Samin Nosrat Wants Viewers to Cook What They See on Her New Netflix Show, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” (2024)

Samin Nosrat, the Iranian-American chef and writer behind the hit cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat—a compendium of cooking guides that help people to prepare food by employing the powers of what she deems the four “holy grail” elements of cooking—has released a show on Netflix. The four-part program, named for each section of her book, tracks Nosrat’s adventures around the world, beautifully capturing her private lessons with local people in communities big and small, from pesto-making in Liguria, Italy, to salt-harvesting in Japan’s small island communities. Like an amped up version of Chef’s Table, the episodes present visually gorgeous segments of food preparation and scenery, peppered with Nosrat’s infectious joy and sense of discovery. After debuting last week, it has already become a hit. “I was hoping it could be something where people can pick up a few tips, or want to start cooking. That’s definitely happening,” Nosrat confirms. “People have been emailing me asking for the recipes, which apparently they’re already cooking just from watching—that’s pretty amazing.”

Today, she launches an updated edition of her website, and with it, a selection of recipes for the dishes featured on the show so that viewers can cook as they watch.

Here, Nosrat discusses the production process, using food as an agent for connecting people from diverse cultures, and bringing her trade trademark cheer to the silver screen. Plus, an exclusive recipe for Ligurian focaccia (“that’s the one people seem to be most obsessed with”), the making of which is pictured, too.

What lead you to doing the show?
I taught my first cooking class in 2007, and I remember coming back from that and telling some of my chef colleagues, “This is really inefficient.” Teaching 12 people how to cook at one time— wouldn’t it be so much better if we had a show? I think it was either 2014 or 2015 when Michael Pollan filmed Cooked, and I was featured on that show. That’s how I met Caroline Suh who directed the episode I was on, and she eventually became the director of my series. She told me then, “You’re going to have a show one day.” She basically called it that day, and told me Jamie Oliver got discovered in the background of somebody else’s program. So she shepherded the idea of my story to Jigsaw Productions, which was Michael’s production company then. Michael’s show launched and it did well—Netflix was really, at that point, just starting to get into food content—and we all stayed in touch, developed the idea with Jigsaw, and brought it to Netflix. From day one, it was like love at first sight with Netflix.

There’s this wonderful sense of artistry in the way the show is shot, somewhat like Chef’s Table, but with far more humor. It’s almost like watching a movie, in that there’s a distinct narrative sense. Were you involved in the visual direction at all? What did you want it to look like?
When I was doing the book, I knew that I wanted it to be a beautiful object, and in the same way, I wanted the show to be beautiful because humans are sensual creatures. While people of course have different aesthetic proclivities, there are some things that are just pleasing to all of us. I really wanted to lean into that idea, and I also felt like most food TV that’s pretty accessible doesn’t really focus on beauty. The accessible stuff, often, is like “workhorse TV.” Now, I didn’t know anything about making film or television or anything like that which is where Caroline, our director, and Luke, our incredible cinematographer, came in. They pushed hard for the show to really capture me, as I am, and all of my quirks. It’s messy over in my apartment: I have 95 million cookbooks, and a weird collection of pins, and all this colorful art on my walls done by my friends. Caroline said, “That’s the spirit that I want this show to have.” So the production of the show—the way it’s shot, the use of archival images and everything you see—was really her interpretation of me. It was definitely a group effort, but I would say that I was really clear from the start that this had to be something beautiful.

My favorite part of the show is your evident joie de vivre and friendliness—together, they suggest that niceness can (and should) be an integral part of teaching and understanding haute cuisine, which isn’t often the case. Can you speak to that spirit a little bit?
In terms of connecting to the human spirit in all of us, that’s definitely my evil plan. I would say probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food’s really fun, but I’ve always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together. They may not be alike in a lot of ways, but they can connect, on some level, around a dinner table. I’ve seen that format have amazing effects—and also some real consequences. But that connection is so important nonetheless. In the wake of a bunch of natural disasters, I’ve held fundraisers and I’ve had a bunch of people show up for people they’ve never met who are on the other side of the world. I feel like especially in this moment, which is such a divisive time for humanity, if I could use this show, and use food, to bring pleasure and joy to show you that we’re not all that different—that humans all want to eat something delicious—that’s great, and that’s something that’s literally baked into each and every one of us. If I can make this beautiful show about food that leaves you feeling a bit better, a little lighter, and maybe curious about somebody or someplace you didn’t know about before, then that’s really great, that’s what I really hope to achieve. Of course, there are the surface goals of cooking and inspiring and eating, but the fundamental thing, for me, is bringing people together.

You say that the secret to great cooking is hiding in plain sight, in salt, fat, acid and heat. How did you come to narrow it down to those four?
I didn’t know anything about cooking, and then I had the good fortune of stumbling into Chez Panisse restaurant when I was 19 years old. I don’t think I understood the significance of that in the scheme of American culinary standards or anything like that. It was just a temple of sensory delight for me, where I was constantly awed and inspired by the chefs and these people who had this incredible fluidity and fluency with ingredients that changed every single day. And so when I first started there, they gave me a bunch of cookbooks, and they said, “Go home and study this, this is the foundation of our cooking.” So I did that, because I’m a really good student. Then they said, “Go home and cook,” so I went home and cooked. Then they said, “Come into the restaurant and watch what the cooks are doing, watch how they talk, how they taste and what they decide when they’re changing stuff.” So I did all that, but it was really confusing because what the cooks were doing on a daily basis didn’t reflect at all on what I’d been doing at home with the cookbooks, because they didn’t use recipes or measure anything or set timers. It was so much more intuitive. I had a hard time with that, because I didn’t understand how they knew how to make everything, regardless of the cuisine.

