Follow the tenets I outline in How Fat Works to achieve whichever texture you’re after, then refer to The World of Fat to guide you in evoking the flavors of wildly different places. Choose to pan-fry Finger-Lickin’ Pan-Fried Chicken , for instance, in clarified butter for a classic French flavor. If you’re craving an Indian-inspired meal and want to dig into that jar of mango chutney in the
refrigerator door, change the cooking fat to ghee. If it’s a Japanese chicken cutlet you’re craving, use a neutral oil studded with a few drops of toasted sesame oil.
In all of these cases, the fat must be sufficiently hot to swiftly lead to browning and deliver a crisp exterior.
Before you bake a birthday cake for your sweetie pie, do a little reconnaissance. Is it the moist, tender crumb of an oil cake she prefers, or the dense, velvety one of a butter cake? Since even I won’t recommend improvising when you bake, let this information guide you to a recipe using the right fat to make your honey happy.
With what you know about fat and what you know about salt, you’ll find that you’re closer to riffing than you might think. Fat has a remarkable capacity to affect texture, while salt and fat can both enhance flavor. Practice using salt and fat to improve flavor and texture every single time you cook. If you intend to finish a salad with a shower of creamy ricotta salata , hold back on some of the salt until after you taste a bite of it with its salty garnish. Similarly, when you’re dicing pancetta to add richness to Pasta all’Amatriciana , wait to season the sauce until after it’s absorbed all the salt from the pork. And if a recipe for pizza dough instructs you to add salt after kneading in olive oil, think twice about following it word for word. Start to use what you know to be true to guide you through the vast forests of myth and misinformation that poorly written recipes comprise.
Improvising begins with notes, and now you have two with which to compose a Salt-Fat melody. Master a third note, and you’ll experience the transcendent harmony of Salt, Fat, and Acid.
I
n contrast to the revelations I experienced with Salt and Fat, I’ve learned the value of Acid gradually. It started at home, with the food my mom, grandmothers, and aunts cooked each night.Maman, who’d grown up eating lemons and limes as an afternoon snack, never thought a dish tasted right unless it made her pucker. She always added a sour element to the plate, to balance the sweet, the salty, the starchy, the rich.
Sometimes it was a sprinkle of dried sumac berries over kebabs and rice. With Kuku Sabzi , a frittata packed with herbs and greens, it was a few spoonfuls of my grandmother Parivash’s torshi , or mixed pickles. For No-Ruz , the Persian New Year, my dad would drive down to Mexico to find sour oranges for us to squeeze ceremoniously over fried fish and herbed rice. Into other classic dishes, Maman layered ghooreh , sour green grapes, and zereshk , the tiny tart fruits known as barberries. But mostly we used yogurt to achieve that desired tang, spooning it over everything from eggs to soups to stews and rice and, though I wince to think of it now, spaghetti with meat sauce.
I wasn’t like the other kids at school. Looking at my classmates’ peanut butter sandwiches next to the kuku sabzi , cucumbers, and feta Maman packed in my lunch box, it was clear that my home life was dramatically different from theirs.
I grew up in a house filled with the language, customs, and food of another place and time. Each year, I eagerly anticipated my grandmother Parvin’s visits from Iran. I loved nothing more than watching her unpack while the room flooded with exotic aromas: saffron, cardamom, and rosewater mingled with the humid, slightly moldy Caspian air that had tucked itself into the fabric lining of her bags over the years. One by one, she’d pull out treats: pistachios roasted with saffron and lime juice, sour cherry preserves, sheets of homemade lavashak , plum leather so sour it made my cheeks hurt. Growing up, I learned from my family to delight in sour foods and let my palate become the most Persian part of me. But it wasn’t until I left home that I realized that there’s so much more to acid than just the pucker.
