Samin Nosrat Quotes

The key to a good meal is simplicity and the right seasoning.

It took me all my life to learn how to salt a tomato.

I'm a rather crude cook.

I always have homemade chicken stock in the refrigerator. I'll reduce it, maybe add a little cream and a few shallots. Before you know it, eureka! It's the best.

A perfect chutney needs patience. If you are cooking it, cook it on a low flame; the flavors come out the best that way.

I love cooking and eating - I'm a total foodie. It started off as a survival thing as a student, when cheese and potato pie was all I could afford to make. My most successful results come from concocting something with leftovers. Any chef will tell you that you should taste as you cook, so I might make it a bit more spicy, yogurty or eggy.

I love fresh citrus and always keep lemons, limes, and oranges on hand; they come in handy for spritzing up quickly grilled meats, seafoods, and vegetables, especially when followed up by a quick drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

I think anybody can cook if they take the time.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

That being said, I often write into recipes techniques I learned in the restaurant kitchen. There are ways of organizing your prep and so on that are immensely useful. Those are woven into all the recipes I do.

I'm not an amazing cook. But I can follow a recipe!

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

I use ginger like garlic. I love it for steaming fish and making barbecue sauces or roasted chicken.

If you salt a chicken the day before cooking, it starts to break down the cell structure of the meat and allows it to take on more flavor and actually helps it to stay more moist. Same goes for a steak, a pork chop. A lot of people brine; we preseason.

A lemon, boiled whole and blitzed, makes a useful base for all sorts of dressings.

First of all, you want to do the soaking with almost all of the larger beans because that will take care of the gas, and second of all... they want to be seasoned and flavored.

Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.

I've taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.

I wouldn't exactly call it 'cooking' but I can make noodles. That means I can boil water, put the pasta in and wait until it's done.

It's all about technique. Rotisserie sounds simple, but to really do it the right way is important so you can get really great products and let them stand on their own.

I use vinegars to deglaze saute pans for sublime sauces.

At some point during every cooking class I teach, I do my signature move: dramatically add handful upon handful of salt to a large pot of boiling water, then taste it and add even more.

I don't know how to cook lettuce.

I am a very bad cook. I can never make proper Indian food.

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