It took about a year of paying attention and really starting to see this pattern that no matter what we were doing, we always salted our meat the day before for the next day, and whenever we’d taste something, the thing that the dish always needed more of was salt. And then fat—when I was helping on the pastry side, we had to keep butter cold for pastry dough, but on the savory side, they were like, “Heat up your pan before you put in the butter so that it gets hot and the food can get crispy.” And so I started to pay attention to fat, and then to acid—we always talked about needing something like lemon. I’d never heard that word in regards to food before, and it sounded so clinical at first, but eventually I connected the dots. I come from Iran, where we have a really tangy palette (we love yogurt and stuff like that). Heat was really the most intimidating one for me— the one day it really sunk in was when we didn’t have any stove space left and they told me to build a fire, and cook my soup over that. I was like, “What are you talking about?!” As if humans hadn’t been doing that for thousands of years.

So I coalesced all of this and brought it to the chef, and I was like, “I figured all this out: salt, fat, acid, heat,” and he’s like, “Yeah, we all know that.” I just felt really betrayed, and said, “Well if you know that, and it’s not in any of the cookbooks, and nobody has articulated it to me over the past year, then probably nobody at home knows this either, when they’re cooking.” It really became the system that I filed all my other learnings into, and then it became how I eventually started to teach other people how to cook. My publisher was concerned that it didn’t mean enough of anything to use for a book title, but I was like, “I’m going to make it part of the vernacular.” I get that it didn’t mean a lot to a general audience, but that it could—as it did for me.

Would you do another season of the show?
I think there’s a real argument to be made for Season 2. I feel like we could go to every country and still learn something. I am also very tired… it took me five years to write the book, I went immediately into touring and then production. I need to creatively refuel, but to me I feel that fundamentally I am a storyteller. I’m really lucky. My first medium was cooking, and then I invested the past 12 years into writing, as a medium, and now I have this new medium. It’s really exciting to me, and very fun. The head of the documentary studio at Netflix is Lisa Nishimura, and she’s the only Asian American woman who is a studio head in Hollywood. She’s responsible for bringing Ava DuVernay to Netflix, and was really instrumental in getting the Obamas a deal there, too. She’s so committed to humanity and diversity, and that shows there in every single person. Almost everyone that works on my team is a woman of color, which is incredible. I’m constantly looking for wonderful collaborators, and I’ve definitely found that in them, so if they’ll have me again, I’ll have them, for sure.

Ligurian Focaccia

Adapted from Diego Bedin with the help of Josey Baker

For the dough:

2½ cups (600 grams) lukewarm water

½ teaspoon active dry yeast

2½ teaspoons (15 grams) honey

5 1/3 cups (800 grams) all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons (18 grams) Diamond Crystal Kosher salt or 1 tablespoon fine sea salt

¼ cup (50 grams) extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for pan and finishing

Flaky salt for finishing

For the brine:

1½ teaspoons (5 grams) Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt

⅓ cup (80 grams) lukewarm water

In a medium bowl, stir together water, yeast, and honey to dissolve. In a very large bowl, whisk flour and salt together to combine and then add yeast mixture and olive oil. Stir with a rubber spatula until just incorporated, then scrape the sides of the bowl clean and cover with plastic wrap. Leave out at room temperature to ferment for 12 to 14 hours until at least doubled in volume.

Spread 2 to 3 tablespoons oil evenly onto a 18-by-13 inch (46-by-33 cm) rimmed baking sheet. When dough is ready, use a spatula or your hand to release it from the sides of the bowl and fold it onto itself gently, then pour out onto pan. Pour an additional 2 tablespoons of olive oil over dough and gently spread across. Gently stretch the dough to the edge of the sheet by placing your hands underneath and pulling outward. The dough will shrink a bit, so repeat stretching once or twice over the course of 30 minutes to ensure dough remains stretched.

Dimple the dough by pressing the pads of your first three fingers in at an angle. Make the brine by stirring together salt and water until salt is dissolved. Pour the brine over the dough to fill dimples. Proof focaccia for 45 minutes until light

Thirty minutes into this final proof, adjust rack to center position and preheat oven to 450°F (235°C). If you have a baking stone, place it on rack. Otherwise, invert another sturdy baking sheet and place on rack. Allow to preheat with the oven until very hot, before proceeding with baking.

Sprinkle focaccia with flaky salt. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes directly on top of stone or inverted pan until bottom crust is crisp and golden brown when checked with a metal spatula. To finish browning top crust, place focaccia on upper rack and bake for 5 to 7 minutes more.

Remove from oven and brush or douse with 2 to 3 tablespoons oil over the whole surface (don’t worry if the olive pools in pockets, it will absorb as it sits). Let cool for 5 minutes, then release focaccia from pan with metal spatula and transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

To store, wrap in parchment and then keep in an airtight bag or container to preserve texture. Gently toast or reheat any leftover focaccia before serving. Alternatively, wrap tightly to freeze, then defrost and reheat before serving.