As part of my parents’ ongoing efforts to delay our assimilation for as long as possible, we never celebrated Thanksgiving. I first celebrated the holiday in college, with a friend and her family. I loved the hubbub involved in preparing and gathering for the meal, but the actual eating part of Thanksgiving was kind
of a letdown. We sat down to a table piled high with food: a humongous whole turkey, roasted and ceremoniously carved; brown gravy made with the drippings; mashed potatoes thick with butter and cream; creamed spinach spiced with nutmeg; Brussels sprouts boiled so long that my friend’s nearly toothless grandmother could easily chew them; and stuffing packed with sausage, bacon, and chestnuts. I really love to eat, but these soft, rich, bland foods bored my palate after just a few bites. Spooning more cranberry sauce onto my plate each time the bowl passed my way, I kept eating in hope of tasting something satisfying. But it never happened, and every year on the fourth Thursday of November I ate until I felt mildly ill, like everyone else.
Once I started cooking at Chez Panisse, I began to spend the holiday with friends from the restaurant. At my first Thanksgiving with other cooks, my palate never became bored. I never felt like eating was a chore. I never felt sick afterward. This certainly wasn’t because the foods we’d cooked were somehow healthier or more virtuous. So what was it?
It hit me that the Thanksgiving dinners I’d spent with other cooks mirrored the traditional Persian meals I’d grown up eating. Acid had been tucked into every dish, and it had brought the meal to life. Sour cream lent a tang to mashed potatoes. A splash of white wine added just before serving lightened the gravy.
Hidden in the big, beautiful mass of stuffing among torn sourdough croutons, greens, and bites of sausage were prunes soaked in white wine—secret caches of acid, most welcome. Roasted winter squash and Brussels sprouts were tossed in an Italian Agrodolce , a sauce made with sugar, chilies, and vinegar. The salsa verde featured fried sage, a welcome partner to the cranberry-quince sauce that I’d made with a nod to the Persian quince preserves Maman jarred every autumn. Even dessert, with a drizzle of dark caramel for the pies and a touch of crème fraîche folded into the whipped cream, had a tang. It dawned on me that the reason why everyone spoons so much cranberry sauce over everything at Thanksgiving is that on most tables, it’s just about the only form of acid available.
I began to see that the true value of acid is not its pucker, but rather, balance . Acid grants the palate relief, and makes food more appealing by offering contrast.
Soon after, I learned another of acid’s secrets. Late one morning at Chez Panisse, I was rushing to finish a batch of carrot soup in time for lunch. Like most of the soups we served in the café, it was pretty simple. I sweated onions in olive oil and butter. I peeled and sliced the carrots and added them to the pot once the onions were soft. I submerged the vegetables in stock, seasoned with salt, and simmered the soup until everything was tender. Then I blended the
contents of the pot into a velvety purée and adjusted the salt. It tasted perfect. I brought a spoonful to Russ, the eternally boyish chef, as he rushed upstairs for the menu meeting with the servers. He tasted it, and without pausing to turn around, said, “Add a capful of vinegar to the pot before you bring it up!”
Vinegar? Who’d ever heard of putting vinegar in soup? Was Russ crazy? Did I hear him right? I didn’t want to ruin the entire pot, so I took a spoonful of my beautiful soup and added a single drop of red wine vinegar. Tasting it, I was floored. I’d expected the vinegar to turn the soup into a sweet-and-sour abomination. Instead, the vinegar acted like a prism, revealing the soup’s nuanced flavors—I could taste the butter and oil, the onions and stock, even the sugar and minerals within the carrots. If blindfolded and quizzed, never in a million years would I have been able to identify vinegar as one of the ingredients. But now, if something I cooked and seasoned ever tasted so dull again, I’d know exactly what was missing.
Just as I’d learned to constantly evaluate a dish for salt, now I knew I needed to always taste for acid, too. It was finally clear to me—acid is salt’s alter ego.
While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them. By acting as a foil to salt, fat, sugar, and starch, acid makes itself indispensable to everything we cook.