Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat
This cookbook may be the most useful book I’ve gotten all year. I say that because my reading it has actually allowed me to take steps to one of my biggest problems whenever I want to cook a set recipe. Whenever, I find a meal that I’m interested in cooking, I end up going to the grocery store, getting all of the exact ingredients for the meal, cooking the meal, and then never using those random ingredients again. Rather than saving money by cooking at home, I end up spending $40 on a random meal that would cost a fraction of that if I had some of those staples in my home already.
I’m including a cookbook on this reading log because, Nosrat specifically tries to distance her book from being a standard collection of recipes. Rather, the first half of her book introduces general concepts and ideas that can make you a more complete and capable cook. Nosrat frames this by breaking cooking into the four main areas from the title: Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. Good cooking comes down to mastering, or at least understanding, how these four elements play together. At first, this can be a little intimidating — rather than just being able to follow a recipe blindly, Nosrat is encouraging us to actually know a little bit about what is going on during the cooking process. After that initial hurdle though, it’s such a relief! No need for guilt if you don’t have any tomatoes for a recipe that needs them for their acidity, try out a little vinegar and see how it works out!
I haven’t made it all the way through the book but it currently has a permanent place in our kitchen right now. It guides a decent amount of my cooking now and it’s accessible to read in little spurs when I want little refreshers on my four new pillars of fun and convenient cooking. Plus, the illustrations are fun.