine might improve the experience was a glass of cold milk.
What I didn’t know, because I was inexperienced in the ways of fancy food, was that for many gourmands the thought of consuming milk after breakfast is childish at best, revolting at worst.
But I was naïve—though I still contend that there’s nothing like a glass of cold milk with a warm brownie, at any time of day or night—and in that naïveté, she saw sweetness. The server returned a few minutes later with a glass of cold milk and two glasses of dessert wine, the refined accompaniment to our soufflé.
And so began my professional culinary education.
Shortly afterwards, I wrote a letter to Alice Waters, Chez Panisse’s legendary owner and chef, detailing our dreamy dinner. Inspired, I asked for a job waiting tables. I’d never considered restaurant work before, but I wanted to be a part of the magic I’d experienced at Chez Panisse that night, even in the smallest way.
When I took the letter to the restaurant along with my résumé, I was led into the office and introduced to the floor manager. We instantly recognised each other: she was the woman who’d brought us the milk and dessert wine. After reading my letter, she hired me on the spot. She asked if I could return the next day for a training shift.
During that shift, I was led through the kitchen into the downstairs dining room, where my first task was to vacuum the floors. The sheer beauty of the kitchen, filled with baskets of ripe figs and lined with gleaming copper walls, mesmerised me. Immediately I fell under the spell of the cooks in spotless white chef’s coats, moving with grace and efficiency as they worked.
A few weeks later I was begging the chefs to let me volunteer in the kitchen.
Once I convinced the chefs that my interest in cooking was more than just a dalliance, I was given a kitchen internship and gave up my job as a waitress. I cooked all day and at night I fell asleep reading cookbooks, dreaming of Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese sauce and Paula Wolfert’s hand-rolled couscous.
Since the menu at Chez Panisse changes daily, each kitchen shift begins with a menu meeting. The cooks sit down with the chef, who details his or her vision for each dish while everyone shells peas or peels garlic. He might talk about his inspiration for the meal—a trip to the coast of Spain, or a story he’d read in the New Yorker years ago. She might even detail a few specifics—a particular herb to use, a precise way to slice the carrots, a sketch of the final plate on the back of a scrap of paper—before assigning a dish to each cook.
As an intern, sitting in on menu meetings was inspiring and terror-inducing in equal measure. Gourmet magazine had just named Chez Panisse the best restaurant in the country, and I was surrounded by some of the best cooks in the world. Just hearing them talk about food was enormously educational. Daube provençal, Moroccan tagine, calçots con romesco, cassoulet toulousain, abbacchio alla romana, maiale al latte: these were the words of a foreign language. The names of the dishes were enough to send my mind reeling, but the cooks rarely consulted cookbooks. How did they all seem to know how to cook anything the chef could imagine?
I felt like I’d never catch up. I could hardly imagine the day would come when I’d be able to recognise all of the spices in the kitchen’s unlabelled jars. I could barely tell cumin and fennel seeds apart, so the thought of getting to a point where I could ever appreciate the nuanced differences between Provençal bouillabaisse and Tuscan cacciucco (two Mediterranean seafood stews that appeared to be identical) seemed downright impossible.
I asked questions of everyone, every day. I read, cooked, tasted, and also wrote about food, all in an effort to deepen my understanding. I visited farms and farmers’ markets and learned my way around their wares. Gradually the chefs gave